Edit 2024-10-28: applications for these positions are closed. KDE e.V., the non-profit organization supporting the KDE community, and the Kdenlive team are looking for proactive contractors to implement some features in the Kdenlive video editor. Two positions are currently open:
OpenTimelineIO integration: this will require implementing a C++ module in Kdenlive to allow importing and exporting using this open standard, to allow exchanging project files with other applications. Please see the job ad for more details about this contracting opportunity.
Audiowaveform integration: this will require rewriting the code used to generate and display the audio waveforms in Kdenlive using the audiowaveform library. This should bring faster and more precise waveforms in the timeline. Please see the job ad for more details about this contracting opportunity.
We are looking forward to your application.
I am huge fan of obsidian.md and just other day I was trying to “convert” Akseli. One pain point he mentioned that it does not quite allow him to get reminders for the todo list created in obsidian.
I have been doing little bit of “hack” to workaround this, and I thought I’d write a blog post about this so that others can also make use of it.
How to use this
First of all, following plugins are used (ignore PlantUML)
KStars v3.7.3 is released on 2024.10.03 for Windows, MacOS & Linux. It's a bi-monthly bug-fix release with a couple of exciting features.
Extension Interface
Ed Lee contributed the Extension Interface for KStars.
Extensions are small programs that can be added to interact with KStars/Ekos/INDI in order to provide extra functions and features. Extensions are separate from KStars. They are not provided as part of this software. Only a means to call them is provided for convenience. Make sure that you understand the requirements and risks of using an extension.
FireCapture launcher (FC_launcher): disconnects the current primary camera INDI driver and launches FireCapture. Upon close restarts the INDI driver.
KStars Backup (KS_backup): provides a GUI for the archiving and restoration of KStars/INDI (and optionally others) configuration directories to/from .tar.gz archives/
Sirial_EEA: provides live stacking of the preview job from the Capture Module and displays it auto-stretched in the Ekos preview window.
Each extension must have a companion configuration file also located in the extensions directory, named the same as the executable with the addition of a .conf eg: an extension named example must also have a configuration file named example.conf A configuration file is a plain text file that provides configuration settings to the extension program and usage information to the user. A configuration file is only valid if it contains a line starting with: minimum_kstars_version=x.y.z The x.y.z is the minimum release of KStars that the extension is designed/tested against. This value is checked against the current KStars KSTARS_VERSION macro defined in version.h and must be equal or lower for the extension to be considered valid. The extension should also check that this minimum_kstars_version string matches what it expects.
Optionally each extension can also provide an icon file for display in the Extension drop down list. Again the naming should match the extension executable with a valid file extension (.jpg, .bmp, .gif, .png or .svg) and be placed in the same extensions directory. A default icon is used for any extension that does not provide it's own icon.
Several new DBus functions/signals are added to enable general extension use and for a specific upcoming extension.
Multi-Target Scheduler
Wolfgang Reissenberger continued the development of multi-camera acquisition and now scheduling with many exciting updates!
Multi-Camera Scheduling
With this new release it is possible to create and run schedules for two or more optical trains in parallel within the same KStars instance. All mount related events like slewing, dithering, alignment and meridian flip are synchronized, i.e. capturing on all optical trains takes these events into account.
Lead and follower jobs
If you want to run capturing on multiple optical trains in parallel, you need to decide, which of the optical trains is the lead job, which defines the target and the scheduling criteria. All other optical trains will be follower jobs, for which only the capture sequence to be used is relevant.
Job Synchronization
Ekos ensures that no mount motion happens while one of the optical trains is capturing to avoid star trails.
In case of dithering, the capture module decides what to do as soon as dithering is requested, depending on the setup of the lead job. If the remaining capture time of a follower train is more than 50% of the lead job exposure time, capturing of the follower train is stopped and restarted after dithering. If the remaining capture time is less than 50%, the Capture module waits for the follower to finish its capture.
For the meridian flip and re-alignment: both are controlled by the lead job. All running follower capturing sequences are stopped and restarted after a successful completion of the respective action.
Recommendations
The lead job should have the longest exposure times, especially if dithering is used.
If you use re-focusing, consider to not suspend guiding during focusing, since the other optical train might capture in parallel.
Configure the same optical train in the Align module that you use in the lead job. This is important if you use the re-alignment check option of the scheduler.
Do not use the Force re-alignment before re-starting jobs, since each new iteration of the lead job stops capturing of the follower trains. Consider using Verify captured image position every n frames instead, since this option triggers re-alignment only if it is necessary.
Adhoc focus with Multi-Camera setups
Wolfgang Reissenberger added support for simultaneous parallel focusing when you are running multi-camera setup. It would be a good idea to disable Suspend Guiding so that guiding is unaffected when focusing operation commences.
Invent Multi-Star Guide Star
Hy Murveit introduced an experimental Multi-Star parameter. In the original (conservative) multi-star guiding implementation, although many stars contributed to the computed guiding drift computation, there still was one more important star that anchored the scheme.
With this change, all the guide stars contribute equally to the guiding calculations. This removes the risk that an unfortunate selection of a double star for the more-important main guide star would degrade performance.
In the next release of Dolphin, the search backend (when Baloo indexing is disabled)
will be faster and support more file types, by using external projects
ripgrep-all and
ripgrep to do the search.
Merge Request
What are ripgrep and ripgrep-all?
ripgrep is a fast text search tool that uses
various optimizations including multi-threading (compared to grep and Dolphin's
internal search backend which are single-threaded).
ripgrep-all, quote its homepage, is
"ripgrep, but also search in PDFs, E-Books, Office documents, zip, tar.gz, etc.".
How to enable it
Install the ripgrep-all package from your distribution's package manager (which should
also install ripgrep). Then Dolphin will automatically use it for content search, when
Baloo is disabled.
If your distribution doesn't provide ripgrep-all, you can also try installing ripgrep. Then
Dolphin will use it for content search, but without the additional file type support.
Limitations
It only works in content search mode, and when Baloo content indexing is disabled. File name search still uses
the internal backend.
It only works in local directories. When searching in remote directories (e.g. Samba, ssh),
the internal search backend is used. Although we can run ripgrep in remote directories through
the kio-fuse plugin, testing shows it can be 3 times slower than the internal backend,
so it's not used.
It doesn't work on Windows. Although both ripgrep and ripgrep-all have releases for Windows,
I personally don't have Windows experience to integrate them. Merge request to enable it
on Windows is welcome.
Customization
You can change the command line with which Dolphin calls the external tools. Copy
/usr/share/kio_filenamesearch/kio-filenamesearch-grep to ~/.local/share/kio_filenamesearch/,
and modify the script there. The script contains comments on the calling convention between Dolphin
and it, and explanations on the command line options.
One option you might want to remove is -j2. It limits the number of threads ripgrep
(and ripgrep-all) uses to 2. Using more threads can make the search much slower in hard disks (HDD).
I tried to detect HDD automatically, but it's not reliable, so I went with a conservative default. It's
still faster than the internal backend, but if you have an SSD, you can remove the option to unlock the
full speed of ripgrep.
You can also use a different external tool. (E.g. the silver search (ag). Or a full-text search engine
other than Baloo) Just make sure it outputs paths separated by NUL. Usually a -0 option will do that.
More customization
You can even modify the script so that you can specify different external tools in the search string.
For example, you can insert the following code before the original code that calls ripgrep-all:
...(line 1-33) --run)iftest"$2"="@git";thenexec sh -c 'git status -s -z|cut -c 4- -z'fi...
Then if you search for "@git" in a git directory, it will show you changed files.
FAQ
But what if a malicious app creates ~/.local/share/kio_filenamesearch/kio-filenamesearch-grep that deletes all my files when I search?
If a malicious app can write to ~/.local/share/kio_filenamesearch/, it probably can just delete all
files in you home directory, without involving Dolphin at all. A script executed by Dolphin doesn't
have more power than a script executed by the malicious app itself.
Also, there are already a lot of places in your home directory that a malicious app can create a script in,
and it will be executed later without you noticing. E.g., ~/.bashrc, ~/.config/systemd/user,
~/.config/autostart, to name a few.
The threat is real, but I believe the solution is to prevent apps from writing to arbitrary places in your
home directory without your consent. If your apps are sandboxed (e.g. via Flatpak) so they can't write to
~/.config or ~/.local by default, and you only use trusted apps like Dolphin and Kate to manage files
in these places (so you trust them to not modify files behind your back), then the scenario in the
question is unlikely to happen.
Future works
There are quite a lot to improve in Dolphin's search (when not using Baloo). The content search should
also search in file names. The search string is currently interpreted as a regular expression, but a
fuzzy match or shell globbing seems to be a more sensible default (probably with regexp as an option).
Hopefully future works will address these issues.
This being my first post on the KDE sphere (or any other sphere),
it was supposed to be just a touch of contact with the world of blogging. But since time pass by in a blast, let's just summarize how I lived my third one in-person Akademy 2024.
Würzbug. Back to Germany
This year's Akademy happily got me back to Germany, which has become like a second home and a place I like to visit at least once a year (yeah, I missed the Dürüms).
I had bought the D-Ticket, which allowed my to board any public transport immaginable (well, except for ICE trains, but I haven't heard much good about them either) for bare 49€. It brought me some memories back as a student in Dresden, enjoying the same perks with the Semesterticket, just on a regional scope. Thanks to Itinerary and its route planner I was able to make it to Würzburg even an hour earlier than anticipated (less 20min train delay which I've heard it's currently quite a good metric).
After having my hotel booking cancelled last minute due to needed repair works, I had booked an appartment because the hotel prices were a bit over the top. I was really lucky to find that just around the corner I had a bus stop to go to the venue, and also Andy Betts and Richard Wagner as ilustrious neighbors. And one of the best rated Dönner places in the city. Very lucky indeed!
The Talks
It's hard to make a better summary of the Talks days that our very own Promo Team's report, which I agree with on many points.
What I particulary felt on these Akademy's talks was a high focus into the future. Some words were thematically present along most of the talks: story, product, and impact.
The story we as the KDE community want to tell is not just a bunch of code packages that live in an ethereal world to be grabbed by a few enthusiasts or distros, but a full useful product for the end users, an inviting environment for fellow developers, and a reliable asset for manufactures on their very concrete hardware.
There were many reveals and surprises to achieve this goal. Projects that had been incubating for some time, were now made public on this Akademy: the KDE OS Codename Banana by Harald Sitter, the Next Project and design system by Andy Betts and the Union theme engine by Arjen Hiemstra.
Some talks addressed the social and environmental impact of the technology we create. The one that specially got to me was the small story Nicole Teal told at her lightning talk. How a group of kids gave many "older" PCs a new life installing KDE, while learning new skills and making community, felt really true and a spur to continue contributing to FOSS. It really matters.
From the technical talks, I enjoyed "What is color, anyway" by Xaver Hugl, and unfortunately had to miss some other ones (Python and Rust integration with Qt). This is the hardest part, where you cannot just .clone() yourself and attend to two talks at the same time. Maybe I would have learnt to do that if I had attended the Rust presentation? (yeah, sorry bad Rust dad joke)
It was also on Sunday when Aniqa and Carl took me by surprise to agains my will happily answer to a small video interview. Just joking, it was fun. Just preemptively preparing myself for when the final video comes out and I can see what words I did babble :D.
The BoFs
After a very intense weekend of talks and the social event and post-event on Sunday, I took the Monday's morning off to have some rest. In the evening, Andy and Manuel showed me a bit more about the design system they're using and the icon exporter Manuel has been developing to streamline the process between designers and the final product. Amazing stuff!
I also started a draft of this very blog post, which wasn't much successful as you can imagine by its final release date.
The big BoF day for me was mostly Tuesday, where I focussed on the Plasma and the VDG ones, though I missed those on KWin's roadmap and window tiling, due to competing schedules. During the Plasma BoF, we could experiment in real time, the step-by-step process of realeasing the Plasma 6.1.5 version, thanks to Jonathan, our Plasma release manager.
Finally, on Thursday I got to enjoy the brand new Sticker BoF. Besides me not having any stickers on my own to share, and being mostly minimalistic when it comes to decoration, I had a great time and ended up sticking my laptop up and about, including an very limited unit of the Sticker BoF's sticker. Thanks Kieryn for organizing it. Of course, Carl won the sticker's award 😄.
On a more personal level, I regret a bit not having participated more on some of the BOFs. Most of my KDE's contributions this summer have been improvements on very niche aspects: the Weather widget and the tool to preview keyboard layouts (tastenbrett), so I felt a bit "out of the loop" on the more general and pressing matters in Plasma.
The Socials
Where the Akademy really shines is in putting together some hundreds of amazing people with some common interests, that in the end happen to make the best software products and computing ecosystem out there.
It is a real warp of space and time. On the Welcome Event I got to meet Eva Brucherseifer, one of the attendants and founders of the very first Akademys, and also recent joiners to the community I only knew via chat or MR interactions.
When the Biergarten that was booked for the Sunday Social Event did cancel due to a storm warning, I could immediately check two things:
that the Weather Widget did correctly report the Warnung vor starkem Gewitter
and that the local organizing team went the extra mile to make the Akademy a success, even against the elements. Beer, pizzas and good people was all required to have an enjoyable evening.
Finally I was really happy to meet again with friends from the previous Akademys and the Plasma Sprint in 2023, sharing opinions on widespread topics, suchs as immovable OSes, ingenuous ways to open a beer bottle, keyboard input methods, or the torture and punishment customs of German cities in medieval times.
Thanks to the organizing team, the speakers, the attendants, the patrons and the whole KDE Community which made possible yet another amazing Akademy!
Kraft (Github)
is the desktop app making it easy to create offers and invoices
quickly and beautifully in small companies. It is targetted to the free desktop and runs on Linux.
This is the release announcement of the new Kraft version 1.2.2. This is a small service release
that fixes a few bugs and CI issues.
Right after this release, the branch with significant changes for Kraft 2.0 will be merged to master.
These changes will make Kraft ready for sharing documents across private file clouds and with that enable use cases for distributed use via internet, along with other significant feature updates.
Details about the next big release with version number 2.0 can be read on the Github Discussion page.
Any feedback and contribution is highly appreciated.
The long journey of GSoC (which got streched into 16 weeks) is nearing to an end. And in this blog, I will share a few of the things I have done, and some of the things I have left to do. Let’s start with the main works.
Snap KCM! It’s here!
I have finally succeeded to create a KCM for snaps. This is written using C++, Qt (Qml), Kirigami, Snapd-Glib Api. The flow is something like this
Programmes like Season of KDE (SoK) and Google Summer of Code (GSoC) provide a great opportunity for young talent to become part of the open source community and contribute to open source projects. LabPlot, and KDE in general, has a long history and experience in managing GSoC projects and has benefited from various contributions. In recent years we have taken a break from GSoC, mostly due to personal reasons and time constraints. After a successful SoK 2024 programme this year we decided to participate in GSoC2024 again.
This year we had Israel Gladima and Kuntal Bar who spent 3 months with us working on quite challenging projects aimed at addressing two major feature gaps in LabPlot, namely Python scripting and visualisation of 3D data. These two development topics had already been the subject of several discussions and even initial implementations on our part, but we never managed to finalise them and make these features available to our users. Based on the already available results of the last years’ work, we decided to re-initiate these projects and work on them during GSoC2024. Despite the technical challenges and complexity of these projects, Kuntal and Israel did a very good job this summer and delivered amazing results.
We refer you to their blog posts here and here for more details of the work that has been done. In the coming weeks and months we’ll continue to work to finalise these features and get them ready for the first release. The LabPlot team would like to thank Israel and Kuntal and we’re looking forward to your contributions in the future!
bshah
@genericity:matrix.org
soumyatheman
GSoC
