Mobiles are all around, as I said before. But do we ask ourselves what they are made of, how they are produced, or what happens after we dump them? Honest answers to these questions will reveal a lot of environmental damage, unfair trade and human abuse. Especially in places where we, the decent smartphone users, […]
Berichten in de categorie Open-source:
Over FOSS, internet en social media
Tracking lost devices
Mobility is all around – and so is losing mobile devices. Years ago I shamefully left my beloved Palm Treo 600 unattended on the couch at Ikea’s. It was a true smartphone, but not smart enough to find its way back to me. I suppose a good Glaswegian will have befriended it. So, with all […]
Xubuntu-on-eMac issues
Some time ago I fiddled with OpenFirmware on my old eMac A1002, saved from the bin and running on Xubuntu 12.04. I tried to find wake-on-lan settings for the network card. I did not. Then, afterwards, the NIC (eth0) appeared to be out of order. I feared I had seriously messed things up in OpenFirmware, […]
Scanning documents
Slightly old-fashioned as it may seem, scanning documents still is part of the usual office jobs. You need it to email an official document to someone else, or simply to keep your own digital copy. So how to do that? As we know there must fifty ways to leave your lover – and probably more […]
PDF to Image
Say you are working on a text document, e.g. in LibreOffice, and you would like to insert a PDF-document. Just inserting or importing it will not work. The easiest way to get a decent result is this: convert the PDF-document to an image file, e.g. PNG; insert that file as an image into your text […]
Honey, I shrunk the DVD
Could I please copy that video DVD? Och aye. But then ripping with K3b resulted in a 7.2 Gb iso that would not fit on the 4.5 Gb DVD on which I just smoothly printed a label… Right. How to shrink my ripsel to the required size? I had DVD95 installed, a simple GNOME tool […]
‘Malformed URL trash:/’
The KDE desktop environment has Dolphin set as its default file manager. So, if you click on the desktop panel’s Wastebin/Trash icon (which is a plasma widget) a Dolphin window will open to show the wastebin contents. But, although Dolphin is a good file manager, I prefer Krusader. However, when I set Krusader as my […]
PUB problems
Someone sent me a MS Publisher file. That is a problem, even if you are on a Windows box. You need to have the correct version of Publisher installed, because there is no reliable compatibility between different versions. A classic M$ trick, I dare say. And besides, I am locked in to a Linux box, […]