Danny's Space

GIMP is the image manipulation tool of choice in the Linux world. I took some photos of myself using cheese. Cheese is the camera app on my desktop. I took 4 and do move or change pose or position for this to work. Then open the first image in GIMP by starting GIMP then Cntrl-O, select the first image. Then type Cntrl-Alt-O, select the second image. This will create a second layer with the second image on it. Do this for the rest of the images. You can view the animation with Alt-R (filter) then choose Animation (I), then Play(P). You can adjust the fps and the speed of play. Save your work by going to File>Export then choose Animation in the next window. Cheese took the original photos in 640x380 px. I prefer the gif image smaller so I had to use the Tool Transform tool and the Crop Tool in GIMP to adjust the images to my liking. The gif is running in 30 fps.

Major updates are available for Archlinux users. Updates include Libreoffice, Gnucash, Calibre and Scribus. Almost all the productivity apps I use. qt5 libraries and webkit2gtk are included in these patches too. A download of just under 400 MB with the usual pacman command.

Archlinux repos released firefox 63 today. This version of the browser offers improved protection against ad trackers. The ones that follow you from site to site are specially annoying.

I started subscribing to a Virtual Private Network (VPN) recently. I took a premium service, which means they take your money, at PrivateVPN . I want a secure and anonymous service provider and also linux friendly. It should also include my android phone in the umbrella of devices to be protected. PrivateVPN Initially, there's a glitch. It won't let me connect to their servers. I'm using openvpn on my archlinux gnome desktop. I checked if I got all the required installation and configuration done. PrivateVPN on their website mentioned support for openvpn and linux. So I went to my logs next. The logs are mentioning error in authentication so I checked if I'm using the right credentials. After another try at connecting to their server, my logs now mention an authentication failure. I included this in my report to their support. After 24 hours, an email prompted me to try a test password. This test password connected me to the service. There is a speed hit when using a VP...

Gnome 3.30 has been in Testing repo for 4 days now. I've been checking back in Archlinux.org/Packages ever since. I am in the regular repos so I have been waiting for this. Included in this upgrade is linux kernel 4.18.8 so it's going to be a wild ride today. $ sudo pacman -Syu [sudo] password for:  :: Synchronizing package databases...  core                                      134.3 KiB   391K/s 00:00 [#####################################] 100%  extra                                    1637.4 KiB   141K/s 00:12 [#####################################] 100%  community...

This is the second time the SIM cards failed to show up on my Asus phone. I thought at first that the problem is a mechanical one but I've tried to reposition the nano sims in the tray to no avail. If it's not mechanical, it must be software. I did add a lot of my old apps and what have you from my old phone to this phone without checking for compatibility. I might be paying for that mistake now. I don't have a choice but to reset to factory specs. After restarting, my main sim card picked up the wifi and the network data connection. So my hunch was right, it is software collision. I reposition my secondary sim and it also picked up the network signal. I'm a happy camper now. My asus zenfone has a backup. I can just pick the most crucial apps from before, and install one at a time.

Do you want to get message notifications from your smartphone to your desktop? Do you want to control your music player in the desktop while away from it and you have your smartphone in hand? andyholmes contributions to this github code is what I have been looking for since getting my new android device. Hello to the wonderful world of open source and thank you to the developers who worked on this.  The link above is a list of questions frequently asked about GS connect. My device is an Asus Zenfone 5 with android 8.0. My computer uses linux kernel 4.18.5 on Arch linux. I have Gnome 3.28 as my desktop environment.  I found out about GS connect during a search about a totally different thing. But the first thing you should ask yourself is if you really want to connect your android device to your desktop or laptop. If the answer is yes, then you should download and install the gnome-shell-extension for G S connect. You have to enable the plugins for each feature you want...