• Start an 8-day data detox

    Recommended to me by Mozilla, I started a Creative Commons-licensed “Data Detox” that was produced for the Glass Room London in 2017, and is curated by Tactical Technology Collective. It was originally a printed/PDF kit created for the Glass Room New-York in 2016. I thought I might try that little exercise to see if I…

  • Use Enigmail with Thunderbird 56 beta

    If you are trying the sign and encrypt your emails with Enigmail (v. 1.9.8.2 in my case) in the latest Thunderbird 56 beta (v. 56.0b3 in my case), you might run into a blocker: In Enigmail Preferences > Basic > Files and directory, a simple “(error)” appears and there is no way to fix the…

  • Fix “unmet dependency” issue for pulseaudio in KXStudio (and others)

    [note: this tip will apply to other “unmet dependency” situations, but definitely not all of them] If you are a user of the KXStudio repos, and use an environment rid of pulseaudio, you probably were disappointed to see that Firefox recently stopped supporting the ALSA backend. The issue came back recently for me, as Firefox…

  • Two Crowd Supply projects worth supporting

    Crowd Supply is a crowdfunding website that does things differently. Projects hosted on it are usually directed at hackers, and they promote businesses that try to do things differently (I would describe it as “progressive” in a sense). Products can also keep being purchased after the funding target is reached, which also makes it a…

  • An alternative to Facebook events

    After leaving Facebook, you realise how much people rely on it to organise events. Some organisations and even administrations actually only use Facebook to publicise their events, and people have to have an account to be able to RSVP, or even have a look at the detailed information. I thought I’d ask and look around…

  • Remove DRMs from Kobo’s KEPUB format

    Kobo decided to go the proprietary Digital Restriction Management (DRM) way by providing some ebooks bought on their platform in their in-house Kepub format. This means that they can only be read on a Kobo device. You might have noticed that, when trying to copy an ebook from your Kobo device to your desktop Calibre…

  • Fix PGP error NO_PUBKEY when apt-get updating

    It is common to find that a  sudo apt-get update does not do a clean job because of a couple of missing public keys. You might get something of the type: Usually, it is possible to directly fetch the missing public key from a popular key server like Ubuntu’s: … where PUBKEY is replaced by…

  • Add missing icons in Ring client

    You might have noticed that your Ring desktop client (in my case, the ring package for an Ubuntu 14.04-based distro, version 20160908.1.07d3d92~dfsg1-1 at the time of writing, launched with the gnome-ring command) is missing some icons and shows a red “forbidden” sign instead. I fixed that by simply installing a missing dependency called gnome-icon-theme-symbolic. You…

  • Fix two conflicting versions of Keybase

    Not having updated keybase in a while (since 0.8.23!…), I ran into an issue after trying to get the latest version (1.0.17) as described on the website: an apt-cache policy keybase would tell me that I had the most recent version installed, whereas running keybase version would return the older one. The problem is that…

  • Install HWSD Viewer on an Ubuntu 14.04-based system

    The Harmonized World Soil Database (HWSD) is a 30 arc-second raster database put together by a consortium of organisations: FAO, CAS, IIASA, ISRIC and JRC. It is a monumental collection of data about soil from all around the globe, and is therefore an important tool for researchers. You can download the raw data or  visualise…