Technology Tales

Halting constant disk activity on a WD My Cloud NAS

Recently, I noticed that the disk in my WD My Cloud NAS was active all the time, so it reminded me of another time when this happened. Then, I needed to activate the SSH service on the device and log in as root with the password welc0me. That default password was changed before doing anything else. Since the device runs on Debian Linux, that was a simple case of using the passwd command and following the prompts. One word of caution is in order since only root can be used for SSH connections to a WD My Cloud NAS and any other user that you set up will not have these privileges.

The cause of all the activity was two services: wdmcserverd and wdphotodbmergerd. One way to halt their actions is to stop the services using these commands:

/etc/init.d/wdmcserverd stop
/etc/init.d/wdphotodbmergerd stop

The above act only works until the next system restart, so these command should make for a more persistent disabling of the culprits:

update-rc.d -f wdmcserverd remove
update-rc.d -f wdphotodbmergerd remove

If all else fails, removing executable privileges from the normally executable files that the services need will work, and it is a solution that I have tried successfully between system updates:

cd /etc/init.d
chmod 644 wdmcserverd
reboot

Between all of these, it should be possible to have you WD My Cloud NAS go into power saving mode as it should, even if turning off additional services such as DLNA may be what some need to do. Having turned off these already, I only needed to disable the photo thumbnail services that were the cause of my machine's troubles.

Improving a website contact form

On another website, I have had a contact form, but it was missing some functionality. For instance, it stored the input in files on a web server instead of emailing them. That was fixed more easily than expected using the PHP mail function. Even so, it remains useful to survey corresponding documentation on the W3Schools website.

The other changes affected the way the form looked to a visitor. There was a reset button, and that was removed on finding that such things are out of favour these days. Thinking again, there hardly was any need for it any way.

Newer additions that came with HTML5 had their place too. Including user hints using the placeholder attribute should add some user-friendliness, although I have avoided experimenting with browser-powered input validation for now. Use of the required attribute has its uses for telling a visitor that they have forgotten something, but I need to check how that is handled in CSS more thoroughly before I go with that since there are new :required, :optional, :valid and :invalid pseudoclasses that can be used to help.

It appears that there is much more to learn about setting up forms since I last checked. This is perhaps a hint that a few books need reading as part of catching with how things are done these days. There also is something new to learn.

Installing Firefox Developer Edition in Linux Mint

Having moved beyond the slow response and larger memory footprint of Firefox ESR, I am using Firefox Developer Edition in its place, even if it means living without a status bar at the bottom of the window. Hopefully, someone will create an equivalent of the old add-on bar extensions that worked before the release of Firefox Quantum.

Firefox Developer Edition may be pre-release software with some extras for web developers like being able to drill into an HTML element and see its properties, but I am finding it stable enough for everyday use. It is speedy too, which helps, and it has its own profile so it can co-exist on the same machine as regular releases of Firefox like its ESR and Quantum variants.

Installation takes a little added effort though and there are various options available. My chosen method involved Ubuntu Make. Installing this involves setting up a new PPA as the first step and the following commands added the software to my system:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-desktop/ubuntu-make
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-make

With the above completed, it was simple to install Firefox Developer edition using the following command:

umake web firefox-dev

Where things got a bit more complicated was getting entries added to the Cinnamon Menu and Docky. While the former was sorted using the cinnamon-menu-editor command, the latter needed some tinkering with my firefox-developer.desktop file found in .local/share/applications/ within my user area to get the right icon shown. Discovering this took me into .gconf/apps/docky-2/Docky/Interface/DockPreferences/%gconf.xml where I found the location of the firefox-developer.desktop that needed changing. Once this was completed, there was nothing else to do from the operating system side.

Within Firefox itself, I opted to turn off warnings about password logins on non-HTTPS websites by going to about:config using the address bar, then looking for security.insecure_field_warning.contextual.enabled and changing its value from True to False. While some may decry this, there are some local websites on my machine that need attention at times. Otherwise, Firefox is installed with user access so I can update it as if it were a Windows or macOS application, and that is useful given that there are frequent new releases. All is going as I want it so far.

Keyboard shortcut for Euro currency symbol on Windows 10

Because I now have business dealings in Ireland, there is a need to add in the Euro currency symbol to emails even though I based in the U.K. and use U.K. keyboard settings. While there is the possibility to insert the symbol in Microsoft Office and other applications, using a simple keyboard shortcut is more efficient since it avoids multiple mouse clicks. For some reason, CTRL + SHIFT + E got into my head as the key combination, but that turns on the Track Changes facility in Word. Instead, CTRL + ALT + 4 does the needful and that is what I will be keeping in mind for future usage.

Killing a hanging SSH session

My web hosting provider offers SSH access that I often use for such things as updating Matomo and Drupal, together with more intensive file moving than an FTP session can support. However, I have found recently that I no longer can exit cleanly from such sessions using the exit command.

Because this produces a locked terminal session, I was keen to find an alternative to shutting down the terminal application before starting it again. Handily, there is a keyboard shortcut that does just what I need.

It varies a little according to the keyboard that you have. Essentially, it combines the carriage return key with ones for the tilde (~) and period (.) characters. The tilde may need to be produced by the combining the shift and backtick keys on some keyboard layouts, but that is not needed on mine. So far, I have found that the <CR>+~+. combination does what I need until SSH sessions start exiting as expected.

Upgrading avahi-dnsconfd on Ubuntu

This is how I got around a problem that occurred when I was updating a virtualised Ubuntu 16.04 instance that I have. My usual way to do this is using apt-get or apt from the command line and the process halted because a pre-removal script for the upgrade of avahi-dnsconf failed. The cause was its failure to disable the avahi daemon beforehand, so I needed to execute the following command before repeating the operation:

sudo systemctl disable avahi-daemon

Once the upgrade had completed, then it was time to re-enable the service using the following command:

sudo systemctl enable avahi-daemon

Ideally, this would be completed without such manual intervention. As it happens, there is a bug report for the unexpected behaviour. Hopefully, it will be sorted soon, but these steps will fix things for now.

Evolving a photo editing workflow to make more use of Adobe Lightroom than before

Photo editing has been something that I have been doing since my first-ever photo scan in 1998 (I believe it was in June of that year but cannot be completely sure nearly twenty years later). Since then, I have been using various tools for the job and wondered how other photos can look better than my own. What cannot be excluded is my preference for being active in the middle of the day when light is at its bluest, as well as a penchant for using a higher ISO of 400. In other words, what I do when making photos affects how they look afterwards as much as the weather that I had encountered.

My reason for mentioning the above aspects of photographic craft is that they affect what you can do in photo editing afterwards, even with the benefits of technological advancement. My tastes have changed over time, so the appeal of re-editing old photos fades when you realise that you only are going around in circles and there always are new ones to share, so that may be a better way to improve.

When I started, I was a user of Paint Shop Pro but have gone over to Adobe since then. First, it was Photoshop Elements, but an offer in 2011 lured me into having Lightroom and the full version of Photoshop. Nowadays, I am a Creative Cloud photography plan subscriber, so I get to see new developments much sooner than once was the case.

Even though I have had Lightroom for all that time, I never really made full use of it and preferred a Photoshop-based workflow. Lightroom was used to select photos for Photoshop editing, mainly using adjustments for such things as tones, exposure, levels, hue and saturation. Removal of dust spots, resizing and sharpening were other parts of a still minimalist approach.

What changed all this was a day spent pottering about the 2018 Photography Show at the Birmingham NEC during a cold snap in March. That was followed by my checking out the Adobe YouTube Channel afterwards, where there were videos of the talks featured every day of the four-day event. Here are some shortcuts if you want to do some catching up yourself: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4. Be warned though that these videos are long in that they feature the whole day and there are enough gaps that you may wish to fast-forward through them. Even so, there is quite a bit of variety of things to see.

Of particular interest were the talks given by the landscape photographer David Noton who sensibly has a philosophy of doing as little to his images as possible. It helps that his starting points are so good that adjusting black and white points with a little tonal adjustment does most of what he needs. Vibrancy, clarity and sharpening adjustments are kept to a minimum, while some work with graduated filters evens out exposure differences between skies and landscapes. It helps that all this can be done in Lightroom, so that set me thinking about trying it out for size, and the trick of using the backslash (\) key to switch between raw and processed views is a bonus granted by non-destructive editing. Others may have demonstrated the creation of composite imagery, but simplicity is more like my way of working.

It is confusing that we now have cloud-based Lightroom CC, while the previous desktop version is called Lightroom Classic CC. Although the former offers easy dust spot removal and other features, I prefer the latter because I do not want to upload my entire image library, and I already use Google Drive and Dropbox for off-site backup. The mobile app is interesting since it allows capturing images on mobile devices in Adobe's raw DNG format. My workflow is now more Lightroom-based than before, and I appreciate the new technology, especially as Adobe develops its Sensai artificial intelligence engine. Because Adobe has access to numerous images through Lightroom CC and Adobe Stock (formerly Fotolia), it has abundant data to train this AI system.

Making pages of new documents look right in LibreOffice Writer on wide screens

My recent move from Linux Mint 17.3 to Linux Mint 18.1 brought with it version 5.3.0.3 of LibreOffice. What that brought was an oddity where the default blank document in a fresh LibreOffice Writer session had its only page displayed to the right within the application window. To me, this looks like a bug, even if I have a 24" computer screen.

After searching, I found a solution that displays a single page in the centre of the application window instead of offset to the right. First, go to the View menu and select Zoom. In the sub-menu, click on 'Zoom...' to open a dialogue box. This has two columns. Under View Layout, the Columns setting was highlighted with 2 columns selected. Choose Single Page instead and click OK to dismiss the dialogue. The Automatic option also works. I cannot understand why such an odd default was selected.

Carrying out a hard reset of a home KVM switch

During a recent upgrade from Linux Mint 18 to Linux Mint 18.1 on a secondary machine, I ran into bother with my Startech KVM (keyboard, video, mouse and audio sharing) switch. The PC failed to recognise the attachment of my keyboard and mouse, so an internet search began.

Nothing promising came from it apart from resetting the KVM switch. In other words, the solution was to turn it off and back on again. That was something that I did try unsuccessfully. What I had overlooked was that there were USB connections to PC's that fed the device with a certain amount of power which was enough to keep it on.

Unplugging those USB cables as well as the power cable was needed to completely switch off the device. That provided the reset that I needed, and all was well again. Otherwise, I would have been baffled enough to resort to buying a replacement KVM switch, so the extra information avoided a purchase that could have cost in the region of £100. In other words, a little research had saved me money.

Trying out a new way to upgrade Linux Mint in situ while going from 17.3 to 18.1

There was a time when the only recommended way to upgrade Linux Mint from one version to another was to do a fresh installation with back-ups of data and a list of the installed applications created from a special tool.

Even so, it never stopped me doing my own style of in situ upgrade, though some might see that as a risky option. More often than not, that actually worked without causing major problems in a time when Linux Mint releases were more tightly tied to Ubuntu's own six-monthly cycle.

Linux Mint releases now align with Ubuntu's Long Term Support (LTS) editions. This means major changes occur only every two years, with minor releases in between. These minor updates are delivered through Linux Mint's Update Manager, making the process simple. Upgrades are not forced, so you can decide when to upgrade, as all main and interim versions receive the same extended support. The recommendation is to avoid upgrading unless something is broken on your installation.

For a number of reasons, I stuck with that advice by sticking on my main machine with Linux Mint 17.3 instead of upgrading to Linux Mint 18. The fact that I broke things on another machine using an older method of upgrading provided even more encouragement.

However, I subsequently discovered another means of upgrading between major versions of Linux Mint that had some endorsement from the project. There still are warnings about testing a live DVD version of Linux Mint on your PC first and backing up your data beforehand. Another task is ensuring that you are upgraded from a fully up-to-date Linux Mint 17.3 installation.

When you are ready, you can install mintupgrade using the following command:

sudo apt-get install mintupgrade

When that is installed, there is a sequence of tasks that you need to do. The first of these is to simulate an upgrade to test for the appearance of untoward messages and resolve them. Repeating any checking, until all is well, gets a recommendation. The command is as follows:

mintupgrade check

Once you are happy that the system is ready, the next step is to download the updated packages so they are on your machine ahead of their installation. Only then should you begin the upgrade process. The two commands that you need to execute are below:

mintupgrade download
mintupgrade upgrade

After these complete, restart your system. In my case, the process worked well, with only my PHP installation requiring attention. I resolved a clash between different versions of the scripting interpreter by removing the older one, as PHP 7 is best kept for testing. Apart from reinstalling VMware Player and upgrading from version 18 to 18.1, I had almost nothing else to do and experienced minimal disruption. This is fortunate as I rely heavily on my main PC. The alternative of a full installation would have left me sorting things out for several days afterwards because I use a customised selection of software.