Category: Technology

Repairable by design

This is good:

HMD Global, which took over the Nokia brand for phones, has launched a smartphone designed to be fixed by the owner, with repair site iFixit providing guides and replacement parts.

The Nokia G22 is one of three handsets launched by HMD at this week’s MWC in Barcelona. It is claimed to be the first Nokia smartphone to come with repairability at its core, enabling owners to replace a damaged display, bent charging port or dead battery.

HMD’s link up with iFixit means that some online guides are already available to help with repairing parts of the G22, while replacement parts for the same are also available from the site, with the G22 getting a dedicated Repair Hub area on iFixit.com.

The current cycle of constantly replacing devices that has come to define the mobile phone market, as well as many others, is expensive, wasteful and environmentally disastrous. As such, it is great to see a major manufacturer embracing repairability. This is especially positive because, as the article makes clear, HMD sees repairability as a selling point and not something with with they are forced to grudgingly comply.

Many years ago, I treated myself to a first edition Fairphone and was delighted to discover just how easy a well-designed phone makes it to replace parts (mainly screens in my case). Obviously, a bigger organisation such as HMD is better able to demand a consistent supply of spare parts, and this is something we should all support.

Repairability should be the norm. Not just for phones, but for everything, and we should support initiatives that move towards making it so.

Two-Factor Authentication and Aegis Authenticator

Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a common, effective and easy to implement method to improve online security. It involves adding an additional factor to the authentication process so that, even if someone manages to get hold of your user ID and password, they still can’t get into your account.

In Belgium, we have the well-established itsme which provides an additional layer of security for online banking, government services and a whole range of online activities. There is also the much newer, and largely ignored, myID, for which I have yet to find a use.

There are also a variety of authentication apps that can be installed on your mobile phone. Once set up, these will continually generate a (usually) 6 digit passcode that you need to enter when logging in to the protected website.

When I started using 2FA (outside of itsme) I went with the first authenticator app that I found, which was Google Authenticator inevitably enough. It is certainly very easy to use and does make it very easy to get started. There are a couple of things about which I have become increasingly unhappy.

The first of these is that it’s a Google product, and because I don’t like being overly dependent on a small number of very large companies, I tend to seek alternatives when I can. More seriously, Google Authenticator appears to lack any sort of backup option, which is problematic.

So, after looking around for a bit, I have settled on Aegis Authenticator, which is a much more security focussed authentication app.

For a start, it does support backups. Not only am I able to back up my vault to my own server, but the app also supports Native Android backups, so I could just switch it on and forget about it. I also like the fact that you actually need to sign in to the app, either with a fingerprint or other biometric option, or with a password.

And the app manages to remain remarkably straightforward to use. I think I will be sticking with this one.

Of course, 2FA is not a panacea, but it is a big improvement on relying on just a password and if you can use it, you really should.

And on that note, I should point out that WordPress supports Two-Step Authentication, and you can set it up from the Security Tab on your Profile settings.

Managing the wastebasket in GNOME

This is more a personal note than anything else, but I’m putting it here on the off chance that someone else might find it useful.

I noticed that the wastebasket on my PC desktop had become rather full. This is both inevitable and unsurprising given that, by default, deleting files sends them to the wastebasket and then leaves them there. Forever.

I want to be able to clear out these deleted files, but not all of them because I sometimes need to go back and recover what I have deleted. Fortunately, a solution exists in the form of trash-cli, a command line interface that allows you to manage the FreeDesktop trash folder.

The package provides several commands, the most useful of which for me is the trash-empty command, which not only allows me to permanently delete trashed files, but also to specify how many days to keep. I played around with it a bit and it does exactly what it promises to do.

Being lazy, I have also scheduled this to run every Monday so that I can start the week with nothing more than a month old in my wastebasket. This should ensure that things remain a bit more manageable in future.

BookWyrm: Federated social reading

I’ve mentioned Mastodon before now, but the great thing about federated social media is that it is not dominated by a single server, or even a single type of software. Multiple applications and networks exist to support a wide variety of social activities. And, because they all use the same protocol, they can all talk to each other.

It’s because of this that I came to discover BookWyrm, a non-commercial alternative to Goodreads on which you can track your reading habits, talk about books and find suggestions as to what to read next.

Of the available servers, I have settled in The Library of the Uncommons, the membership of which leans towards Science Fiction and Fantasy novels in terms of reading preferences. This, of course, is great for me and I have already discovered a couple more books to add to my ever-expanding pile of must-read books.

Because all of these federated services can talk to each other, I can interact with people on other servers regardless of whether they are using BookWyrm, Mastodon or anything else.

BookWyrm is still under development but all of the essentials are in place and working well. I especially like how easy it is to migrate from Goodreads to BookWyrm by exporting your books from one and importing them into the other. The import wasn’t perfect, but the site does tell me exactly which books I need to check, so getting everything set up is a remarkably painless process.

I find I am getting a lot more out of BookWyrm than I was from Goodreads. I haven’t deleted my Goodreads account yet, but I suspect that this is only a matter of time.

You can find me at The Library of the Uncommons. Feel free to pop over and say hi.

Mastodon: Because life’s too short for imbeciles

Federated social media has been around since 2008 and I have been bouncing around various federated networks (with a couple of hiatuses) since the end of that year. The idea behind federated networks is that, rather than having to rely on a single large server to control all your messages, lots of smaller servers achieve the same result by talking to each other. The obvious analogy for this is email: if I want to send a message to someone, all I need is their email address and, thanks to the magic of open standards, any message I send will be correctly delivered.

The federated network that everyone is talking about at the moment, of course, is Mastodon.

I had signed up to Mastodon a while ago, to a smaller instance that is no more and when I returned to the network I was quite interested in the idea of running my own server. Being lazy, however, this led to a bit of procrastination on my part until I came across masto.host, which really does provide the best of both worlds: Everything on the server is under my control, while, for a small monthly fee, I can leave someone else to look after the server and software maintenance.

And when it comes to managing what I do and don’t see on my timeline, the tools provided by Mastodon are really rather good.

On a personal level, I can block and mute any obnoxious types I happen to bump into, and I can also filter out specified words and phrases if I want to ignore a particular conversation (always useful during bug sporting events). I can even block whole domains if I decide that I just don’t want to deal with anyone from a specific instance, all I need is a single click.

The site moderation tools are equally well designed. Obviously, with only one user on my own instance, I haven’t had much need to use these, but I do like the fact that I can also silence other instances if I really don’t want to deal with them.

Overall, I do like Mastodon and it has proven to be a very comfortable place to return to. I do like its decentralised nature and the fact that both the developers and the various communities are keen to encourage this.

You can find out more, including a video explainer and a list of available servers at Join Mastodon and, if you ever find yourself looking for someone to follow, you can find me @Paul@social.lightlyseared.online.

FD Computers and the Joy of Linux

With William and Alexandre going up a school in September, we found ourselves in the market for two new laptops. They have both been using Ubuntu for quite some time and, given how stable and reliable it has proven to be, I was keen to keep them on the same OS. I was also quite keen on the idea of having everything pre-installed for them, mainly because I’m lazy.

When we were looking for a new laptop for Macsen, Dell were selling Inspirons with Ubuntu pre-installed. They appear to have stopped doing this now, for Belgium anyway. You can still buy Ubuntu laptops from Dell, but only if you want to shell out for a very powerful and incredibly expensive Data Science Workstation. So that was off the table.

Looking around, however, I discovered that there’s a shop in Belgium, FD Computers, who not only sells laptops with the Linux distro of your choice pre-installed, but also has a webshop. After a short phone call to availability and delivery times, we placed an order.

The laptops turned up exactly when promised and we are very happy with them.

The laptops themselves are light but have quite a robust feel to them and they certainly look like they will handle being lugged around by a pair of teenagers. And having Ubuntu pre-installed, along with all of the applications they are likely to need, is a definite bonus.

I would certainly FD Computers and, possibly more tellingly, would quite happily go back to them when we are in the market for more hardware.

Having used several desktop operating systems over the years (DOS, Windows, OS/2, AmigaOS), I have to say that the Linux desktop really is the best of the best.

People like to say that Linux is difficult to use, but it really isn’t. Granted, some distributions are aimed at a more technical crowd, but you don’t have to make things difficult for yourself. Go with Ubuntu or something similarly user friendly and the experience is, if anything, better than using Windows.

You don’t even need to install it yourself these days. Plenty of retailers will do this for you, even if you don’t live in Belgium.

Compared to Windows and MacOS, Linux is much more secure, and a lot easier to manage. Installing applications, and even upgrading the OS, can all be done with a couple of clicks of a mouse. And the software is all free (gratis), and centrally managed — you don’t need to deal with ads or endless pop-ups telling you to upgrade to the paid version, just install the application and off you go.

Ultimately, with a Linux laptop, I can leave an eleven-year old in charge of his own computer without having to constantly be watching what he’s doing. This is not something I can say about Windows.

Digital Nostalgia

While clearing up a bit, I recently discovered a whole stack of 3.5 inch diskettes. Many of these were blank and had never been used — with my usual sense of great timing I bought a stack of 20 of the things, and a large case to hold them, just as they started to go out of fashion.

Of the ones that weren’t blank, most contain files and documents that I last looked at in the 1990s.

And then there were all the freebies that I had accumulated. Disks that had been mounted on magazine covers, stuffed with free and demonstration utilities for DOS or even Windows 3.1. Some of these I even remember. Most, however have been completely forgotten and none of them has been looked at since 2004 (or earlier).

One thing I do remember is OS/2. Not the disk so much as the actual operating system, which I used at work somewhere around the mid-1990s. We had a development tool that couldn’t run on Windows because… well, Windows wasn’t very good and this meant that the development team (me and one other person) had to dual boot between OS/2 and Windows 3.1.

I really liked OS/2 back in the day. It was stable, reliable and worked really well — which was quite a revelation when compared to Windows. And while the operating system never took off, it did manage to build a community of users which survived well into this century.

Time has, of course, moved on and I suspect that I doubt that it would stand any comparison with the operating systems of today, but when I was using OS/2 I did appreciate it.

As for the disks, I don’t have anything that could actually read them and doubt that any of them contain anything of more than passing interest, so into the bin they all went.

Mageia

Back in the mists of time we acquired a second-hand laptop and I installed DouDouLinux on it.This is a Linux distribution aimed at young children and it does achieve its aim of enabling young children to find their way around a PC without needing constant parental supervision. But time moves on and the boys are older, all have their own laptops now and the old laptop hasn’t been looked at for a couple of years.

So, over the holiday period, I started looking around for a distribution that still supported 32 bit architectures and discovered that Mageia still has a 32 bit edition which I immediately downloaded. It’s rather nice.

As with many — probably most — Linux distributions these days, the installer is graphical and takes you through the installation process quite painlessly. The only choice I really had to make was for the desktop environment, which was easy for me because I always go for Gnome. Once everything is installed, you are led through a configuration process which involves setting a root password and a main user profile, and then clicking through and accepting all of the defaults.

The installer is a little different to ones I am more used to, but it all proved to be a very painless process and one that worked well.

Many distributions now are providing a welcome screen when you boot your PC and Mageia is no exception. In this case, it’s reasonably nicely done and provides an easy way to quickly find your way around the operating system. Of course, once you have finished looking around this screen, it’s easy to disable by simply unchecking a box.

Mageia comes with a wide selection of applications that cover all of the obvious uses, and then some. While I can see that having everything available as soon as you start is useful, I have picked up my own preferences which I keep falling back to. So, helpful as all this software is, I know that I will end up replacing it with the applications I’m already used to.

And then there’s the Mageia Control Centre. This handily brings all of your administration tools together into a single application and is something about which I am still a bit ambivalent. One one hand, I can see that having everything managed by a single application is convenient. On the other hand, I have gotten used to doing things differently and, for me, the control centre feels a bit like reinventing the wheel. This is all down to personal preference, though, and I strongly suspect that, if Mageia had been the first distribution I had used, I would think it’s wonderful.

In fact, the only real gripe I have is that I had to tell the control centre not to look for CDs when doing updates. And this took all of one click.

Overall, Mageia strikes me as a solid, if unspectacular, operating system with several helpful touches. More importantly, it has helped me to revive a very old laptop.

Now all I need to do is figure out what I want to do with it.

Scratch

A few weeks ago, William told me he wanted to make his own computer game. So I installed Scratch on his laptop and told him to see what he could do. It turns out he can do quite a lot.

Scratch is a visual programming language. While it has all the features you would expect, the programming itself is done by dragging and dropping blocks rather than typing text. This makes for a very intuitive interface which allows you to get up to speed very quickly. Well, William did.

After a couple of pointers from me about loops and variables, he was off and now has a working game in which teleporting monkey has to collect various objects.

He then discovered that there is an online editor and a collection of tutorials and, after two weeks, he’s probably a better Scratch programmer than I will ever be. If he carries on like this, it’s not going to be long before he has a better handle on event-driven programming than I do.

As someone who makes a living as a developer, I’m not sure whether I should be proud or embarrassed.

Either way, Scratch itself is proving a very effective way of enabling kids to not only build their own applications, but also understand the underlying principles. The visual interface allows them to focus on developing applications, rather than having to worry about syntax, and the development environment provides instant feedback which encourages them to try things out and see what happens.

I am very impressed.