The Apple ecosystem hell bent on becoming extremely privacy invasive… Per usual it’s justified by “protecting the children” or some other false pretense. Don’t be fooled, once it’s in, it’ll just expand in scope and governments will do everything they can to tap in the content of those scans.
If You Build It, They Will Come: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship Around the World | Electronic Frontier Foundation
Tags: apple, surveillance
Thanks you Apple for creating the perfect tools for private and governmental surveillance. Now, we can probably expect a race to the bottom from the other players as well.
KDE Gear 21.08 improves KDE apps across the board, bringing you quick and responsive utilities, creativity programs with powerful features, and secure tools for all your work and play needs.
If this is your first time with KDE software, discover a whole new world of free and secure programs, packed with incredible possibilities. If you are already a KDE regular, check out all the fresh innovations we have added to your favorite apps.
Let’s start with your gateway into your system: Dolphin. Officially, Dolphin is labeled as a “file manager”, but it is much more than that. Dolphin does not only let you navigate through the folders and files in your hard drive, but also share them to your phone, social media, or on your instant messaging app. The same goes for the stuff in your cloud and online services, be it Google Drive, NextCloud, DropBox, FTP servers, or Git repositories: you can access all of these services directly without ever moving from Dolphin.
If you think managing such a wide variety of locations and data would be confusing, fear not: you can easily identify what is what with Dolphin’s file and folder previews. Hover your cursor over a file and it will show you a small preview. Do the same over a folder and it will show you pictures from the files it contains. New in KDE Gear 21.08 is that, if a folder contains a lot of previewable files, it will show you an animated sequence of previews so you can check to see if the folder contains what you are looking for. Dolphin also shows previews for files inside encrypted locations, such as Plasma Vaults. Dolphin’s preview code has also been optimized in this version and thumbnails now pop up faster.
Another way of keeping on top of your folders is through the Information Panel. Press F11 and the Information Panel will open on the right of Dolphin’s window. Hover the cursor over a file, and the Information Panel will tell you what type of file it is; give you a preview; tell you how much space it takes up in your hard disk; if it is an image, its size; if it is a video, it will tell you its duration (and size); and much more. In Dolphin 21.08, this information now updates in real-time. This means that, if the file is changed by another app, the Information Panel will show you the changes immediately.
Improvements to Dolphin’s usability now make it easier to rename several files: Select the file, hit F2 and rename it. To immediately jump to the next file and rename it also, just press Tab. If you need to move back one file, press Shift + Tab. You can also now select the name of a file like many other text elements, and copy it to the clipboard.
The KHamburger menu, located in the top right of the app, became an integral part of Dolphin a few versions ago. As it contains virtually every option you can use to configure Dolphin, we have cleaned it up, making accessing what you need to change easier to reach and the entries easier to understand.
Another usability improvements is that, if you right-click on the Trash icon in the Places Panel, you can choose an entry in the pop up menu that opens the Trash Settings window.
The new version of Okular, KDE’s PDF and document viewer, makes reading and manipulating documents, books, and comics easier and more accessible.
As with most KDE applications, you can tailor the toolbar to your needs and add a button that will change the color of the document’s paper. Right click on the toolbar and click on Configure Toolbars…. From the toolbar dropdown field at the top of the dialog, pick Main Toolbar <okular_part>. You can see the current buttons in the toolbar in the panel on the right, and stuff you can add in the panel on the left. Look for Change Dark and Light colors and press the arrow pointing to the right in the group of arrow buttons between the panels and you will push the button onto the toolbar. You can set its position in the bar with the up and down arrows. When you are done, click on Ok and the new button will appear in your toolbar. When you click it, the document paper will change to a muted gray. This color is designed to make reading more comfortable and avoid eye-strain.
This is the level of attention to detail and control KDE’s application developers offer users. Another example is the big notification messages about embedded files, forms, and signatures that often pop up when you open a contract or an official document: If you don’t want to see them because they interfere with your reading, you can disable them. Or take the annotation tools that allow you to write and draw on your documents: now the different kinds of annotations (highlighting, underlining, boxes, etc.) can be toggled on or off and Okular will remember the last one you used (in case you want to use it again in a hurry). Also, when you choose to start annotating a document, Okular will automatically disable the Browse and Text Selection modes, so you don’t accidentally move away from what you want to annotate, or select some text instead of, say, highlighting it.
Text terminals are intimidating to people who are new to Linux. But knowing just a bit about how to use them (no, you don’t need to know how to program) gives you a level of control over your machine difficult to achieve any other way.
This is doubly true when using Konsole, KDE’s very powerful spin on the classic text terminal. In fact, calling Konsole a “terminal emulator” and leaving it at that is not fair. Take Konsole’s preview feature, for example, type white, red, blue or salmon at the command line, hover the cursor over the word, and a box will appear displaying the color. You can also use HTML color codes, like #1d99f3 and get a preview of the KDE blue color.
Previews extend to images and folders: hover the cursor over an image filename in a list in Konsole and a thumbnail will pop up showing you a preview. Hovering over a folder will show you a preview of its contents. This is very useful when you want to make sure you are copying, moving, or erasing the right thing.
Click on a file, and it will open in its corresponding application — an image will open in a viewer like Gwenview, a PDF will open in a document viewer like Okular, or an MP3 file will open in a music player like Elisa, for example. You can also hold down the Alt key and click and drag a file to another application, and share it, say, with a friend on your instant messaging app, or send it as an attachment in an email.
Apart from having tabs to access different parts of your system (or remote systems, if you prefer) at the same time, Konsole lets you split tabs any which way you want. This lets you see what is happening at a glance in several terminals. Use the buttons in the toolbar (or Ctrl + ( and Ctrl + )) to split the view, or use the preset layouts included with Konsole. You can click and drag the borders of the panes around to increase or decrease their sizes and, once you have a layout that fits your workflow, you can save it by going to View > Save tab layout to file… and then use it again and again.
Sending commands you type in one pane or tab to several other panes and tabs has been part of Konsole for a long time, but it is worth remembering again because it allows you to, for example, process files in several directories simultaneously.
But probably the most spectacular innovation of Konsole 21.08 is the SSH plugin. You can use this to create a directory of machines you regularly connect to. If you already have a list of machines in your .ssh/config file, activate the plugin from Plugins > Show SSH Manager and click on the Import button at the bottom of the SSH Manager pane that pops up on the left of Konsole. A new category entry will appear with all the SSH accounts listed in the config file. To create a completely new entry, click on the + button and fill in the fields. Then, when you need to connect to one of your SSH servers, just click on the entry in the list.
Working with a text terminal does not get much easier than this.
Gwenview is KDE’s image viewer. It is fast and easy to use, ideal for browsing and displaying individual or collections of images, and convenient for doing quick edits, like cropping and resizing your photos.
Apart from a performance and visual makeover that has improved its looks and speed, developers have added new compact controls in the bottom right-hand corner of the app. The first is a zoom/size selector that uses a pop up menu. The spinner of previous versions was a bit clunky to use and the current control makes it much easier to zoom in and out of images. The other control is a color picker for Gwenview’s display area: four simple options will let you choose the best background color on which to display your images.
Talking of controls, Gwenview has fully embraced the KHamburger the same way as Dolphin: you can now access all of Gwenview’s options from the drop down menu located in the upper right-hand corner of the app. Of course, if you prefer, you can enable a traditional menu and reach everything you need from there.
While browsing through your pictures, you can use the arrow buttons located at the top of the app, or the ⬅️ and ➡️ keys on your keyboard to move to the prior and next images respectively. When you land on a video, again use the on-screen controls or just press Space to play and pause it. When you reach the end of the images, Gwenview will “wrap around” and show you the first image in the list again.
Finally, Gwenview now supports 16-bit color images and can read color profile information from JPEG and PNG and many other image formats.
Elisa is KDE’s simple music player that’s easy to use and ready to party right out the (beat)box. Rock it from your desktop or your phone, and play local music and music from online radio stations too. When with your friends, you can put Elisa in party mode by simply pressing the F11 key. Pause and play music from where you left off, as Elisa remembers what it was playing and where it was in the song even after a shutdown.
Elisa is available for Linux, Windows, Android and Plasma Mobile.
… And all this too:
Spectacle, KDE’s application for capturing desktop screenshots, now lets you take screenshots of the window currently under the cursor by pressing the Meta (Windows) + Ctrl + Print keys together. Spectacle is also much faster and more reliable in Wayland and the options of what to copy after taking a screenshot have been substantially clarified in the settings window.
Kate, KDE’s Advanced Text Editor, comes with a feature called Snippets. Snippets are useful templates of bits of code you can drop into your projects as you program. Snippets are now easier to get as you can find them in their own category in Discover (KDE’s software management tool). Also, Kate’s Language Server Protocol (LSP) now supports the Dart programming language.
Kdenlive, KDE’s all-purpose video-editing software, has migrated to MLT 7. This means you can look forward to new functionalities in existing features, like changing the speed of a clip is now a keyframeable effect. Kdenlive devs further stabilized the code and have also improved the job manager, making it faster to open projects and import files.
KDE Connect lets two or more devices (like your phone and your laptop) communicate easily with each other and share files and resources. KDE Connect is now available from the Microsoft Store and is officially supported on Windows so you can use it on your computer even if you are not using Linux. The new update also lets you easily reply to a text message from the notifications.
Yakuake is a terminal emulator (like Konsole) that lives at the top of your screen and you can always drop down HUD-style by hitting the [F12] key on your keyboard. Like Konsole, you can split the screen and open multiple tabs, and, in the new version, you can switch from one pane to the next with [Ctrl] + [Tab].
Ark is KDE’s utility for compressing and decompressing archives of files. In version 21.08, Ark shows a splash screen if you open it without an archive and can un-archive zip files with Windows-style backslashes used as path separators.
KDE is All About the Apps
One of the Goals of KDE is to be All About the Apps. This means the KDE Community takes more charge of releasing our own software and delivering it directly to you. Although we fully support distributions that ship our software, KDE Gear 21.08 apps will also be available on these Linux app stores shortly:
SnapcraftFlathub
If you’d like to help us get more KDE applications into the app stores, support more app stores and get the apps better integrated into our development process, come say hi in our All About the Apps chat room.
KDE Gear ⚙️ 21.08 comes out Tomorrow! KG⚙️21.08 brings updates and new features to your favorite apps. We made ads for some of them, using different styles and perspectives. Here is an ad for Elisa, KDE's simple, but fancy music player.
Today: [Elisa](https://elisa.kde.org/)
Yesterday: [Dolphin](https://tube.kockatoo.org/w/c4ZkdAVv82Z45CDsG9jz4J)
Monday: [Konsole](https://tube.kockatoo.org/w/5qF1kLp71wZJ4sLqhYEAkd)
[Get More Apps](https://apps.kde.org/)
**Attributions**
Music is [Emotional](https://soundcloud.com/barradeen/emotional) by Barradeen, distributed under a CC By-SA license.
In one of our previous blog posts we wrote about the new development in the spreadsheet and the extension in the statistics dialog that now make use of new visualization elements. One of these elements is the Box Plot:
Of course, this new visualization type is not only available in the statistics dialog in the spreadsheet, but it can also be used in the Worksheet, in the area where LabPlot plots the data. In this blog post we will introduce this important new development, as it is going to be part of the next release.
A box plot (also known as a box-and-whisker plot) provides a quick visual summary of the important aspects of a distribution of values contained in a data set:
A more detailed description of the components of a box plot can be found in our documentation.
Even though this is the first release of this visualization type, we decided to implement many features for this very powerful visualization tool. LabPlot’s box plots supports different orientations (horizontal and vertical), different types of whiskers, variable widths, plotting of multiple data sets in one plot, and much more. A great variety of box plot visualizations can be achieved by using and combining the available options. To give you an idea of what is possible in LabPlot see below a couple of examples.
The first examples demonstrate the visualization of multiple data sets using different orientations of the box plots and working with and without the variable width of the box (width proportional to the square root of the number of data points):
Box plots, laid out side-by-side, allow a visual comparison between different batches of data in four aspects regarding level, spread, shape and potential outliers. The notches on the sides of box plots permit a more refined comparison by providing a rough measurement of the significance of the differences between medians. They define a confidence interval around the median that has been adjusted to make it appropriate for comparisons of two boxes:
A box plot can hide the details of the actual distribution. Showing the data points on top of the box plot can reveal the underlying structures of the data. In case the data set is big and plotting of many data points doesn’t lead to nice looking results, the “jittering” (adding random noise over the data points) can be used. The example below shows the data points plotted on top of the box plot, with and without jittering:
In many cases, a more powerful representation and interpretation of the data can be achieved by putting multiple visualization elements together. In addition to jittering, a combined visualization of a histogram and a box plot can be used to provide more insight. The example below shows five datasets (taken from the same stats, different graphs) that have completely different distributions but lead to the same box plot visualizations. The combination of box plots and histograms helps reveal the underlying structure of the data sets:
As usual, LabPlot provides full flexibility when defining the appearance of the box plot in the Properties Explorer. You can set the properties of lines, colors, different symbol styles for different “markers” (outliers, far out values, median and data points), and more:
The box plot feature has already been in master for quite some time and has reached stability and maturity. We consider it is worth now introducing to you, our users, and inviting you to test it in our nightly builds so you can provide us feedback.
KDE Gear ⚙️ 21.08, an update for many of KDE's applications, comes out on Thursday, and we decided to try and make advertisements in different styles for some of the apps.
Today: [Dolphin](https://apps.kde.org/dolphin/)
Tomorrow: [Elisa](https://elisa.kde.org/)
Yesterday: [Konsole](https://tube.kockatoo.org/w/5qF1kLp71wZJ4sLqhYEAkd)
[Want more apps?](https://apps.kde.org/)
**Attributions**
Music is [Ant Party](https://www.freemusicarchive.org/music/Podington_Bear/Curious/AntParty) by Podington Bear, distributed under a CC By-NC 3.0 license.
[Arrow icons](https://thenounproject.com/term/arrow-keys/264898/) by Chameleon Design, distributed under a CC By license.
There has been a lot of work on printers this week but
GDB/MI
GDB MI allows applications to connect to GDB without actually running it from the terminal, this is how frontends talks to GDB. Most of the time this is how users actually use GDB for debugging.
Children and to_string
GDB has two ways for returning pretty printing values, as children or as to_string. children method returns a tuple of two values, the name and the value ie. ('name', value). to_string returns a string or a gdb.Value, you can read up more on that here. some printers return to_string, children or both to give relevant debugging information. For example for a double would return a to_string value and std::vector would return to_string to show how many items are in the vector and children’s value to print the items in the vector.
Printing children and to_string
Currently in GDB/MI, if the pretty-printer has a children method, it ignores the value of the to_string a only shows the children. for example you have the below code
this is a current limitation of GDB/MI but the its still usable, however a bug report has been filed. the problem comes when both the to_string and children valuables are needed. The current workaround is to repeat the value in the to_string in the children method. so if you have a QStringRef
QString string{"this is a string"};
QStringRef aref(&string, 10 , 6);
//GDB CLI
(gdb) print aref
$1= string = {"this is a string", 0x7ffff4fe9b70"string", 10, 6}
GDB cannot show a python string as a string instead it shows it as a char array. the only way to get it to print as a string is to convert it to a char pointer, however this would add the memory address in front of the value.
What would advertisements for different KDE apps look like? KDE Gear ⚙️ 21.08, an update to many of KDE's applications, comes out on Thursday, and we decided to give it a go.
Today: [Konsole](https://konsole.kde.org/)
Tomorrow: [Dolphin](https://apps.kde.org/dolphin/)
Wednesday: [Elisa](https://elisa.kde.org/)
[Want more apps?](https://apps.kde.org/)
**NOTE:** Developers have informed us that the availability of the SSH plugin has been temporarily rolled back and may not be available in the first release due to some stability issues. However, you can expect it shortly after.
**Attributions**
Background music is [THINGAMAJIG](https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Jason_Shaw/Audionautix_Acoustic/THINGAMAJIG_______________________3-53) by Jason Shaw, distributed under a CC By-SA 3.0 license.
[Photo is of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie](https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24512134), and was taken by Peter Hame. Uploaded by Magnus Manske and distributed under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license.
Usually DSO catalogs are pretty static and rarely change due to the
nature of their contents. But although galaxies do not tend to jump
around in the sky, catalogs still get updates to correct typos or
update coordinates with more precise measurement. Our primary catalog
OpenNGC for example gets updates quite regularly.
Figure 1: OpenNGC is being updated regularly.
And even though a catalog might not change, it would nevertheless be
desirable to have a record on how it was derived from its original
format in a reproducible way1. Last but not least, having all catalogs in a
central place in kind of the same format would make deduplication a
lot easier.
The question is: how does one define a convenient yet flexible format
that nevertheless enforces some kind of structure? My answer was: with
some kind of package definition. What about the flexibility part?
Well, basically every catalog is just a python module that must
implement a class. By overwriting certain methods, the catalog can be
built up. The framework provides certain support functionality and an
interface to some catalog database features by way of a python binding
to some KStars code. Apart from that one has complete freedom in
implementing the details although some conventions should be
followed2.
A simple random catalog looks like the following listing.
defgenerate_random_string(str_size, allowed_chars=string.ascii_letters):
return"".join(random.choice(allowed_chars) for x in range(str_size))
classRandomCatalogBase(Factory):
SIZE =100
meta = Catalog(
id=999,
name="random",
maintainer="Valentin Boettcher <[email protected]>",
license="DWYW Do what ever you want with it!",
description="A huge catalog of random DSOs",
precedence=1,
version=1,
)
defload_objects(self):
for _ in range(self.SIZE):
ob_type = random.choice(
[ObjectType.STAR, ObjectType.GALAXY, ObjectType.GASEOUS_NEBULA]
)
ra = random.uniform(0, 360)
dec = random.uniform(-90, 90)
mag = random.uniform(4, 16)
name = generate_random_string(5)
long_name = generate_random_string(10)
yield self._make_catalog_object(
type=ob_type,
ra=ra,
dec=dec,
magnitude=mag,
name=name,
long_name=long_name,
position_angle=random.uniform(0, 180),
It implements only the load_objects build phase and is a kind of
minimum viable catalog.
The basic idea behind the structure of a catalog implementation is
that the build process can be subdivided into four phases which can
be partially parallelized by the framework.
In the download phase each catalog defines how its content may be
retrieved from the Internet or otherwise acquired. In the load/parse
phase the acquired original data is being parsed and handed over to
the framework which takes care of molding it into the correct
format. During the deduplication phase each catalog can query the
catalog database to detect and flag duplicates. And in the final dump
phase the contents of each catalog are written into separate files
which KStars can then import3.
If you are interested in the details I can recommend the documentation
for the catalog repository.
After implementing the framework porting over all the existing
catalogs to the new system, I went on to configure the KDE Invent CI
to rebuild the catalogs upon changes. The CI artifacts are sync-ed to
the KNewStuff data server for KStars periodically and users are able
to update their catalogs to the latest version.
To get the CI working I had to create a Docker image that encapsulates
the more or less complicated build process for the KStars python
bindings. This container is updated weekly by CI and is also suitable
as a quick-and-easy development environment for new catalogs.
That’s it for today but do not fret. This is not all that I’ve
done. There’s still more to come including something that has to do
with the following picture.
Cheers,
Valentin
And in a way that hopefully lasts for some time. Currently very few people know how to generate KStars' deep star catalogs… ↩︎
This week, we spent some time making Kalendar more pleasant to look at. We took some of your feedback from last week (thank you for your ideas!), and we think you will like what we have in store for you in this post.
There’s another feature some of you have asked for that you will also see here.
Improved the appearance of the month view and visual consistency across views
Here’s a comparison of the old (left) month view, and the new (right) month view:
Better, right? Well, a lot of little visual tweaks do add up to make a big difference. We started with the event ‘lines’, which were previously not very contrast-y and sometimes tough to read. Now, we have given these event lines more vibrancy and ensured that the text colour changes depending on the colour for better contrast.
We have also given these lines slightly more padding, making them feel less cramped. Adjustments to the border radius now also make their shape match those of the incidence cards in the schedule view.
More changes for consistency include the separation lines between the cells in the month view grid, which are now the same colour as the Kirigami separator components used in the schedule view.
The most noticeable change is the differential colouring of the month view cells. Cells that correspond to months other than the selected month are now darker, and their events have less contrast. For the cell corresponding to the current day, the background is now highlighted, and the day number is bolded with “Today” text being featured alongisde it. This should make it much easier for you to locate the current day on the grid.
By the way, we also added the “Today” highlight to the schedule view.
Added location map to incidence information drawer
We are also working on including a map in the incidence information drawer for incidences that have a set location. I know some of you asked for this, and I’m glad you did: it looks pretty cool!
When opening the drawer, Kalendar fetches data from OpenStreetMaps to display the area where your event or todo is taking place, overlaying a blue circle for the exact location. In cases where a location can’t be found from the event’s set location information, you’ll see a dismissible warning instead.
If you like exploring around the map, that’s fine: as soon as the location leaves the map’s viewable area, a button will show up that will take you right back to the location.
This feature, unfortunately, comes with a big caveat. There are several reports of QtLocation Map components crashing QtQuick applications on some systems (including my own!). We are going to keep working on this feature, and hopefully most of you will be able to enjoy it — but it will be opt-in so that users with machines affected by these crashes can still use Kalendar as normal.
If you know about this issue and know of a workaround/fix, please let me know!! It’ll make me very, very, very happy.
Both the month view and the schedule view now feature an action that lets you quickly return to the current day. This should make it easier to get back to where you want to be in your calendar.
Day drop-down menu now also available in the month view
Right-clicking on a day in the month view now popups a helpful drop-down menu that lets you quickly and easily add incidences of your choice to your calendar.
To be honest, this should have been working before, but it wasn’t. Now it is. Yay!
Previously, the cards on the schedule view displayed an icon when an incidence had a set reminder. Now, the cards in the schedule view also display whether an event is recurring or not.
Bug-fixes
Two important bugs have been squashed over this past week.
Calendars are now selectable when running Kalendar on non-bleeding-edge versions of KFrameworks/Qt No MR yet: code can be found on branch work/collection_fixes
These fixes should go a long way to letting more of you test Kalendar!
Coming up next
Work on the location map will continue over the course of next week. Fingers crossed, we’ll be able to find a fix for the map crashes and get that feature rolled out to everyone. We’re also in the process of making a todo view, which should let Kalendar take care of much of your time-related productivity needs.
Is there anything you’d like to see added to Kalendar? Get in touch! I’m @clau-cambra:kde.org on Matrix.
@da-viper:kde.org
clau-cambra
