Yesterday, I had the opportunity to join Josh Durgin in a Ceph Tech Talk “What’s new in Octopus”, where we spoke about the key features and changes in the Ceph Octopus release (released in March). I took over the Ceph Dashboard part and gave a quick overview about the key highlights (starting at 5:48).
If you missed the live stream, the session has been recorded and is now available on YouTube. Enjoy!
There are two Android apps that I have become very fond of when I’m outside, e.g. spending time in the garden or taking a walk. Both are tools that allow you to learn more about the nature around you, and they use machine learning for doing so.
Let me start with BirdNET, an application that uses your mobile device’s microphone and GPS sensor to determine what birds are currently singing around you. If you have ever wondered what is chirping on that tree, simply take a recording, upload it to the BirdNET AI and it will tell you!
Sadly, the mobile app does not support uploading pre-recorded audio files, but they have a service on their web site that supports that. The App also keeps a log of your previous findings and provides links to Wikipedia, Cornell’s Maculay Library and their All About Birds site for every bird it recognized. They also have a Twitter account at @BirdNET_App.
The second app I would like to mention is Flora Incognita. It allows you take pictures of unknown flowers and other plants to help you with determining their name and a lot of additional background information.
In many cases, taking a single picture of the flower is sufficient, sometimes the app asks you to take additional pictures of the leaves or the entire plant in order to find a match. It also keeps a record of every plant it discovered for you. They have an iOS app as well. They can be found on Twitter at @flora_incognita.
Not that I have been advertising or using it much (there are way too many encrypted messengers around nowadays anyway), but I just deleted my Wire account after having read about some recent changes to the ownership and privacy policy of that product. I actually liked the UI, but I never managed to build up enough connections to use it regularly (and all of my contacts there are available via other messengers, too). These silent changes were really the tipping point for me to prune this one from my device.
Last weekend, I attended FrOSCon 14 in St. Augustin, Germany. I gave a presentation about “Managing and Monitoring Ceph with the Ceph Dashboard”, where I gave an overview and update about our work on the Ceph Dashboard, including a live demo.
Sadly, my poor little laptop ran out of resources near the end of the demo, so I could not fully conclude my presentation. But I hope the session was still worthwhile!
If you haven’t been able to attend it, I just uploaded the slides and the video recording is also available already. I’d like to say a very big “Thank You” to the video crew that performs the video recordings and post-processing, I was very impressed by how quickly they published them! Enjoy!
For ergonomical reasons, I’ve been a long-time user of Trackballs as pointing devices instead of using regular mice. For several years now, I have been using a Logitech Trackman Marble together with a libinput tweak to use the trackball for scrolling by holding down one of the buttons while spinning the ball.
This worked well until some distributions decided to switch to using Wayland as a replacement for X.org. In the past, I have been reverting back to using X.org (by setting WaylandEnable=True in /etc/gdm/custom.conf), as Wayland does not support the required libinput configurations. I found a workaround that creates a shared library that can be preloaded to implement this, but that looked somewhat hacky to me.
But as Wayland seems to be the way forward and my latest distribution upgrade caused some weird X.org issues (my dual-screen setup did not longer work properly), I caved in and switched to Wayland again. At least all of my screens were properly detected afterwards, but scroll wheel emulation was broken. I did some research if the libinput support in Wayland had improved in that regard in the meanwhile, but it seems it doesn’t.
However, I found a solution for enabling mouse wheel emulation in Wayland/GNOME3 on the Arch Linux Wiki: simply run the following command in a terminal window:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.trackball scroll-wheel-emulation-button 8
Now button 8 (the small button above the left button) acts both as a “back” button (e.g. when browsing web pages) as well as the modifier that turns the trackball into a scroll wheel, just like before. Nifty!
I finally got around to uploading my pictures from this year’s FOSDEM 2019 conference in Brussels, Belgium.
I spent most of my time in the Software-defined Storage DevRoom, where I also spoke about the latest developments in the Ceph Dashboard. I also collected all Ceph-related FOSDEM talks on the Ceph blog.
Enjoy!
I recently added Delta Chat to my ever-growing collection of instant messaging applications. What intrigued me was the simplicity and the use of well-established protocols like IMAP and SMTP – chat messages are sent and stored like email messages, with built-in encryption (based on Autocrypt, which is supported by Enigmail already as well). This allows me to send messages to everyone having an email address, and they don’t actually need to install the DeltaChat client to reply!
The concept of “chat over email” seems to be gaining some traction; from what I have gathered, the Delta Chat implementation may become the reference implementation for the Chat Over IMAP (COI) protocol that the Open-Xchange folks are working on for their own OX Talk application.
As I use mailbox.org as my private email provider, I wanted to make use of a nifty feature they support: email sub-addresses (sometimes also called “plus addresses”), which allows me to append a custom string at the end of the local part, e.g. firstname.lastname+foo@mailbox.org. This makes it possible to have a dedicated email address for chat messages and being able to filter them right into the DeltaChat IMAP folder that the chat client creates.
Setting this up in the Delta Chat Android app is fairly simple. As a plus address cannot be used for the server login, you need to open Delta Chat’s advanced server settings and use the email address without the plus extension as the login name for both the Inbox and Outbox settings.
That’s all you need to do on the client side. In order to enable server-side filtering in mailbox.org, log into their web interface and go to Settings -> Mail -> Filter Rules and click Add new rule. Now create two conditions:
This rule should apply if any condition is met, the action should be to file the message into the “DeltaChat” folder.
Using these settings, incoming chat messages sent from other DeltaChat users will not clutter up your Inbox anymore. In fact, you can disable the monitoring of your Inbox in the Delta Chat app now: Settings -> Advanced -> Watch Inbox folder (disabled)
Spotted at FOSDEM; this is a quite an exhaustive list of conferences and events about free and open source software: https://floss.events/2019/events.html
Here’s another Ceph Manager Dashboard screencast, showcasing how the dashboard displays and reacts to ongoing changes in the Ceph cluster, e.g. when OSDs go down. Enjoy!
I created a short overview screencast of the Ceph Manager Dashboard, to give you an impression of what to expect in the upcoming Nautilus release. Enjoy!