-<p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
-over time. This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
-battery.</p>
-
-<p>But why is this happening? Why are my laptop batteries always
-dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
-satellites keep working year after year. If we are to believe
-<a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
-University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
-chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
-all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
-I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
-<a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
-the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
-100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
-like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
-story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
-Linux too.</p>
-
-<p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
-stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
-preparation for a longer trip? I found
-<a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
-recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
-80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
-load).</p>
-
-<p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
-at the start. I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
-times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
-back to design capacity. And I wonder if the discharge and charge
-speed change over time, or if this stay the same. I did not yet try
-to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
-level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
-those.</p>
-
-<p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
-acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
-packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
-initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
-and stop. I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
-and need to be replaced. The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
-specific.</p>
+<p> The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor
+SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today
+Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines
+will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal
+connections if they use source IP address.</p>
+
+<p>When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under
+"Standalone Registration" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git
+repository. I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the
+Chromium debugging tool, visited the 'Console' tab and wrote
+'extension.install("standalone")' on the console prompt to get the
+registration form. Then I entered by land line phone number and
+pressed 'Call'. 5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice
+repeated the verification code three times. After entering the number
+into the verification code field in the form, I could start using
+Signal from my laptop.
+
+<p>As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to
+whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server,
+but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server
+setup. It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the
+content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data
+exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know.
+So better than many options, but not great. And sadly the usage is
+connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server
+to associate it to my home and person. I would prefer it if only
+those I knew could tell who I was on Signal. There are options
+avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not
+using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Mon, 6 Jun 2016 12:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">which
+multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
+MIME types</a>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
+the various players claimed support for. The range was from 55 to 130
+MIME types. I suspect most media formats are supported by all
+players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
+their desktop files. There are probably also some bogus MIME types
+listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.</p>
+
+<p>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
+the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
+and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
+favorite media player VLC. The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
+yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
+<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">Multimedia
+player MIME type support status</a> Debian wiki page.</p>
+
+<p>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian? It is VLC, followed by
+totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
+kmplayer. I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
+several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
+toten and parole.</p>
+
+<p>A sad observation is that only 14 MIME types are listed as
+supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
+desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
+audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
+video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
+video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo. Personally I find
+it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
+players in Debian. As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
+formats.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>A program should be able to open its own files on Linux</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 5 Jun 2016 08:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
+decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
+talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine. I
+wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
+the day before I would give the talk. The next day I took a plane to
+the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
+started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
+that kpresenter refused to load its own data file. I cursed a bit and
+started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
+present when I arrived. I tested that the saved files could be
+loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued. I continued to polish the
+slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
+be loaded into kpresenter. In the end I had to rewrite the slides
+three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
+shorter. After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem &ndash;
+kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
+Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
+program to make slides. The point I'm trying to make is that we
+expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
+embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
+
+<p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
+files from the desktop file browser? It is not a uncommon problem. A
+while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
+gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
+browser would refuse to open. No video player claimed to understand
+such file. I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
+returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
+installed listed as a MIME type they would understand. I asked for
+<a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
+behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead. I also asked
+several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
+the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files. After a
+while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
+output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
+
+<p>But history repeats itself. A few days ago I tested the music
+system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
+browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
+(*.rg). I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
+rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
+included in the next upload. To increase the chance of me remembering
+how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
+from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
+
+<p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
+There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file. The output from
+<tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
+shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/). The file MIME
+type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
+information is collected from
+<a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
+desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/. If there is
+one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
+activated when asking to open a given file. If there are more, one
+can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
+selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar. In general
+this work well. But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
+type (preferably
+<a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
+MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared MIME
+registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
+type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
+
+<p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
+<a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
+Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
+&lt;mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"&gt;
+ &lt;mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden"&gt;
+ &lt;sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/&gt;
+ &lt;comment&gt;Rosegarden project file&lt;/comment&gt;
+ &lt;glob pattern="*.rg"/&gt;
+ &lt;/mime-type&gt;
+&lt;/mime-info&gt;
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
+(it is a gzipped XML file). Note, it is much better to use an
+official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
+unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.</p>
+
+<p>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
+audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
+file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+% grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
+MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
+X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
+%
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the
+MimeType= line.</p>
+
+<p>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
+selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
+<tt>file --mime-type</tt> for the file, ensure the file ending and
+MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
+that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
+support for this MIME type. If not, please report a bug to have it
+fixed. :)</p>
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