Three years ago I wrote a post (along with a Youtube video) about how to set up a KVM VM with Dual Monitors (or even triple monitors). Since then there’s been a bit of a change. I loaded up remote viewer and, for some reason, I couldn’t add more monitors to my Linux KVM VM. Turns out what you have to do is look at the Video (QXL) section in virt-manager. Look at how many “heads” it has listed. For example:

I’ve been hearing about Podman for a while now - at Red Hat Summit and at various local Red Hat presentations. I’ve seen the slides where the RHEL presenter (it’s always the same guy, but I’m terrible with names - after a bit of research, I think it’s Dan Walsh) asks you to pledge to call them container images, not Docker images, etc. But up until now, even though I’m a huge Red Hat fan, I’ve continued to use Docker as my container engine because I am just running a few containers for myself. I don’t even use a one-machine Docker Swarm. I use docker-compose. And that’s just not something that Podman is ever going to officially support. This makes sense because Red Hat is thinking enterprise. And in the enterprise there are two scenarios: 1) Orchestration - vanilla Kubernetes, OpenShift, etc - and 2) are devs running docker run (or podman run) to test the images before putting them into the orchestrator. I’m an anti-pattern, even if I’m not the only one doing things this way.

Just in time for Halloween I discovered the Dracula set of dark themes.They’ve got themes for nearly every code editor and shell/console program you can think of. Here’s Yakuake with the Dracula Konsole theme:

Yakuake with Dracula theme

And here’s Kate with the Dracula theme:

Kate with Dracula theme

I like the color scheme, but the font’s a bit small, so I might make a variant theme with a slightly larger font size.

Clarkesworld Magazine has wonderful metadata for their issues and anthologies that requires little work from me:

Tor books had an awesome DRM-free policy that I love and that allows me to go to the ebook vendor of my choice. And they give away a free book every month as long as you agree to get some marketing emails from them. But their metadata is not so great:

Come on, Tor! You publish Science Fiction! Let’s get some better metadata on those ebook files!

Yesterday I was at a conference dedicated to DevOps and so Red Hat and Google were there to talk about containers, especially Docker and Kubernetes. While summarizing it to some of my employees today, I was asked about what I see as the benefits of Docker containers relative to Virtual Machines. I mentioned that one of the great things is that Docker containers are immutable. All of your data’s actually written to a folder that’s essentially mounted in the container.

My grad school Alma Mater, Stevens Institute of Technology has discovered how your Fitbit or Smart watch could give away your PIN:

Stevens researchers discovered that the motions of your hands as you use PIN pads, which is continually and automatically recorded by your device, can be hacked in real time and used to guess your PIN with more than 90 percent accuracy within a few attempts.

The Stevens team outfitted 20 volunteers with an array of fitness wristbands and smart watches, then asked them to make some 5,000 sample PIN entries on keypads or laptop keyboards while “sniffing” the packets of Bluetooth low energy (BLE) data transmitted by sensors in those devices to paired smartphones.

There was a good chunk of time where I was converting all my Canon Raw files into DNG files on the thought that it would be better and make them more readable in the future. But with KDE able to read Canon files as well as the libRaw in Linux - it seemed a waste of time.

This article by a professional photographer gives another reason. Certain software may not be able to produce as good a result from DNG as when the files come unadulterated from the camera.

18 GB RAM on Bowser

Thanks to mom, now I have 18 GB of triple RAM on Bowser. Incidentally, it’s the first time I’ve used the Task Manager in Window 10 and it’s really slick! I like it - it matches the look/feel/usability of the similar utilities in KDE’s Plasma 5.

I found one way around the situation involving a DNG going to RawTherapee and creating a JPEG image that’s missing the title and tags when read by Digikam’s Exiv2 library. It may not be perfect, or even the best way. But it’s one way around the issue that I was easily able to confirm with about 5 minutes of messing around today. First up you want to tell Digikam to make XMP files to go along with all files:

I still really love using Linux, but I don’t follow the Linux press like I used to. I’ve settled into a comfortable zone where I only follow Fedora and KDE news since that’s what I use. But I followed it very closely for nearly 10 years. Every year there’d be multiple articles asking whether this was the year of the Linux desktop, meaning people would finally see the Microsoft hegemony for what it was and throw off the shackles of proprietary software. It never came. Thanks to Ubuntu and Vista, we almost got there. Then there were the Netbooks, but the manufacturers chose horrible versions of Linux and underpowered machines and Microsoft came out with Windows 7 starter edition. And people went to Macs instead of Linux in the biggest tech comeback of … ever.