Getting ready for Akademy

Next week Akademy, KDE’s annual community conference, will take place in Würzburg, Germany. There are a few features that I actually began during various conferences throughout the years to address real-world problems. I decided to have look at some of them again that would be most useful for people travelling to Akademy from abroad or who will be giving a presentation there.

Wifi QR Code Scanner

Two years ago at Akademy in Barcelona the venue Wifi details were printed onto our attendee badges as QR code. Already during the conference I started adding a scanner to the networks menu using our fantastic Prison Framework scanner feature. However, with Qt 6 at the horizon and its significant changes to Qt Multimedia I didn’t pursuit it further at the time. Then, whenever I attended another sprint or got to a hotel where they handed out Wifi QR codes, I was reminded that I still haven’t finished the thing.

Still, all prerequisites under the hood have long been merged. The first task was to move the MeCard parser (the format used for those QR codes) from the QRCA scanner app into a shared location. Since MeCard can even contain WPA-EAP configuration I wanted to have the logic for setting up NetworkManager accordingly shared, too. In preparation for adding a sub-page for the camera viewfinder I replaced the full-screen QR code generator with an integrated one.

A huge challenge was that we either need to add a new connection or update an existing one with new credentials. It took me forever to figure out why it wouldn’t update the Wifi passphrase on my network: I’m meanwhile using WPA3-SAE at home! The code for setting up NetworkManager from MeCard didn’t handle “T=SAE” and thus didn’t generate any credentials. Funnily enough, our MeCard generator did. Once that was sorted, the code worked as intended.

However, after a lot of back and forth I abandoned the idea of putting it in the Network applet directly. Using Qt Multimedia, potentially loading a bunch of backends and codecs is probably not something we want to have in the shell. Instead, I will look into adding a button to the Network settings module instead. In the meantime, you can always use QRCA to scan a code a Wifi code.

Location-aware time zone setting

Last year’s Akademy was located in Thessaloniki, Greece which is in a different time zone for many of its attendees. Our phones automatically adjust to that using the cellular network and we don’t even think about it. Frequently during the conference people were confused which talk will come next when their laptop and phone disagreed on the time. Therefore, I wrote a daemon that automatically adjusts the time zone based on your physical location.

“Date & Time” settings window, “Time Zone” tab, a check box “Select time zone automatically based on location” pointed at by the mouse cursor — Enable location-based time zone option in “Date & Time” settings

For privacy, this uses KDE’s own GeoIP endpoint and is opt-in. It is also disabled when connected to a VPN (the endpoint could be in an entirely different location after all) or a metered connection. We’re considering adding a checkbox to Plasma’s Welcome Center on its “Privacy” page to make the feature more discoverable for laptop users. However, there’s still a few quirks to be ironed out to ensure that our users don’t bring down the server hosting that service since by definition you cannot put that sort of thing behind a CDN.

I can’t wait to travel to Würzburg next week. Given the convenient location I am positive that a lot of people and “old-timers” that I haven’t seen around in a while will stop by to say hello. Come join us, attendance is free and it’s always great fun!