LightZone

Over the weekend I began to learn more about LightZone, which is one of the best photo editing programs available to Linux users (it’s also cross-platform).

I have previously tended to use DarkTable more often. LightZone is easier to learn, but is still quite a powerful non-destructive editor. It handles RAW formats of many cameras, has built in styles, and seems to have a more logical workflow. As in DarkTable or GIMP, one can select parts of an image to work on separately.

Years ago, LightZone was a commercial program, but its source was later released on GitHub. Since then it has been maintained by a couple of developers who have not always had enough time to give to the project. However recently it has been showing some new development. The version has been bumped up from 4.5.2 (available as a flatpak to 5.0 beta, which is available in a Debian depository. Yesterday I filed bug reports on two issues, and already today a new beta was released, which resolves the more substantive issue. Thanks to Masahiro Kitagawa, the current main developer, for this quick action. The ability to reach out to and communicate with developers is the best aspect of using open source software.

Additional resources for LightZone:

YouTube channel

Forum

Keep software simple

In the early 2000s when I began to use Linux, a lot of things seemed a bit experimental and iffy. I would install and reinstall distros and software. Nowadays I feel that it is generally more stable, and there are long periods when everything works just as it should.

But occasionally things still go wrong. After installing a new version of Darktable photo editing software in a flatpak, the application started to crash. The problem was with the database – I hate databases; they so often seem to be a source of problems. I’ve now gone back to an earlier version of Darktable and hope that it will be quiet.

In between, I learned a bit about another photo editing program, Lightzone, which seems to be simpler and doesn’t have a database – a plus, from my point of view. But still something wasn’t right – there’s always a learning curve.

I think a better solution to these matters could be not to require elaborate photo editing software at all – my new old Fujifilm X10 is capable of producing good results that do not need editing – other than cropping and rescaling – which I can do adequately and easily in XnView.

I have been having other software issues as well, with both the fediverse servers I use. Epicyon didn’t work for a couple of days, and now the site won’t open again. Hubzilla has suddenly stopped allowing me to add photos to albums that I create – probably a file authorization problem that has come since upgrading to a new version.

I think the solutions to these problems are probably not too difficult – but they will take time to identify, and I ask myself whether this is something I want to continue dealing with. My blogging software is so much more simple and trouble-free. “Simple and trouble-free” is irresistably attractive. Social media software is better for repeating or linking to posts and images that have already been published in my blog, while following others who have interesting posts. I’m not sure that I really need to run a server at all for that.

product features vs user needs (cartoon showing complicated structure on one side, and a cat in an empty box on the other. — Figure 1: Seen on the internet

My current blogging software is a simple Lisp program created in and employing emacs. The photo gallery software is another small php program that doesn’t depend on a database. I didn’t create either of these programs, but the possibilities for something to go wrong are slight, and the system is fairly secure, since anyway the whole caboodle is uploaded from local files. Still something went wrong the other day, after a Chromium update. The blog began to use a wrong font. I solved the error by changing the font’s file-name from a *.woff to a *.woff2, if I remember rightly. That wasn’t too painful.

Diary

Shifting as I do between Markdown, BBCode, Orgmode, SPIP PHP tags and plain HTML there’s a tendency to get a bit mixed up sometimes. Bill Gates would say that the wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them.

Lately I haven’t found the inspiration to write in my blog, but, on the other hand, I’ve written lots of little things in various other places, so I’ll collect a couple of them here.

In sickness and in health

A person who has to be laid up for several months due to a couple of unexpected spinal operations wrote that:

“I’m feeling ok now – a little mentally traumatised still from the urgency and unexpectedness of the surgery. The randomness of life really hit me.”

I wrote back that I wasn’t sure that “life is random” because I’ve been conditioned to think of it as prarabhda karma – which Jiddu Krishnamurti would have laughed at, because we create theories to explain away life’s mysteries. I also wrote that I try to relate to the “random” things that happen to us as gifts from the universe, as a bhakti would do. Baruch ha shem be tov ve ba ra as they say in Judaism.

But then she asked me to explain all these words, so follows my explanation:

‘Prarabhda karma’ is one of three types of karma according to brahmanist texts: it’s the kind that you have already been landed with, as against the karma you are now creating, or the karma that you have already perpetrated, but which has not yet resulted in anything. Actually, there’s nothing mystical about the word karma itself – it simply means action – the Indo-European root is cognate with our word “create”, but there’s a whole philosophy built around it (in both Hinduism and Buddhism): the result of “bad” actions, good “actions”, and doing action without seeking reward, etc. – the Bhagavad Gita, a poem of 700 verses, spends a lot of time on it.

‘bhakti’ means someone of a devotional bent, who might find himself in opposition to, say, a “raja yogi” or a dhyani. The analogy they usually give in India is that a bhakti is like a kitten, who his mother picks up by the scruff of his neck, and allows himself to be carried along, surrendering personal will to divine providence, whereas other kinds of yogis are more like the monkey baby, tenaciously clinging to their stated objective.

‘ blessed is God who brings goodness and ba ra’ I suppose “praise G-d whether he brings us good things or bad things” is the spirit of it. Bhakta, or devotion, is pretty much the same in all religions, I think. In one of Paul Bowles books, set in Morocco, there’s a scene where the narrator accidentally slams the taxi door on the hand of an elderly fellow passenger. Wordlessly, the old guy wraps his bloodied fingers in his shawl, mutters “alhamdulillah” (praise be to Allah!) and goes on his way.

I find I don’t have a problem reconciling between the attitudes of these different religions, while not believing in a conceptualization of God as some of them do. “God” is just a shorthand term used for convenience; a personalisation similar to the way some people assign personal names to inanimate objects. If they find it helpful, let them do so. Just don’t try to persuade me that divinity is the way that you imagine it, based on what has been drummed into you in churches and temples. Or that the god you yourself have set up on a pedestal needs to be pulled down, because either way, it is of no consequence to me. Agnosticism and atheism are nonsense terms and only imply that we haven’t understood, while “belief” will always be extremely fragile.

Progressive web applications

On my phone, using Epicyon, I noticed that there are interesting differences between Firefox (and Mull) and Chrome, in the way they handle progressive web apps. The launcher I use does not directly support pwas. But I found that if I create a Chrome pwa in Samsung’s default launcher, I can then go back and use it in my launcher. But the same is not true for Firefox pwas. They can be added to Samsung’s home screen, but do not show up among the applications, as do Chrome pwas. I don’t normally use Chrome and when it began to pester me about syncing between devices, I decided not to use it for Epicyon either. So, since I can’t use Firefox web apps under my launcher, I simply open Epicyon from a Mull tab. I might eventually put Vivaldi back on my phone, so then I’ll see what happens with the web apps that it creates, but for Epicyon I can manage like that. My launcher, by the way, is Baldphone – it’s supposed to be a simple launcher for old people. Maybe I’m getting old, because although I’ve experimented with every launcher in F-Droid, I like it best.

Unfediverse

Someone said the other day that it isn’t entirely true to say that “the Fediverse is bigger than Mastodon” because, as it stands, Mastodon by itself has many more people on it than any of the other non-Mastodon instances. (And what happens if all of Tumblr joins the Fediverse?) Anyway, for now, the effect of Mastodon’s “market dominance” is that all the other instances need to conform to Mastodon first, and then worry about being interoperable with each other only later. As a result, although almost everything I do in Epicyon and Hubzilla will work in Mastodon, and everything I receive from Mastodon is likely to come through fine, this is not true if I try to follow someone on Hubzilla from Epicyon, and, as I just discovered, posting an image in Hubzilla will come through blank to Akkoma (a Pleroma fork). Even with Mastodon, Epicyon and maybe Hubzilla have compatibility problems. From Epicyon, I discovered that I cannot respond to surveys, for example. Images can be given alt tags in Hubzilla (through a non-intuitive and undocumented syntax), but these do not seem to work in exactly the same way as in Mastodon. It’s all a bit wild. So, for interoperability it’s best to keep posts as simple as possible.

Palestine

When political realities change for the worse, we tend to adapt to them by hardening our positions. When Russia invades Ukraine, this has an inhibiting factor on all discourse that tries to be even-handed. Suddenly we are all against Russia, siding with the warmongers of NATO. That’s too bad, because the necessary nuances are lost – with the darkness of night comes our inabilities to perceive differences in colors.

It’s the same now with what’s happening in Israel/Palestine. Israel’s new regime is so harsh, anti-Arab and Fascist, the world cannot do other than to side with Palestinians and to unite against Israel. This usually results in sending Israeli Jews into defensive mode. A people so traumatized by historical antisemitism have a strong defensive reflex. This too is dangerous.

But what can one do? What can one do when a conflict seems to require that we take sides? To sign up anyway but just not to be happy about it?

Lao Tsu has the following to say about war:

Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu – chapter 31

Good weapons are instruments of fear; all creatures hate them.
Therefore followers of the Tao never used them.
The wise man prefers the left.
The man of war prefers the right.

Weapons are instruments of fear; they are not a wise man’s tools.
He uses them only when he has no choice.
Peace and quiet are dear to his heart.
And victory no cause for rejoicing.
If you rejoice in victory, then you delight in killing;
If you delight in killing, you cannot fulfill yourself.

On happy occasions precedence is given to the left,
On sad occasions to the right.
In the army the general stands on the left,
The commander-in-chief on the right.
This means that war is conducted like a funeral.
When many people are being killed,
They should be mourned in heartfelt sorrow.
That is why a victory must be observed like a funeral.

I’m told that there’s a parallel Talmudic passage.

War and peace may be governed by firm principles, or be in the domain of realpolitik. But they are also matters of the heart. When it comes down to it, I am not going to listen to Lao Tsu, Marx, Jesus, my elders, the Prime Minister or the laws of the nation. I’m going to do what my heart tells me to do.

Links

Palestine: Unite or die | Israel-Palestine conflict | Al Jazeera This article by an al-Jazeera senior journalist suggests that it’s imperative for Palestinians to put aside their differences if they want to struggle against the new political realities in the region.

2022’s Best Investigative Stories in India – GIJN

There are amazing stories here.

Modern Travel

I decided to join D for part of her planned trip to Plum Village, so I’ll be there for her “Lamp Transmission” ceremony. That meant booking flights. There are less options today, following the pandemic, and many trips to Bordeaux involve travel of 20 – 30 hours or more. I struggled for a couple of hours with Expedia, trying to find something cheap and convenient, but eventually gave up. D came to the rescue with E-Dreams, which, in this case, seemed to have more options with the cheapo companies like Veuling, Wiz and whatever. She was able to find a cheaper flight, which I eventually booked.

One thing I learned along the way is that it is much easier to book a flight to France than to order a rail ticket. (It’s true that Air France offers rail arrangements sometimes instead of connecting flights.) I have previously had more success with the SNCF website (and previously have had their telephone app), but this time the experience was awful. First, in order to make any booking, one has to log in. For that to happen, after the password log-in they send a confirmation code by email. After that there’s a CAPTCHA. That’s already three kinds of verification. But a couple of minutes later, a message popped up telling me that I had been blocked, due to suspicious activity, so I simply had to give up. I was using an up-to-date Vivaldi browser, which uses the same rendering engine as Chrome and matches it for all other browsing features. I have Privacy Badger installed, but nothing that blocks ordinary javascript.

Travel is becoming quite a nightmare in our era. Booking rail tickets in France, India, and no doubt in many other countries, is a horrible experience dressed up in the guise of being sophisticatedly modern. Here in Israel we just had a foreign guest who took a bus from the local junction, only to discover that tickets can no longer be purchased on the bus itself. She managed to reach Jerusalem only due to the kindness of a passenger.

Plane, bus and rail companies, whether private or government-run are guilty of the worst form of ableism. Our modern pretenses against all kinds of discrimination against people with disabilities, are a complete sham. They challenge even mentally fit people with their byzantine arrangements, and only work very well if one is equipped with a smartphone full of surveillance apps. The situation is getting worse, not better. If all of this somehow helped to reduce carbon emissions, by making travel less popular, there might be an advantage, but the ones who travel most are not those who feel challenged by these difficulties. And the relative complexity and inconvenience of public ground transportation favors travel by planes and private cars.

Server

I made good progress today, especially on the matter of file transfers. I discovered earlier that although WebDAV had seemed to work, it actually is only presenting the server folders in read-only format. I cannot change anything. The configuration there is too complex and I gave up on WebDAV just as I’ve given up on GIT, so it was back to FileZilla. Then I discovered Rsync, which, although I knew about it, had never actually used. It’s powerful and amazing. It’s also very quick (at least for what I need it for) and simple to use from the commandline, once you get the syntax right. Furthermore, it’s something that I can execute from within Emacs (where I’m now composing this blog).

So now, for blog posts, I only need to a) save the file b) publish it locally and c) rsync it to the server. All of this happens within emacs itself. ~~When I grow more proficient, I will probably set up a macro to handle these operations even more quickly.~~ Update: done, easily enough. That’s a nice thing about emacs, and probably the Lisp programming that underlies it – that it can be used on a simple level, but provides the opportunity to grow with it. When Stallman talks about the advantage in open source programs that the code is up-front and visible, people like me think that that’s all well and good, but the majority of us are completely unable to read code. However when I look at Lisp code, understanding it seems within reach.

Browser colors

I noticed today that the colors in Vivaldi are brighter than those in SeaMonkey or Chrome. The blue color that I have been using in this blog appears purplish in Vivaldi. I tried to find something about this in the settings and it looks like there may be a configuration option for this, but I didn’t succeed in changing anything.

Writing in html – imagining a better future

Writing in html

One thing that I like about this composing this blog in Bluefish editor is that I am writing it in the actual html used to publish it online. Not in BBCode, Markdown, some sort of WYSIWYG view, or a word processor. It’s somehow liberating to use the actual code, even if I do find occasional validation errors afterwards. That’s also why I want the code to be as clean and easy to read as possible. For example, I shift long html anchor links to the end of the post.

CSS (cascading style sheets) enables us to separate style from content, so that the code can be as clean as possible. But if you look at the source of most modern web pages (Ctrl + U in the browser), what you will see is an undecipherable mass of code and java script. Hubzilla is relatively tidy, but if you open a single Hubzilla post or article, you need to scroll down through about 2000 lines of code before reaching the post’s title and text, whereas, as you can see from the image below, this is not the case here. desktop with editor open

Not only that, but, because of the WebDav system, I’m also writing it online and saving occasionally, so a visitor may catch me in the middle of an unfinished post.

Solarpunk

Yuval Noah Harari says that science fiction is the most important literary genre of our era. But when an average movie-goer thinks of SF today, they probably think about blockbuster superheroes or post-apocalyptic dystopias. The situation in print is fortunately a little better, but we know from even the greatest writers, going back to Dante and Milton, that it has always been easier to imagine and write about scenes from hell than about heaven.

Some popular authors, like Kim Stanley Robinson [1] buck the trend for doom and gloom by imagining more positive outcomes, based on confronting the issues. This kind of fiction is sometimes called Solarpunk [2]. The SF site Tor has a review of several books in this category [3].

The sense of the upcoming disaster seems to traumatize all those who are not in denial of it, and there is a tendency towards paralysis – which is the opposite of what we currently need. Films like “Don’t Look Up” attempt to shake us out of complacency through parody, but the idea that “anyway, we’re screwed” is not likely to lead to a way forward.

It’s hard. George Monbiot [4], who writes about climate change for The Guardian, has been known to break into tears on live TV, because he sees that what needs to be done is consistently undermined by policy makers.

One thing that we know is that shifting the responsibility to individuals is not going to solve anything. Buying bamboo toothbrushes with bristles made from beans isn’t actually going to save the planet.

Changing our conception of the way the world works, rejecting a vision of the future where humanity loses the planet due to the inaction of politicians and corporate concerns, and galvanizing people to action, on the other hand, could actually help.

As human beings we are always motivated by the stories we tell ourselves, the myths we believe in, and our dreams. Human history can’t be understood or explained without giving sufficient space for these aspects. We live less in objective reality than in our collective imagination. So the only way to motivate people to make a real change is to reach people first on this level.

Solarpunk, which is not just about fiction-writing, but also about hacker spaces and community, could be an interesting way to start. Yesterday I learned of an online conference that is coming up at the end of May, which looks promising.

A walk | the blog | browsers | Signal messenger | links

I have been feeling a need for a bit of seclusion lately. Maybe because in Israel-Palestine the holiday season with its seasonal tensions is on us again. I went for a walk in the woods and fields today and ran into a battalion of boy/girl scouts. One of them – maybe their security detail – was waiting for me as I approached, with questions about where I lived, whether I was Jewish, how relations are between Jews and Arabs there – he got mostly a stony silence from me as I marched through. Luckily I’m harmless.

Then I found a quiet spot to read Ibn Arabi and do a bit of writing. It’s a lovely season and was a beautiful day; the wild chrysanthemums are blooming and the thistles are starting to flower too. Unfortunately I didn’t have a camera or a phone. Blogging

I have accumulated several issues to handle in the blog, when I find time/feel like doing something about it. I already mentioned making the font sizes larger. Yesterday I found a couple more articles on static blogs, and one of these mentioned Google Lighthouse – a Chrome extension which is an even greater stickler than the tests that I have been using. It discovered a couple of things to improve. the SEO rating – where my blog suffers most – does not interest me, and could never be very high when I have included “No Index, No follow” meta, but there are a couple of other things to take care of. Regarding RSS, either I will learn to write my own, or I will depend on WP, which I have been using for archiving in any case. There may even be a way of using WP solely for RSS, with no front-end blog interface – I will have to check that.

I was looking again at Genesis in Lagrange. Because it is solely text-based, habitually lacklustre textual blogs seem even less inspiring to me when viewed in Genesis. One day I might decide to use it, but not now. Although I’m not a particularly graphic-oriented person, I do find that the likelihood of my reading a blog is somewhat influenced by appearances, and I have an unproven hunch that this is true of many people.

“My stack will outlive yours” https://blog.steren.fr/2020/my-stack-will-outlive-yours/

“My Static Blog Publishing Setup and an Apology to RSS Subscribers” https://tdarb.org/blog/my-static-blog-publishing-setup.html

Browsers

I found a few interesting articles to check out on browsers. One blogger insists that Pale Moon and related UXP browsers are the way to go, for web privacy. I find that I am staying with SeaMonkey except in cases where a website patently won’t work.

Pale Moon Hardening Guide https://blackgnu.net/palemoon-hardening.htmlUXP

UXP Browser Bundle https://albusluna.com/uxp/index.html

UXP Browser https://docs.temenos.com/ndocs/Solutions/Technology/Interaction_Framework/uxp/Browser/uxp/uxp.htm

Signal

I have stopped using Signal, because I don’t trust it; but I see that Russians are trusting it more and more, among other means, to get around censorship.

How Russian citizens evade Putin’s censorship – Protocol https://www.protocol.com/russian-internet-crackdown

Here are a couple of other articles regarding Signal:

Tell HN: iOS Signal eats your disk space | Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30972546

Moxie Marlinspike has stepped down as CEO of Signal – The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/10/22876891/signal-ceo-steps-down-moxie-marlinspike-encryption-cryptocurrency Other interesting links

Leave your shoes outdoors, these scientists say – CNN https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/11/world/shoes-home-contaminants-scn-partner/index.html

I Liked The Idea Of Carbon Offsets, Until I Tried To Explain It https://climateer.substack.com/p/avoided-emissions?s=r

Updating Thunderbird, growing the root partition

I managed to update Thunderbird from version 78, which was from the MX Testing repository, to version 91, which I found as a flatpak. Transfering the old profile was not so easy, but when it worked, it worked painlessly.

Along the way, I had to grow the size of the root partition on my my hard drive, by skimping on the swap directory, but that also worked easily. It turns out that you can grow an ext4 partition to the right, even when it is mounted.

With the help of SoundCloud I continue my exploration of mainly MENA Music. It just turns out somehow that one thing leads to another and almost all the tracks and the musicians I follow end up being from there.

True Sorry, by Ibrahim Maalouf https://soundcloud.com/adham-safena/ibrahim-maalouf-true-sorry

“Ibrahim Maalouf is a trumpeter who is also a composer and arranger for trumpet. He also teaches trumpet. He was born on December 5, 1980 in Beirut, Lebanon, but now lives in France.

He is the son of trumpeter Nassim Maalouf and pianist Nada Maalouf, a nephew of the writer Amin Maalouf, and the grandson of journalist, poet and musicologist Rushdi Maalouf. He is currently the only trumpet player in the world to play Arabic music with the trumpet in fourth tones, using a technique his father invented in the 1960s. Ibrahim is also the winner of some of the greatest classical trumpet competitions in the world.”

Auntie Alice’s recipe book – opml files – SeaMonkey – Hubzilla Cards – Zelensky

When we moved from Yorkshire to Virginia in 1969, my Auntie Alice gave my mom a handwritten notebook of her cake and dessert recipes.

My mom treasured the book and used it a lot – it had everything from her syrup sponge puddings to her Christmas cakes. When I was there one time I scanned the notebook and have now collected all together into a 20-page PDF[1] which I have placed in Hubzilla’s file storage.

If I would use it I’d want to substitute for ingredients like eggs and suet in some of them, but it’s a nice thing to pass down to future generations. I tried in various ways to get the PDF size down, eventually settling on a batch conversion in XnView. Finally I got it down from 162 MB to just under 15.

On the way, I have added a wiki post [4] describing what I like about SeaMonkey.

Zelensky and Palestine

Zelensky is to address Israel’s parliament on Sunday. (The speech will be also broadcast in Tel Aviv’s main square). The mainly Arab Joint List party may boycott it, though Mansour Abbas of the United Arab List says he will attend. He spoke on Israeli TV saying that evidently this was because they (with their communist roots) consider Russia to be a continuation of the former communist state. But Ilan Pappé, an Israeli historian who self-exiles in the UK, writes in the Palestine Chronicle [6] why Palestinians might not feel so enthusiastic about Zelensky:

The Ukrainian establishment… is also disturbingly and embarrassingly pro-Israeli. One of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s first acts was to withdraw the Ukraine from the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People – the only international tribunal that makes sure the Nakba is not denied or forgotten.

The decision was initiated by the Ukrainian President; he had no sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian refugees, nor did he consider them to be victims of any crime. In his interviews after the last barbaric Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip in May 2021, he stated that the only tragedy in Gaza was the one suffered by the Israelis.

Thanks to Manuel for sharing a Spanish version of the article.

The Libre Planet conference [7] has some interesting speakers. Unfortunately my attempts to listen to it have resulted in failure so far, due to the buffering lag. Perhaps afterwards I will manage to watch/listen to the recordings. Links

Recipe Book (for download)

https://www.vikshepa.com/static/auntie-alices-recipe-book.pdf

SeaMonkey (in wiki)
Chana Dhal (The Guardian)

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2022/mar/19/chana-dal-recipe-tamal-ray

Navigating our Humanity: Ilan Pappé on the Four Lessons from Ukraine

https://www.palestinechronicle.com/navigating-our-humanity-ilan-pappe-on-the-four-lessons-from-ukraine/

LibrePlanet conference

https://libreplanet.org/2022/live/

Each Firefox download has a unique identifier https://www.ghacks.net/2022/03/17/each-firefox-download-has-a-unique-identifier/

Google gives Black workers lower-level jobs and pays them less, suit claims https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/mar/18/google-black-employees-lawsuit-racial-bias

Life imitates art as seven charged over robbery from Lupin set https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/18/seven-charged-in-france-over-daylight-robbery-on-lupin-set-omar-sy

Spanish driver who ate hash cakes claims diplomatic immunity from non-existent state https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/18/spanish-driver-hash-cakes-claims-diplomatic-immunity-menda-lerenda

Nicholas Johnson: Why I do not use a pseudonym Inspiring. https://nicksphere.ch/2022/02/28/why-i-dont-use-a-pseudonym/

Hubzilla menus in mobile view – guest access tokens – PDF editing

In the morning we were busy with a guest. In the afternoon I had another look at a couple of things that have been bothering me regarding Hubzilla.

1: Menu system in Hubzilla mobile view. It is possible to create a custom menu that can be displayed on every page. However, the menu is not shown in the mobile version of the site; only the default menu is shown. For me, this means that, when giving a link to friends, it is better to send them directly to my blog, which is a website under Hubzilla’s cloud file system. Here, I now have a responsive menu, which displays a “hamburger” menu on phones. (I have written how this is done in my technology wiki).

2: Access tokens. I find Hubzilla “dropbox style” guest access (which involves using links that contain access-tokens) a bit hit-or-miss. Today, when testing in a private browsing window, I found that the access token had stopped working completely, though it had been set to never expire. I went through the motions of saving the token again, and then the link did allow access – no idea why. But it worked for one private photo album, and not for another.

There is a separate problem that whereas the access token guest access seems to survive clicks across several Hubzilla pages, it does not survive the passage between my blog and the rest of Hubzilla. So if, as mentioned above, I use my blog as my primary give-out link, it does not help that I include there an access token. My conclusion is that, since most of my Hubzilla assets are public, this is important mainly for items like family photo albums. It is therefore better to keep those elsewhere, such as in my Fastmail storage. Although the links would be “public”, they are hard to find without obtaining a direct link; for example, Google is not going to crawl those photo albums if there are no links to them from another website. Basically it means that when I have personal-type photos that I wish to share with the family or friends who lack login credentials, I will share these somewhere else.

There are, very occasionally, bits of text that I do not want to share publicly or get into search engines. These should not be included in the blog, but can be included in Hubzilla Articles then shared privately. There is an example in this current post.

The upshot of these reflections is that I can use the link to my blog in places like my email signature. This has a mobile view from which my other Hubzilla assets can easily be reached. And I will no longer worry about access tokens. When I wish to share a family album, I will place it elsewhere and share the link directly through email.

Adobe Acrobat writer

One of the office staff has asked me to purchase Adobe Acrobat writer, or whatever it’s currently called. I pointed out that in the majority of cases it’s possible to manage without it, but she was not convinced. I think I have never managed to persuade anyone to use free open source software. But admittedly it’s a bit of a tough sell with PDF writers, because there is no exact fit among FOSS solutions. There are foundations to which we need to apply that require good PDF editing of their application forms. I personally haven’t had much experience with filling out complex PDF forms but have seen the frustration of those who have needed to do so. I am sure I would manage somehow, as I always do, but can’t expect that of others.

It seems that Adobe’s Acrobat software is not part of their Creative Suite, for which they have a specific discount for non-profit associations like us. Therefore it’s necessary to pay the full amount, which is quite expensive.

For simple editing of a PDF document, I personally find that InkScape has one of the best options. It imports a PDF document nicely (though only one page at at time), and allows one to edit both text and graphics quite well.

Phone messaging | Int’l Rescuers Day | Diaspora connections

After hearing from Ivan Zlax about Telegram and its founder Pavel Durov, I felt that it may be time to ditch the program from my phone. He dug up an old bio about him in the Internet Archive that has the following:

In 2005, Pavel completed his training at the Faculty of Military Studies of St. Petersburg State University with a specialization in Propaganda and Psychological Warfare. While training with the Faculty of Military Studies, he served as Platoon Commander of the Philology Department. Upon completion, he was awarded the title of Lieutenant of the Reserve Force.[2]

There have been numerous articles by Moxie and others regarding the security of Telegram, but this is the first time that I heard these details of Durov’s past. I don’t get the feeling from reading his posts on Telegram that he is turning over user data to three-letter agencies, but I also don’t feel like he is being sufficiently open about things.

I have been looking at replacements for Telegram. One thing I considered was Delta Chat [3]. It has the advantage that one does not need to worry about not being able to communicate with existing contacts who do not use Delta Chat, because it simply repurposes email protocols. It sets up PGP automatically so that one can communicate securely with those who are on Delta Chat. This is a little like Signal, which uses ordinary SMS to send and receive messages for those who do not have Signal.

Parallel to my interest in privacy I have an interest in simplifying and minimizing interaction with my phone. This is also in line with recommendations for good operational security, because the less applications (and data) are on the phone, the smaller the attack surface. Some weeks ago I removed both email and NextCloud from the device. If one doesn’t intend to use a dumb-phone (which are considered to be very insecure due to their reliance on old-fashioned protocols), the best thing is to bring the use of a smartphone closer to the level of a dumb-phone.

For now I have left Signal on the phone, and use it as an SMS replacement. A few of my contacts have Signal and do the same. But i don’t feel inspired to recommend Signal to others. For one thing, it uses Amazon servers. If there were a decentralized messaging app that could also replace SMS as the phone’s default messaging service, I might use that instead, but I haven’t found one. I think it is possible to bridge between Signal and Matrix, but that defeats my purpose of minimalism.

Meanwhile, I continue to use Telegram on my computer as our family group is quite heavily invested in it (tons of family photos and videos, etc.) International Rescuers Day ceremony

Today we had the International Rescuers Day ceremony near the Spiritual Center. This emulates the event promoted around the world by the GARIWO organization. They actually refer to it as the “Int’l Day of the Righteous” but Prof. Auron, who initiated our local event, prefers the term “rescuer” to “righteous” due to the latter’s possible religious connotations.

This year the village awarded the prize (which has no monetary value) to the Ta’ayush organization [4] and to the Afghan journalist and feminist activist Atefa Ghafoory, who wasn’t present – she lives with her child in Sweden these days, after suffering quite badly at the hands of the Taliban. The annual event takes place in a dedicated area under the olive trees below the spiritual center, and we were lucky this year with the weather.

I was happy to hear from the Ta’ayush founder afterwards that David Shulman is still active in their activities and is writing a new book about these. His earlier short book, “Dark Hope” is excellent.

Int’l rescuers day

Einat, the new director of the spiritual center, invited a professional photographer for the event, which, though I haven’t seen the results so far, was a good idea as an olive grove has its challenges for photography: under the blotchy sunlight, many of my photos had areas that were either too dark or overexposed. I didn’t find a good way, in darktable to deal with the overexposed areas, though one article did at least address the issue.

I liked a photo that Manuel had posted on Hubzilla, so I thought to follow the photographer. She is on Diaspora, on which I currently have no current connections. I enabled the diaspora protocol in Hubzilla’s admin and added the add-on in the applications panel, but still no luck with adding her.

My solution for people in non-compatible social networks like Twitter and Facebook is a bookmark tool bar folder that I check occasionally. Works fine for me.