Iron Maiden: the next half dozen albums (1986-1998) ►
◄ Amazon have pretty much killed off older Kindles
This entry is part of my Project Zebra series covering migration to Linux for personal computing use.
Title reference: is almost the title of a picture book aimed at kids that's probably good for adult introductions too. I've got a copy of the original version, All Cats Have Asperger Syndrome. There are others covering ADHD, etc. It's quite sweet. The observation that cats are sticklers for routine and obsessive behaviours, though, I think anyone could have come to the conclusion of.
Software stuff first... noticed that free space was getting a bit low in some partitions so checked with QDirStat, uninstalled a couple of Wine games (WAU and WA) and did "sudo apt-get clean" (since the apt cache had gotten over 10GB).
The geany-plugins meta package includes one with a systray icon (and lots more besides). Install, enable 'Addons' and restart the application.
https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/183plix/setting_kde_shortcut_for_flameshot_ocr_what_am_i/
CustomShortcuts>Edit>New>GlobalShortcut>Command/Url
Action: flameshot gui --raw | tesseract stdin stdout | xclip -in -selection clipboard (gotta make sure you've installed xclip, tesseract-ocr, flameshot)
Trigger: whatever keybindings you want.
You can just use "flameshot gui" for a well-featured snipping tool.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/29/thunderbird_139/ notes this resource: https://heyjoe8890.wordpress.com/2024/12/01/thunderbird-customization/
Memo to self: using FFMPEG rotate video losslessly
ffmpeg -i input_video.mp4 -vf "transpose=1" output.mp4
FOSS image upscaling
https://flathub.org/apps/io.gitlab.theevilskeleton.Upscaler
Windows gets a Nano type editor
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/edit-is-now-open-source/
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/06/microsoft-edit-text-editor-ubuntu
A good command line editor is needed for remote use without a GUI, and to be part of standard systems (particularly as Notepad is now AI infested crap). Amusingly, apparently Defender initially detected it as malware. And apparently it's got regex, which immediately makes it more useful than this classic clone of the DOS text editor I dabbled with briefly circa 2000 and still have fond memories of - https://www.tetrap.com/software/yikes/
Current clack about desktop environments...
Gnome is making its play to drop X11 entirely before next April
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/05/gnome-dropping-x11-support-ubuntu-impact
Plasma 6 gains the option to allow XWayland apps to have working global keyboard shortcuts, which is a step in the right direction
I'm not sure if this means Plasma itself implements global custom shortcuts
https://blogs.kde.org/2025/05/17/this-week-in-plasma-hdr-calibration-wizard/
And 6.4 has been released
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/06/kde-plasma-6-4-review-new-features-linux-desktop
Further updates on Wayland/X11
https://m.slashdot.org/story/443053
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/20/new_version_of_xorg_x11/
http://pointieststick.com/2025/06/21/about-plasmas-x11-session/
A look in on how people are moving on after Red Hat killed CentOS
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/14/rocky_alma_and_rhel_10/
On the topic of abusive AI crawlers
https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externalizing-your-costs-on-me.html
Linux Format (aka LXF) ended in may 2025 on its 25th anniversary. Linux Magazine is still kicking for now... but who's reading print mags? And it turns out that Linux Journal still exists as an online news site and free e-book publisher.
It's about eight and a half years since I migrated to Linux and most print magazines that I dipped into as a taster are gone. What I'm not sure I realised, as it was before my time, was that in 2013 most of the LXF team left to protest Future Publishing and start Linux Voice after an Indiegogo crowd funded campaign - which lasted a couple of years, then merged into Linux Magazine.
I think the trouble was always that much of the kind of newcomer-friendly feature article content LXF published rapidly cycled through topics, and could only cover them in a shallow way. But that isn't an entirely fair assessment of the magazine as a whole, which was quite technical hobbyist oriented. The problem there is that most people don't distro hop, or build Raspberry Pi projects, or need news that's a month or two behind, at a 2024 cover price of six pounds forty nine which had gone up to 6.99 by the final issue. Publishing costs have soared, particularly when there aren't advertisers, and it's not surprising that most magazines are no longer viable. Contributors were already doing so more out of interest than for the page rates.
Personally, when there were three on the shelf I used to like Linux User & Developer, which folded in 2018, and was a middle ground between hobbyist and sysadmin. Of course it also helped I got a load of issues cheap a month behind on eBay and was therefore more forgiving of lower interest issues. Issues of LUD I particularly remember are 171, I'm pretty sure the first, from a motorway service station with current issues of LXF and LM, 181, for its Mint coverage, 181 which again gave Mint some love, and final issue 196 which seemed to have no advance warning of its cancellation and was just a decent regular issue. I've never used Mint on a main machine, by the way, but it's proven useful setting up machines for others or on stray laptops.
In reading around, I found that ItsFoss still has its old top Linux magazines article, periodically updated, and Zinio has LUD covers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP
"W3Techs reports that as of 27 October 2024 (about two years since PHP 7 was discontinued and 11 months after the PHP 8.3 release), PHP 7 is still used by 50.0% of PHP websites, which is outdated and known to be insecure.[18][19] In addition, 13.2% of PHP websites use the even more outdated (discontinued for 5+ years) and insecure PHP 5, and the no longer supported PHP 8.0 is also very popular, so the majority of PHP websites do not use supported versions."
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