Technology Tales

Adding a Start Menu to Windows 8

For all the world, it looks like Microsoft has mined a concept from a not often recalled series of Windows: 3.x. Then, we had a Program Manager for starting all our applications with no sign of a Start Menu. That came with Windows 95 and I cannot anyone mourning the burying of the Program Manager interface either. It was there in Windows 95 if you knew where to look and I do remember starting an instance, possibly out of curiosity.

Every Windows user seems to have taken to the Start Menu regardless of how big they grow when you install a lot of software on your machine. It didn’t matter that Windows NT got it later than Windows 9x ones either; NT 3.51 has the Program Manager too and it was NT 4 that got the then new interface that has been developed and progressed in no less than four subsequent versions of Windows (2000, XP, Vista & 7). Maybe it was because computing was the preserve of fewer folk that the interchange brought little if any sign of a backlash. The zeitgeist of the age reflected the newness of desktop computing and its freshness probably brought an extra level of openness too.

Things are different now, though. You only have to hear of the complaints about changes to Linux desktop environments to realise how attached folk become to certain computer interfaces. Ironically, personal computing has just got exciting again after a fairly stale decade of stasis. Mobile computing devices are aplenty and it no longer is a matter of using a stationary desktop PC or laptop and those brought their own excitement in the 1990’s. In fact, reading a title like Computer Shopper reminds me of how things once were with its still sticking with PC reviews while others are not concentrating on them as much. Of course, the other gadgets get reviewed too so it is not stuck in any rut. Still, it is good to see the desktop PC getting a look in in an age when there is so much competition, especially from phones and tablets.

In this maelstrom, Microsoft has decided to do something dramatic with Windows 8. It has resurrected the Program Manager paradigm in the form of the Start screen and excised the Start Menu from the desktop altogether. For touch screen computing interfaces such as tablets, you can see the sense of this but it’s going to come as a major surprise to many. Removing what lies behind how many people interact with a PC is risky and you have to wonder how it’s going to work out for all concerned.

What reminded me of this was a piece on CNET by Mary Jo Foley. Interestingly, software is turning up that returns the Start Menu (or Button) to Windows 8. One of these is Classic Shell and I decided to give it a go on a Windows 8 Enterprise evaluation instance that I have. Installation is like any Windows program and I limited the options to the menu and updater. At the end of the operation, a button with a shell icon appeared on the desktop’s taskbar. You can make the resultant menu appear like that of Windows XP or Windows 7 if you want. There are other settings like what the Windows key does and what happens when you click on the button with a mouse. By default, both open the new Start Menu and holding down the Shift key when doing either brings up the Start screen. This is customisable so you can have things the other way around if you so desire. Another setting is to switch from the Start screen to the desktop after you log into Windows 8 (you may also have it log in for you automatically but it’s something that I believe anyone should be doing). The Start screen does flash up but things move along quickly; maybe having not appear at all would be better for many.

Classic Shell is free of charge and worked well for me apart from that small rough edge noted above. It also is open source and looks well maintained too. For that reason, it appeals to me more that Stardock’s Start8 (currently in beta release at the time of writing) or Pokki for Windows 8, which really is an App Store that adds a Start Menu. If you encounter Windows 8 on a new computer, then they might be worth trying should you want a Start Menu back. Being an open-minded type, I could get along with the standard Windows 8 interface but it’s always good to have choices too. Most of us want to own our computing experience, it seems, so these tools could have their uses for Windows 8 users.

Relocating the Apache web server document root directory in Fedora 12

So as not to deface anything that is available online on the web, I have a tendency to set up an offline Apache server on a home PC to do any tinkering away from the eyes of the unsuspecting public. Though Ubuntu is my mainstay for home computing, I do have a PC with Fedora installed and I have been trying to get an Apache instance starting automatically on there without success for a few months. While I can start it by running the following command as root, I’d rather not have more manual steps than is necessary.

httpd -k start

The command used by the system when it starts is different and, even when manually run as root, it failed with messages saying that it couldn’t find the directory while the web server files are stored. Here it is:

service httpd start

The default document root location on any Linux distribution that I have seen is /var/www and all is very well with this but it isn’t a safe place to leave things if ever a re-installation is needed. Having needed to wipe /var after having it on a separate disk or partition for the sake of one installation, it doesn’t look so persistent to me. In contrast, you can safeguard /home by having it on another disk or in a dedicated partition and it can be retained even when you change the distro that you’re using. Thus, I have got into the habit of having the root of the web server document root folder in my home area and that is where I have been seeing the problem.

Because of the access message, I tried using chmod and chgrp but to no avail. The remedy has to do with reassigning the security contexts used by SELinux. In Fedora, Apache will not work with the context user_home_t that is usually associated with home directories but needs httpd_sys_content_t instead. To find out what contexts are associated with particular folders, issue the following command:

ls -Z

The final solution was to create a user account whose home directory hosts the root of the web server file system, called www in my case. Then, I executed the following command as root to get things going:

chcon -R -h -t httpd_sys_content_t /home/www

It seems that even the root of the home directory has to have an appropriate security context (/home has home_root_t so that might do the needful too). Without that, nothing will work even if all is well at the next level down. The switches for chcon command translate as follows:

-R : recursive; applies changes to all files and folders within a directory.

-h : changes apply only to symbolic links and not to where they refer in the file system.

-t : alters context type.

It took a while for all of this stuff about SELinux security contexts to percolate through to the point where I was able to solve the problem. A spot of further inspiration was needed too and even guided my search for the information that I needed. It’s well worth trying Linux Home Networking if you need more information. There are references to an earlier release of Fedora but the content still applies to later versions of Fedora right up to the current release if my experience is typical.

Adobe CS3 Launch

A Look at a Compact System Camera

During August, I acquired an Olympus Pen E-PL5 and it is an item to which I still am becoming accustomed and it looks as if that is set to continue. The main reason that it appealed to me was the idea of having a camera with much of the functionality of an SLR but with many of the dimensions of a compact camera. In that way, it was a step up from my Canon PowerShot G11 without carrying around something that was too bulky.

Before I settled on the E-PL5, I had been looking at Canon’s EOS M and got to hear about its sluggish autofocus. That it had no mode dial on its top plate was another consideration though it does pack in an APS-C sized sensor (with Canon’s tendency to overexpose finding a little favour with me too on inspection of images from an well aged Canon EOS 10D) at a not so unappealing price of around £399. A sighting of a group of it and similar cameras in Practical Photography was enough to land that particular issue into my possession and they liked the similarly priced Olympus Pen E-PM2 more than the Canon. Though it was a Panasonic that won top honours in that test, I was intrigued enough by the Olympus option that I had a further look. Unlike the E-PM2 and the EOS M, the E-PL5 does have a mode dial on its top plate and an extra grip so that got my vote even it meant paying a little extra for it. There was a time when Olympus Pen models attracted my attention before now due to sale prices but this investment goes beyond that opportunism.

The E-PL5 comes in three colours: black, silver and white. Though I have a tendency to go for black when buying cameras, it was the silver option that took my fancy this time around for the sake of a spot of variety. The body itself is a very compact affair so it is the lens that takes up the most of the bulk. The standard 14-42 mm zoom ensures that this is not a camera for a shirt pocket and I got a black Lowepro Apex 100 AW case for it; the case fits snugly around the camera, so much so that I was left wondering if I should have gone for a bigger one but it’s been working out fine anyway. The other accessory that I added was a 37 mm Hoya HMC UV filter so that the lens doesn’t get too knocked about while I have the camera with me on an outing of one sort or another, especially when its plastic construction protrudes a lot further than I was expecting and doesn’t retract fully into its housing like some Sigma lenses that I use.

When I first gave the camera a test run, I had to work out how best to hold it. After all, the powered zoom and autofocus on my Canon PowerShot G11 made that camera more intuitive to hold and it has been similar for any SLR that I have used. Having to work a zoom lens while holding a dinky body was fiddly at first until I worked out how to use my right thumb to keep the body steady (the thumb grip on the back of the camera is curved to hold a thumb in a vertical position) while the left hand adjusted the lens freely. Having an electronic viewfinder instead of using the screen would have made life a little easier but they are not cheap and I already had spent enough money.

The next task after working out how to hold the camera was to acclimatise myself to the exposure characteristics of the camera. In my experience so far, it appears to err on the side of overexposure. Because I had set it to store images as raw (ORF) files, this could be sorted later but I prefer to have a greater sense of control while at the photo capture stage. Until now, I have not found a spot or partial metering button like what I would have on an SLR or my G11. That has meant either using exposure compensation to go along with my preferred choice of aperture priority mode or go with fully manual exposure. Other modes are available and they should be familiar to any SLR user (shutter priority, program, automatic, etc.). Currently, I am using bracketing while finding my feet after setting the ISO setting to 400, increasing the brightness of the screen and adding histograms to the playback views. With my hold on the camera growing more secure, using the dial to change exposure settings such as aperture (f/16 remains a favourite of mine in spite what others may think given the size of a micro four thirds sensor) and compensation while keeping the scene exactly the same to test out what the response to any changes might be.

While I still am finding my feet, I am seeing some pleasing results so far that encourage me to keep going; some remind me of my Pentax K10D. The E-PL5 certainly is slower to use than the G11 but that often can be a good thing when it comes to photography. That it forces a little relaxation in this often hectic world is another advantage. The G11 is having a quieter time at the moment and any episodes of sunshine offer useful opportunities for further experimentation and acclimatisation too. So far, my entry in the world of compact system cameras has revealed them to be of a very different form to those of compact fixed lens cameras or SLR’s. Neither truly get replaced and another type of camera has emerged.

Buying OEM Vista?

A few days ago, I mused over buying OEM Vista if/when the time came for me to do upgrade. Then, I came to the conclusion that OEM was a no-no unless you bought it installed on a system. In an article on the PC Magazine website, things seem not to be as cut and dried as that. Apparently, the perceived wisdom is that if you are building a system for yourself and you agree to provide all support as the system builder to yourself as the system user, then everything is OK under the licence. Also, there seems to be a trend among resellers that it is not them who are subject to the terms of the licence but the customers who purchase the OEM software. It is all just a little bit confusing. Draw your own conclusions…

A bigger screen?

A recent bit of thinking has caused me to cast my mind back over all the screens that have sat in front of me while working with computers over the years. Well, things have come a long way from the spare television that I used with a Commodore 64 that I occasionally got to exploring the thing. Needless to say, a variety of dedicated CRT screens ensued as I started to make use of Apple and IBM compatible PC’s provided in computing labs and other such places before I bought an example of the latter as my first ever PC of my own. That sported a 15″ display that stood out a little in times when 14″ ones were mainstream but a 17″ Iiyama followed it when its operational quality deteriorated. That Iiyama came south with me from Edinburgh as I moved to where the work was and offered sterling service before it too started to succumb to aging.

During the time that the Iiyama CRT screen was my mainstay at home, there were changes afoot in the world of computer displays. A weighty 21″ Philips screen was what greeted me on a first day at work but 21″ Eizo LCD displays were set to replace those behemoths and remain in use as if to prove the longevity of LCD panels and the validity of using what had been sufficient for laptops for a decade or so. In fact, the same comment regarding reliability applies to the screen that now is what I use at home, a 17″ Iiyama LCD panel (yes, I stuck with the same brand when I changed technologies longer ago than I like to remember).

However, that hasn’t stopped me wondering about my display needs and it’s screen size that is making me think rather than the reliability of the current panel. That is a reflection on how my home computing needs have changed over time and they show how my non-computing interests have evolved too. Photography is but one of these and the move the digital capture has brought with a greater deal of image processing, so much that I wonder if I need to make less photos rather than bringing home so many that it can be hard to pick out the ones that are deserving of a wider viewing. That is but one area where a bigger screen would help but there is another and it arises from my interest in exploring countryside on foot or on my bike: digital mapping. When planning outings, it would be nice to have a wider field of view to be able to see more at a larger scale.

None of the above is a showstopper that would be the case if the screen itself was unreliable so I am going to take my time on this one. The prospect of sharing desktops across two screens is another idea but that needs some thought about where it all would fit; the room that I have set aside for working at my computer isn’t the largest but it’ll need to do. After the space side of things, then there’s the matter of setting up the hardware. Quite how a dual display is going to work with a KVM setup is something to explore as is the adding of extra video cards to existing machines. After the hardware fiddling, the software side of things is not a concern that I have because of when I used laptop as my main machine for a while last year. That confirmed that Windows (Vista but it has been possible since 2000 anyway…) and Ubuntu (other modern Linux distributions should work too…) can cope with desktop sharing out of the box.

Apart from the nice thoughts of having more desktop space, the other tempting side to all of this is what you can get for not much outlay. It isn’t impossible to get a 22″ display for less than £200 and the prices for 24″ ones are tempting too. That’s a far cry from paying next to £300 (if my memory serves me correctly) for that 17″ Iiyama and I’d hope that the quality is as good as ever.

It’s all very well talking about pricing but you need to sit down and choose a make and model when you get to deciding on a purchase. There is plenty of choice so that would take a while but magazine reviews will come in handy here. Saying that, last year’s computing misadventures have me questioning the sense of going for what a magazine places on its A-list. They also have me minded to go to a nearby computer shop to make a purchase rather than choosing a supplier on the web; it is easier to take back a faulty unit if you don’t have far to go. Speaking of faulty units, last year has left me contemplating waiting until the year is older before making any acquisitions of computer kit. All of that has put the idea of buying a new screen on the low priority list, nice to have but not essential. For now, that is where it stays but you never know what the attractions of a shiny new thing can do…

A waiting game

Having been away every weekend in July, I was looking forward to a quiet one at home to start August. However, there was a problem with one of my websites hosted by Fasthosts that was set to occupy me for the weekend and a few weekday evenings afterwards.

The issue appeared to be slow site response so I followed advice given to me by second line support when this website displayed the same type of behaviour: upgrade from Apache 1.3 to 2.2 using the control panel. Unfortunately for me, that didn’t work smoothly at all and there seemed to be serious file loss as a result. Raising a ticket with the support desk only got me the answer that I had to wait for completion and I now have come to the conclusion that the migration process may have got stuck somewhere along the way. Maybe another ticket is in order.

There were a number of causes of the waiting that gave rise to the title of this post. Firstly, support for low costing isn’t exactly timely and I do wonder if it’s any better for more prominent websites. Restoration of websites by FTP is another activity that takes up plenty of time as does rebuilding databases and populating them with data. Lastly, there’s changing the DNS details for a website. In hindsight, there may be ways of reducing the time demands of these. For instance, contacting a support team by telephone may be quicker unless there is a massive queue awaiting attention and there was a wait of several hours one night when a security changeover affected a multitude of Fasthosts users. Of course, it is not a panacea at the best of times as we have known since all those stories began to do the rounds in the middle of the 1990’s. Doing regular backups would help the second though the ones that I was using for the restoration weren’t too bad at all. Nevertheless, they weren’t complete so there was unfinished business that required resolution later. The last of these is helped along by more regular PC restarts so that unexpected discovery will remain a lesson for the future though I don’t plan on moving websites around for a while. After all, getting DNS details propagated more quickly really is a big help.

While awaiting a response from Fasthosts, I began to ponder the idea of using an alternative provider. Perusal of the latest digital edition of .Net (I now subscribe to the non-paper edition so as to cut down on the clutter caused by having paper copies about the place) ensued before I decided to investigate the option of using Webfusion. Having decided to stick with shared hosting, I gave their Unlimited Linux option a go. For someone accustomed to monthly billing, it was unusual to see annual biannual and triannual payment schemes too. The first of these appears to be the default option so a little care and attention is needed if you want something else. In order to encourage you to stay with Webfusion longer, the per month is on sliding scale: the longer the period you buy, the lower the cost of a month’s hosting.

Once the account was set up, I added a database and set to the long process of uploading files from my local development site using FileZilla. Having got a MySQL backup from the Fasthosts site, I used the provided PHPMyAdmin interface to upload the data in pieces not exceeding the 8 MB file size limitation. It isn’t possible to connect remotely to the MySQL server using the likes of MySQL Administrator so I bear with this not so smooth process. SSH is another connection option that isn’t available but I never use it much on Fasthosts sites anyway. There were some questions to the support people along and the first of these got a timely answer though later ones took longer before I got an answer. Still, getting advice on the address of the test website was a big help while I was sorting out the DNS changeover.

Speaking of the latter, it took a little doing and not little poking around Webfusion’s FAQ’s before I made it happen. First, I tried using name servers that I found listed in one of the articles but this didn’t seem to achieve the end that I needed. Mind you, I would have seen the effects of this change a little earlier if I had rebooted my PC earlier than I did than I did but it didn’t occur to me at the time. In the end, I switched to using my domain provider’s name servers and added the required information to them to get things going. It was then that my website was back online in some fashion so I could any outstanding loose ends.

With the site essentially operating again, it was time to iron out the rough edges. The biggest of these was that MOD_REWRITE doesn’t seem to work the same on the Webfusion server like it does on the Fasthosts ones. This meant that I needed to use the SCRIPT_URI CGI variable instead of PATH_INFO in order to keep using clean URL’s for a PHP-powered photo gallery that I have. It took me a while to figure that out and I felt much better when I managed to get the results that I needed. However, I also took the chance to tidy up site addresses with redirections in my .htaccess file in an attempt to ensure that I lost no regular readers, something that I seem to have achieved with some success because one such visitor later commented on a new entry in the outdoors blog.

Once any remaining missing images were instated or references to them removed, it was then time to do a full backup for sake of safety. The first of these activities was yet another consumer while the second didn’t take so long and I need to do this more often in case anything happens. Hopefully though, the relocated site’s performance continues to be as solid as it is now.

The question as to what to do with the Fasthosts webspace remains outstanding. Currently, they are offering free upgrades to existing hosting packages so long as you commit for a year. After my recent experience, I cannot say that I’m so sure about doing that kind of thing. In fact, the observation leaves me wondering if instating that very extension was the cause of breaking my site. In fact, it appears that the migration from Apache 1.3 to 2.2 seems to have got stuck for whatever reason. Maybe another ticket should be raised but I am not decided on that yet. All in all, what happened to that Fasthosts website wasn’t the greatest of experiences but the service offered by Webfusion is rock solid thus far. While wondering if the service from Fasthosts wasn’t as good as it once was, I’ll keep an open mind and wait to see if my impressions change over time.

Assorted Desktop Packages

Here is some desktop software that is either commonplace in the world of Linux or needs a bit more publicity, at least in my opinion. The list is sorted alphabetically, in case you are left wondering at its first entry. As with everything in this place, it may grow or contract, but change certainly is a feature of the world of Linux anyway. That’s never a bad thing, even if it upsets some from time to time.

Calligra

This suite comes from the KDE project and includes office and graphical software. The latter includes Krita, which is described separately below, so this is an interesting collection of software.

Choqok

Linux does have a choice of Twitter/X clients and this is one of them. It’s a KDE application that also supports Pump.IO, GNU Social and Friendica instances. There are others on the support list too, though Mastodon is a surprising absence given the recent furore surrounding Twitter/X.

Darktable

The name is a play on that of Adobe’s Lightroom, and that gives you an idea of what it is about. This too allows non-destructive editing of images with the added information being kept in associated files with XMP extensions, one for each image. What the software does not have though is an image management interface like that of Lightroom or digiKam.

digiKam

This is more than an organiser, and may be the KDE project’s counterpart to Adobe’s closed source Lightroom. Its photo organising doesn’t mean automated folder creation from EXIF information like F-Spot, Shotwell or Rapid Photo Downloader. It is for that reason that I combine digiKam with the last entry on the preceding list, since I jumped ship from Shotwell. The image processing part of the application is something that I have to explore.

Eclipse

Other IDE’s have taken over me these days, but this had a use for editing PHP scripts once upon a time. It is better known for what it offers Java developers, though.

Emacs

A long-standing UNIX/Linux text editor that has been doing battle with Vi for longer than many can remember. Like the alternative, it has keyboard shortcuts that do anything but make concessions to Windows conventions, add needless steepening of any learning curve unless you find the appropriate option (CUA) that allows for some emulation of mainstream keyboard shortcuts. Nevertheless, there also is a GUI variant that makes life easier, and I have to concede that it has a history that is longer than even Microsoft itself. As if that weren’t enough compensation, it is a powerful piece of software whose functionality goes much further than text editing, whose surface I have only barely begun to scratch. The logic of the interface may differ from that to which many are accustomed, but it is consistent and well-thought-out nonetheless.

F-Spot

For a while, this was my photo organiser of choice, but it has not seen a new release since December 2010. Maybe that’s because it works well enough as it is, yet you cannot help thinking that a project with no new releases is a dead one, even if that sometime reflects how right they got things at the time.

FileZilla

Before my quest for added automation took over, this was my FTP client of choice, and its advent has made the need to buy such software extinct. That it works on both Windows and Linux is a bonus.

GIMP

The ubiquitous Photoshop challenger is maturing nicely, though its interface may not please some.

GraphicsMagick

This is very like ImageMagick (see below) with its main selling point being that it’s faster than its parent for the purpose of command line image editing; my own testing seems to support this so far. The commands that you use are similar to ImageMagick too, apart mainly from adding the gm command before the likes of convert and others. Speaking of convert, the GraphicsMagick version has yet to support the -annotate switch, so -draw needs to be used in its place.

ImageMagick

Using a command line tool for image processing may seem counter-intuitive, but there are operations where you need not have much user intervention. Included among these is image resizing and conversion between file formats, and yours truly has done both. Processing many files at a stroke comes naturally to this very useful and talented piece of software, too.

KODI

Software media centres lie largely beyond my purview, but this seems to be one of the better known of the breed. It overlays the desktop when it is running and caters for consumption of music, movies, TV, photo slideshows and games. Controversially, there even is PVR capability for recording live broadcasts as well.

Krita

For those with a more artistic bent, this is a digital drawing and illustration package that will work not only on Linux but also on Windows or OS X. The results can be striking, so it looks as if your talent may be the only limitation with this tool.

LibreOffice

Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems meant that some feathers were ruffled in the open-source and free software community, and one example of a change coming from this is the forking of OpenOffice. It is that act that has brought LibreOffice into being, and it then gained so much ground that it eclipsed its parent.

LibreWolf

Mozilla may promote their wares as bing privacy-friendly, yet others are not sure, so Firefox has been forked to give LibreWolf. This removes telemetry, adds a content blocker along with other enhancements.

Mozilla Firefox

There’s no way that I could not include what once was the de facto standard web browser for Linux, though there’s competition from Chrome/Chromium now too. There is also a mobile version for phones running the Android OS.

Mozilla SeaMonkey

The original Mozilla suite still lives on, and this is what it’s called nowadays.

Mozilla Thunderbird

This has replaced Evolution on Linux systems that I use, and it comes close to eclipsing Microsoft Outlook everywhere else, too.

MythTV

The main function of this piece of software is to record broadcast TV, hence that part of the name. It also has media playback capability, and that is what makes it more of a media centre than the digital video recording functionality may suggest.

NEdit

UNIX/Linux offers plenty of text editors, so here’s another of the less well-known ones that I have encountered. Syntax highlighting is part of the offer and some menu customisation is possible too. In essence, it is a straightforward text editor that works with Windows keyboard shortcuts, but that can be no bad thing.

NetBeans

You cannot feature Eclipse in a software listing without having NetBeans too. In fact, it was NetBeans that I first encountered, and that was many moons ago. There is a PHP variant available, but that seemed very sluggish when I tried it and turned back to Eclipse, with which I have stuck ever since. That poor performance may have been caused by the variant of Java that was available to it, so I may give it another ago when I have the time.

OBS Studio

Here, OBS stands for Open Broadcaster Software, and that somewhat says what it does. In essence, we are talking about video recording and live-streaming. With the increasing pervasiveness of video like what once was the case with photography, it is easy to see the use case for this kind of software.

OpenOffice.org

Is this the office suite of choice for Linux? It certainly felt that way before Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and upset a few open-source developers. Now, the appearance of LibreOffice is going to make things look a little more interesting.

PlayOnLinux

This is a far more user-friendly way to run Windows software on Linux, using the WINE libraries in the background. The name seems to originate from game playing, though web browsers like Internet Explorer and Safari are available too, along with a selection of other software. For the adventurous, there also is the possibility of installing something you have yourself.

Privoxy

Here’s the description from the website:

Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data and HTTP headers, controlling access, and removing ads and other obnoxious Internet junk.

It’s available for a number of platforms, including Linux and UNIX, and offers a way of blocking ads in Google Chrome, which is how I got to hear about it. Ubuntu users can snag a copy from the usual repositories too.

Configuration is by editing text files, but the default settings have sufficient so far. Setting a browser to use it means searching through settings for the means of making it use IP address 127.0.0.1 and port 8118 for ordinary and secure HTTP connections.

Rapid Photo Downloader

When Shotwell, started to fail to download photos from ever larger memory cards, it was time to look at something else and this became the replacement. You can use it to copy images from any card reader into the directory structure of your choosing. It does nothing more than downloading, and it does it so well that it merits a mention on here.

Shotwell

This was my photo library manager of choice until its limitations when it came to handling large data volumes came to light. It is written for the GNOME desktop environment and worked well for a few years before technology overtook it. Still, it also offers limited photo editing capabilities to go with its organising skills.

UFRaw

This reader and manipulator of raw digital camera image formats acts either alone or as a plugin. It can be used via the command line or using a GUI. That makes it flexible for those times when you need things to happen without much input from yourself.

VirtualBox

All in all, this is an excellent piece of virtualisation software that makes you wonder why you’d pay for something like VMware Workstation. There is a closed source variant, but the open-source equivalent has what you’d want for personal use anyway. Windows 11 support took a while to come into place because of its TPM requirements, but that is steady these days.

VSCodium

Since the widely used VSCode is so available and appears to be open-source in nature, one does wonder why this project exists. Here is their take on that conundrum:

Microsoft’s VSCode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS licence and contains telemetry/tracking. According to this comment from a Visual Studio Code maintainer:

When Microsoft builds Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. They clone the VSCode repository, they lay down a customized product.json that has Microsoft-specific functionality (telemetry, gallery, logo, etc.), and then produce a build that we release under their licence.

When you clone and build from the VSCode repo, none of these endpoints are configured in the default product.json. Therefore, you generate a “clean” build, without the Microsoft customisations, which is by default licensed under the MIT licence.

The VSCodium project exists so that you don’t have to download and build from source. This project includes special build scripts that clone Microsoft’s VSCode repo, run the build commands, and upload the resulting binaries for you to GitHub releases. These binaries are licensed under the MIT licence. Telemetry is disabled.

If you want to build from source yourself, head over to Microsoft’s VSCode repo and follow their instructions. VSCodium exists to make it easier to get the latest version of MIT-licensed VS Code.

Waterfox

This is a fork of Firefox that claims to be faster and more private. From my brief test, it certainly feels faster, though I was not as able to test things on the privacy end.

Never undercutting the reseller…

Quite possibly, THE big technology news of the week has been the launch of Windows 7. Regular readers may be aware that I have been having a play with the beta and release candidate versions of the thing since the start of the year. In summary, I have found to work both well and unobtrusively. There have been some rough edges when access files through VirtualBox’s means of accessing the host file system from a VM but that’s the only perturbation to be reported and, even then, it only seemed to affect my use of Photoshop Elements.

Therefore, I had it in mind to get my hands on a copy of the final release after it came out. Of course, there was the option of pre-ordering but that isn’t for everyone so there are others. A trip down to the local branch of PC World will allow you to satisfy your needs with full, upgrade (if you already have a copy of XP or Vista, it might be worth trying out the Windows Secrets double installation trick to get it loaded on a clean system) and family packs. The last of these is very tempting: three Home Premium licences for around £130. Wandering around to your local PC components emporium is an alternative but you have to remember that OEM versions of the operating system are locked to the first (self-built) system on which they are installed. Apart from that restriction, the good value compared with retail editions makes them worth considering. The last option that I wish to bring to your attention is buying directly from Microsoft themselves. You would think that this may be cheaper than going to a reseller but that’s not the case with the Family Pack costing around £150 in comparison to PC World’s pricing and it doesn’t end there. That they only accept Maestro debit cards along with credit cards from the likes of Visa and Mastercard perhaps is another sign that Microsoft are new to whole idea of selling online. In contrast, Tesco is no stranger to online selling but they have Windows 7 on offer though they aren’t noted for computer sales; PC World may be forgiven for wondering what that means but who would buy an operating system along with their groceries? I suppose that the answer to that would be that people who are accustomed to delivering one’s essentials at a convenient time should be able to do the same with computer goods too. That convenience of timing is another feature of downloading an OS from the web and many a Linux fan should know what that means. Microsoft may have discovered this of late but that’s better than never.

Because of my positive experience with the pre-release variants of Windows 7, I am very tempted to get my hands on the commercial release. Because I have until early next year with the release candidate and XP works sufficiently well (it ultimately has given Vista something of a soaking), I’ll be able to bide my time. When I do make the jump, it’ll probably be Home Premium that I’ll choose because it seems difficult to justify the extra cost of Professional. It was different in the days of XP when its Professional edition did have something to offer technically minded home users like me. With 7, XP Mode might be a draw but with virtualisation packages like VirtualBox available for no cost, it’s hard to justify spending extra. In any case, I have Vista Home Premium loaded on my Toshiba laptop and that seems to work fine, in spite of all the bad press that Vista has gotten for itself.

Camera tales

Anyone who has ever been on HennessyBlog will know that I enjoy walking in the countryside and that I always have a camera with me when I do. Like many digital SLR owners, I am beginning to see the tell-tale spots in my photos that are caused by a dirty sensor. And it isn’t that I am continually changing lenses either: I rarely remove the Sigma 18-50 mm DC zoom lens that I use with the camera. Rather than trusting myself with the cleaning (I have had a go already without much success), I am giving serious consideration to letting the professionals take care of my Canon EOS 10D, my only digital camera. I have already been quoted something of the order of £35 by a Canon service centre not far from me and am seriously considering taking them up on the offer.

Of course, sending it away to them means that I will have to forego the ability to include photos with posts on HennessyBlog describing my walks in the kind of timescale to which I have become accustomed; of course, this is where digital really scores. I will still have a camera with me as film remains my mainstay, even in this digital age. The camera in question is another Canon, an EOS 30 that I acquired used from Ffordes Photographic. While taking a recent peek at their website, I have just spied a used EOS 1V going for £399, a song for what remains Canon’s top of the range film SLR. Yes, I am tempted but I must stay real. In fact, I did not pay full price for my EOS 10D. That was part of the run-out stock that 7dayshop.com were selling off at next to half of the EOS 10D’s original asking price in the wake of its being superseded by the EOS 20D (itself since replaced by the EOS 30D: digital is a fast-moving world).

Sending a camera away for attention is not new to me as I also acquired a used Minolta X-700 manual focus SLR, again obtained from Ffordes, and that needed a spot of maintenance after a year in my possession. There was a problem with the shutter that cost me £75 to get Minolta to fix. Now that Minolta as a camera maker is no more, I was wondering who would attend to it in the future. That question was answered by a recent look on the web: in the UK it is JP Service Solutions, a division of Johnson’s Phototopia. Konica Minolta retain this information on their website. Konica Minolta’s failure to capitalise effectively on the digital revolution in its early days, particularly in the SLR area where they gifted their competitors a massive head start, cost them their future in the photographic business and now Sony continues the mantle, a sad end to one of camera manufacturing’s great innovators.

Returning to my digital-less dilemma, I suppose that I could get another digital for backup duty; I have to admit that a DSLR is a bulky contraption to be carrying in airline luggage. The camera that has made it onto my wish list is Ricoh’s GR Digital, a highly regarded offering that follows in the great tradition of its film forbears, the GR 1 and GR 21. Given that my first 35 mm camera was a Ricoh, and I have it still, this would be a case of returning to my roots. Of course, having it on a wish list is very different from having it on the to-do list and finances will certainly dictate if the purchase is made, though a finance deal offered by Warehouse Express does make it more accessible. Maybe some day…