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.

A year ago I started using Ting, a Sprint MVNO, as my cell phone provider. A month later I wrote an update as well as a review of my most used apps. Well, now it’s been a year and I’d like to talk about what it’s been like.

I started off the year with a Samsung Galaxy Victory. It is a decent and capable smart phone, but I like to use a lot of programs like Doggcatcher and SmartBooks and the phone was having issues working correctly when I had more than a few programs running. So I switched to a Nexus 5 and it’s working perfectly for me.

I heard today that AOL is getting rid of Moviefone. Makes sense, I haven’t used it to find movie times in at least a decade. Shoot, I rarely even go to the Moviefone website. I just use Google’s ability to show showtimes, go to the actual theater’s website, or Fandango. Lots of people remember Moviefone from the pretty funny Seinfeld episode in which Kramer answers the phone number (when the phone numbers get switched?). My favorite line: “Why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie you want to see?”

First of all, here’s my referral link. Click here to sign up and they’ll give you a $25 credit you can use on a phone or against your bill.

The account sign-up was painless and pretty quick. The part where it did a bunch of stuff to my phone took a couple cycles to take, but once that was through it worked perfectly sing. I decided not to do VOIP for calls at home as I thought I would. As I went through the instructions, it turned out to be too complex and unreliable. People complained that it turned off their alarms (which I use to wake up for work) and other strange nonsense. I decided not to stress it. I barely talk on my phone anyway - ever since my parents became business owners, it’s been a lot harder to get a hold of them. At the end of my fist month I only had used a little over half of the smallest chunk of voice minutes that Ting sells. I’ve decided that whenever Hangouts for Android gets feature parity with iOS and allows VOIP calls, I’ll investigate that. Strangely, the one time I tried to use Hangouts on a desktop to call, it didn’t work as a touchtone phone.

Around three or so years ago I was ready to get a new cell phone. My phone was no longer maintaining a charge and a new battery was more than the nearly free phone I could get by renewing my contract. Smart phones had been around for a few years, but I didn’t want a smart phone. I just wanted a phone with a decent camera. I absolutely love my dSLR; it helps me take the best photos I’m capable of taking. But I rarely have it with me unless I know I will be going somewhere I want to be able to take photos; I always have my cell phone. I spent an hour in the Verizon store finding just the right phone - it looked and behaved like a smart phone (for the most part) and it had a great camera compared to my dying phone. I got the phone and the agent told me I’d need to get a data plan. I informed him that I didn’t want one. He told me about all the functionality I’d be missing. I didn’t care. This phone did what I wanted - it made phone calls and it took nice photos for a point and shoot. OK, he did some wrangling on his computer and told me the data plan was removed. I fought with verizon every time a bill arrived because the system kept adding a data plan. Eventually, I was told I couldn’t have it without a data plan and so I got rid of the phone.

Especially because I would expect this to just be automated. Someone at Amazon decides to put jerky on sale, it should auto-generate the email title. It should NOT be written by a human that could end up with a weird typo like this!

A 1 May Ars article and 30 April Wired article mention that a UK company known as Gamma International is selling spyware that pretends to be Mozilla Firefox. Both articles mention that repressive governments have used it to spy on dissidents, but it’s unclear from the article whether the company purposely sells to evil governments or whether it sells this to anybody, including foreign governments. The Wired article mentions that Gamma markets it to governments in general and so, if pressed, would probably say that it’s not meant to be used by evil governments - just people like the FBI trying to catch criminals. Either way, Mozilla has sued for trademark infringement. I applaud them for doing so. Governments may have both legitimate and illegitimate reasons for spying on computer communications, but I don’t think they should be abusing the good will of other companies to do it. Imagine if Gamma was selling Ford cars that were bugged. No one would want to buy a Ford car for fear it might be a bugged version. Come on, guys! Figure out a solution that doesn’t screw over the folks at Mozilla.

Earlier this year I wrote about using xbmc to create your own private Netflix.  I thought I’d update my readers on how I like it.  Here’s what the current version looks like with the default skin:

I have linked it up with trakt.tv to track my tv and movie watching (just like music scrobbling with last.fm) Using it has allowed me to catch up on shows that I might not have otherwise had the time to watch.  It was easy to start going through all the Buffy episodes while waiting to feed Scarlett at night since they were sitting on my computer and I didn’t have to go find the DVDs.

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about replacing my file and print server with a Pogoplug. Overall, it’s worked perfectly. I even made it my DNS server because the number of internet connected devices in my was growing so much and on some computers (like the laptop and netbook) I was constantly changing distros so DNS became preferable to maintaining a bunch of /etc/hosts files.

Everything was working just dandy until I wanted to install mysql to have all my xbmc installs reference one library. I wasn’t able to install it because the mirrors and package lists were out of date. Being unfamiliar with arch, I decided I needed to upgrade my system to get that ability. And, as part of the upgrade, yes, it did update the mirrors and package lists and I was able to install mysql. But it also did something that killed ssh. So I could no longer connect to my Pogoplug (babyluigi).