July 1, 2022

Camera use on openSUSE Leap on Raspberry Pi Zero 2

One thing I wanted to investigate during the Hackweek was trying out whether openSUSE Leap would offer my Raspberry Pi Zero 2 a nice and stable option for motion detection camera recording. I have had RPi 3 Model A+ doing this for a longer time, and a Zero model before that, but the newer RPi Zero 2 has been a bit unstable for so far unknown reason. There are also some unoptimal combinations of too old or too fresh software in the official Raspberry Pi OS releases.

May 19, 2022

I will just quickly do a blog post...

I got ”inspired” by my writing of the previous blog post, and wrote in a channel about my experience some time ago. So why not also do a blog post about doing a blog post :) So… I was planning to use GitLab’s Pages feature via my Hugo fork as usual to push it through. So like, concentrate on writing and do a publish, right, like in good old times? I did so, but all I got both locally and in remote pipeline was stuff like…

April 28, 2022

GNOME Dynamic Triple Buffering patch on openSUSE

I’ve always, or at least ever since the development of the iconic Nokia N9 and the projects I was working on at the time, wanted “60 fps” silky smooth behavior from both phones and computers, and learned to be sensitive to that. GNOME has been fighting back a bit on that front for several years though on HiDPI displays, with also regressing at least on openSUSE a bit earlier which I was unable to pinpoint exact reason to.

January 26, 2022

Unboxing Dell XPS 13 - openSUSE Tumbleweed alongside preinstalled Ubuntu

I received a new laptop for work - a Dell XPS 13. Dell has been long famous for offering certain models with pre-installed Linux as a supported option, and opting for those is nice for moving some euros/dollars from certain PC desktop OS monopoly towards Linux desktop engineering costs. Notably Lenovo also offers Ubuntu and Fedora options on many models these days (like Carbon X1 and P15 Gen 2). Obviously a smooth, ready-to-rock Ubuntu installation is nice for most people already, but I need openSUSE, so after checking everything is fine with Ubuntu, I continued to install openSUSE Tumbleweed as a dual boot option.

December 14, 2021

Working and warming up cats

I’m using an external keyboard (1) and mouse (2), but the laptop lid is usually still open for better cooling. That means the internal keyboard (3) and touchpad (4) – made of comfortable materials – are open to be used by a cat searching for warmth (7), in the obvious “every time” case that a normal non-heated nest (6) is not enough. The problem is, everything goes chaotic at that point in the default configuration.

October 29, 2021

Disabling broken webcam on demand

This is more like a self-written notes post about a problem I’m facing, since my laptop’s web camera is starting to deteriorate. I’ll update the post if I find more useful bits of how to tweak with USB. For the first few weeks I was suspecting a Tumbleweed problem, but eventually I booted up Ubuntu LTS from USB stick and managed to see the problem also there. dmesg goes like follows

March 31, 2021

MotionPhoto / MicroVideo File Formats on Pixel Phones

Google Pixel phones support what they call ”Motion Photo” which is essentially a photo with a short video clip attached to it. They are quite nice since they bring the moment alive, especially as the capturing of the video starts a small moment before the shutter button is pressed. For most viewing programs they simply show as static JPEG photos, but there is more to the files. I’d really love proper Shotwell support for these file formats, so I posted a longish explanation with many of the details in this blog post to a ticket there too.

March 25, 2021

Super Resolution Video Enhancing with AMD GPU

I’ve had a somewhat recent AMD Radeon RX 560 graphics card in my Mini-ITX PC for over a year already, and one long term interest I have would be to be able to enhance old videos. Thanks to Hackweek I could look at this as one of the things that I’ve waited to have time for. In recent years there have been approaches to use eg neural networks to do super resolution handling of photos and also videos, so that there would be more actual details and shapes than what would be possible via normal image manipulation.

February 1, 2021

Getting a package from openSUSE to SLE

I was looking forward to updating a package (enchant) with a backported patch from upstream and wanted it to be included in both SLE offerings and openSUSE. I’m used to working within the community from the past, so even though I’m a SUSE employee I wanted to contribute without using anything internal. I filed a bug and did a request to first get the patch into Tumbleweed via GNOME:Factory. That was easy, but then I looked on how to get the same patch into the stable releases.