The One with the Thoughts of Frans

Author Archive

Linkify Addressbar Segments in Vivaldi

16:12 · Filed under Browsers

Great news! My suggestion for segmented addressbars from Opera 11 Addressbar Revisited has been picked up by Vivaldi. Presumably independently, but this is the kind of development I like to see.

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KOReader 2020.07 “Tumbleweed”

16:07 · Filed under Software

As one of the maintainers of KOReader, a versatile a document and image viewer, I’m proud to announce the latest release.

It’s been a busy month, so I’ll get right to some of the highlights.

Ruby (furigana)

Ruby characters (also known as furigani) are now supported in the form of the <ruby> element, small typographic annotations to aid pronunciation (#6305).

Rotation handling

Usually I tend to emphasize user-visible changes, and in a way this one’s both. Rotation was refactored (#6309), which immediately and easily allowed for better Android TV support (#6327).

The following screenshots showcase the new rotation handling on Chrome OS (running Android apps) and Android TV:
chromeOS-overlay
tv

calibre

The calibre metadata search and calibre wireless connections were merged into a single plugin (#6177).

search metadata changes:

  • search directly into calibre metadata files.
  • search can be performed on more than one library (configurable from a menu)
  • device scans now find all calibre libraries under a given root
  • search options can be configured from a menu. (case sensitive, find by title, author and path)
  • removed legacy global variables.
  • option to search from the reader
  • option to generate a cache of books for faster searches.

calibre wireless connection changes:

  • keep track of books in a library (includes prunning books from calibre metadata if the file was deleted locally)
  • remove files on device from calibre
  • support password protected connections
  • FM integration: if we’re in the inbox dir it will be updated each time a book is added or deleted.
  • disconnect when requested by calibre, available on newer calibre versions (+4.17)
  • remove unused opcodes.
  • better report of client name, version and device id
  • free disk space checks for all calibre versions
  • bump supported extensions to match what KOReader can handle. Users can override this with their own list of extensions (or from calibre, by configuring the wireless device).

Hebrew translation

A big thank you to all of our translators. This month a good chunk of KOReader was localized in Hebrew. Please head over to https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/koreader/ if you want to help.

We’d like to thank all contributors for their efforts. Some highlights since the previous release include:

  • Fix bottom menu item titles truncation (#6273) @poire-z
  • Add chapter title when exporting notes in Evernote (JSON/HTML, remote) (#6146) @Galunid
  • [chore] Rename ‘More plugins’ to ‘More tools’ (#6279) @Frenzie
  • [chore] Device abstraction (#6280) @pazos
  • Unified calibre plugin (#6177) @pazos
  • [chore, UX] Move some ‘permanent’ settings inside more_tools (#6282) @pazos
  • [Android] Add support for custom startup scripts (#6275) @zwim
    This is only available on the rocks flavor of Android, which is provided here on GitHub. In the fdroid flavor it’s been disabled. See the wiki for more information.
  • [plugin] Dispatcher: for profiles & gestures (#6106) @yparitcher
  • Don’t rotate BookStatus & ReadingProgress in screensavers. (#6286) @NiLuJe
  • Translator: Add definition of the word to the translation (#6295) @Galunid
  • bump crengine: add support for elements (#6305) @poire-z
  • Add the possibility run shell scripts from filemanager on android (#6288) @zwim
  • Add PocketBook 614W (Basic 3) definition (#6312) @roshavagarga
  • [feat] FocusManager: wrap around horizontally (#6315) @Frenzie
  • [UX] Add left to close to ConfigDialog for hasFewKeys (#6318) @Frenzie
  • [plugin] Wallabag: Make remove from history consistent with deletion (#6320) @Frenzie
  • [UX] Move double tap to gesture manager (#6322) @Frenzie
  • [i18n] Add support for fledgling Hebrew translation (#6333) @Frenzie
  • [feat] Add text/html to OPDSBrowser (#6335) @Frenzie
  • Landscape FM / Refactor rotation (#6309) @yparitcher
  • bump crengine: memory fixes, speedup, bg image enhancements (#6350) @poire-z
  • android: support for native surface rotation (#6359) @pazos
  • Allow locking the gyro to the current screen mode (#6347) @NiLuJe
  • Add macOS target (#6361) @JasonInOttawa
  • ReaderGesture: cleanup (#6292) @yparitcher
  • Dispatcher: use sections (#6364) @yparitcher
  • Perception expander: disable margin increase when set to 0 (#6377) @yparitcher
  • Initial handling of the upcoming Kobo Nia (#6380) @NiLuJe NB This may not work properly on a real Nia once it’s released.
  • [UX] German keyboard layout qwertz (#6385) @zwim
  • SetNightMode event & Night Mode refresh rate (#6386) @yparitcher
  • Implement numeric collator (natural sorting) in file manager (#6378) @Galunid
  • Remarkable button-listen when resuming from suspendsuspend fix (#6396) @tcrs

Full changelog — closed milestone issues

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KOReader 2020.06 “Mosaic”

17:24 · Filed under Software

As one of the maintainers of KOReader, a versatile a document and image viewer, I’m proud to announce the latest release.




This month we’ve seen quite a number of small improvements in various areas, such as support for book-specific style tweaks (#6244), support for ::before/after (#6236), an offline add link to Wallabag queue (#6170), as well as some Android fixes. Enjoy!


We’d like to thank all contributors for their efforts. Some highlights since the previous release include:



Full changelog — closed milestone issues

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Fix Firefox Adressbar Autofill Broken

12:36 · Filed under Software

After updating to the latest Firefox ESR 68.8, for some reason my Firefox stopped autofilling the addressbar.

Our first stop lies in Help → Troubleshooting information → Places Database (which will take you to about:support).

Click verify integrity, it will probably detect an issue, and then it claims it will replace it on the next startup.

> Task: checkIntegrity
– Unable to fix corruption, places.sqlite will be replaced on next startup

But oddly enough, nothing of the sort happened! Not to worry, right at the top there’s the profile directory, which indicates where the places.sqlite file can be found. Rename it to something like .bck or .old, or just outright delete it if you don’t care, and success! Everything will be working again.

> Task: checkIntegrity
+ The places.sqlite database is sane
+ The favicons.sqlite database is sane

Unfortunately you’ll have to repopulate the autofill if you take this approach.

Geekery

But I didn’t want to admit defeat. Surely it can’t be too hard to salvage our old database. As an aside, but not strictly relevant to what I did here, I think it’s always useful to have sqlitebrowser installed. That way you can browse the data and run SQL commands on it. For example, if you open places.sqlite and run PRAGMA integrity_check on it… Oh dear, it says the same thing as Firefox: database disk image is malformed.

But we have a trick up our sleeve: command line SQLite. My initial plan was to play around with export and import to determine where the error was located since SQLite didn’t want to say, but that seemed a bit tedious. Essentially to try it table by table, and once I’d identified the table, basically to keep cutting it in half. But as luck would have it, SQLite 2.29 and higher has a built-in error correction feature. Docs here.

sqlite3 places.sqlite ".recover" | sqlite3 places_fixed.sqlite
Error: near line 378367: NOT NULL constraint failed: moz_origins.host

All that was left was to give it a try and all was well with the world again — or at least with Firefox. The SQLite error recovery command found the error and fixed it up all by itself. So now I still have all of my location history. Useful? Maybe not in this particular case, but good to know if anything like this should happen in the future on some more important data.

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KOReader 2020.05 “May Storm”

13:42 · Filed under Software

As one of the maintainers of KOReader, a versatile a document and image viewer, I’m proud to announce the latest release.

Good news for Kobo users! There’s a new launcher for apps and scripts called NickelMenu, and it’s supported starting with this version of KOReader.

We’d like to thank all contributors for their efforts. Some highlights since the previous release include:

Full changelog — closed milestone issues

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KOReader 2020.04 “Eating Ghosts”

12:01 · Filed under Software

As one of the maintainers of KOReader, a versatile a document and image viewer, I’m proud to announce the latest release.

koreader-2020 04-coronavirus-evillll

By staying inside and reading, humans have become resistant.

We’d like to thank all contributors for their efforts. Some highlights since the previous release include:

Full changelog — closed milestone issues

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KDE Compact Window Switcher Missing?

21:50 · Filed under Software

Let’s face it, all of KDE’s task switchers other than Compact are awful in varying degrees. Unfortunately I found it to be missing. Luckily the solution is simple on Debian/Ubuntu.

sudo apt-get install kwin-addons

And there you have it. Happy window switching!

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KOReader 2020.03 “Skating Bird”

16:41 · Filed under Software

As one of the maintainers of KOReader, a versatile a document and image viewer, I’m proud to announce the latest release.

koreader-bird

There’s this upcoming videogame called Skatebird. The demo was quite promising. But what you didn’t know is that many of those birbs read heaps and gobs of classic literature from Project Gutenberg and Archive.org. Just like us!

Quite a bit of effort was put into PocketBook this month to make it more maintainable going forward. By creating our own toolchain (koreader/koxtoolchain#22), we can now build the binaries with an up-to-date GCC instead of the years-old GCC 4.8 in the official toolchain, which was starting to become problematically outdated. This is no panacea; most PocketBook issues are unrelated, but a higher maintenance burden can be quite demotivating and gets in the way of addressing actual issues.

In-page footnotes are now enabled by default (#5908). We’re quite fond of them, but if you’d like to disable them you can do so in the document menu (second from the left in the top menu) → Style tweaks → Miscellaneous → In-page footnotes.

We’d like to thank all contributors for their efforts. Some highlights since the previous release include:

  • Make dictionary margin depend on font size (#5865) @Frenzie
  • Footnote popups: CSS: remove some vertical margin (#5863) @poire-z
  • Font menu: show only 5 items per page (#5863) @poire-z
  • Style tweaks: reorganize in submenus, add a few (#5863) @poire-z
  • Get rid of the old PB TC (#5860) @NiLuJe
  • Statistics: revamp settings, add calendar settings (#5867) @poire-z
  • CoverBrowser: fix “Extract and cache” crash (#5874) @poire-z
  • Warn if color rendering is enabled on a grayscale device. (#5871) @NiLuJe
  • TextBoxWidget: handle tabs and tabstops (#5870) @poire-z
  • [Android] Prevent previous book reopening in some situations (#5880) @pazos
  • continuous: do not limit visible area to page area (#5885) @yparitcher
  • Add “message at top of screen” screensaver (#5739) @RenaKunisaki
  • Add support for PocketBook InkPad X (#5890) @KucharczykL
  • Disable HW dithering on Kindle (#5893) @NiLuJe
  • Style tweaks: force List items bullet/decimal style (#5897) @poire-z
  • Migrate books to normalized xpointers (#5897, #5904) @poire-z
    This means highlights should be a lot more stable from now on, across rendering setting changes or rendering engine improvements.
  • kosync: validate username and password against empty/blank strings (#5894) @pazos
  • Avoid writting highlights into read-only PDFs (#5889) @pazos
  • TOC: validate and fix misordered page numbers (#5907) @poire-z
  • Style tweaks: enable EPUB/FB2 in-page footnotes by default (#5908) @poire-z
  • SDL2 MacOS HiDPI (#5917) @magicmirror1365
  • PathChooser: fetch ‘show_hidden’ setting on each use (#5923) @poire-z
  • Correct Frontlight status on suspend when screensaver mode is ‘Leave … (#5928) @clarkspark

Full changelog — closed milestone issues

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Switching Audio Output Devices in Broken Sword 5 (OpenAL)

20:37 · Filed under Software

Shamelessly lifted from Norbert Preining in case I forget. I still haven’t actually continued Broken Sword 5 past the first few rooms, just like a few years ago.

Create a file named ~/.alsoftrc with this in it.

[pulse]
allow-moves=true

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KOReader 2020.02 “90 % Cocoa”

9:40 · Filed under Software

As one of the maintainers of KOReader, a versatile a document and image viewer, I’m proud to announce the latest release.

Thanks to @tcrs the program has now been ported to the Remarkable (#5828).

Additionally, OTA update reliability should be better from now on, by switching to zsync2 with a few custom patches (#5810). The update from 2019.12 to 2020.01 managed to sometimes trigger an edge condition where the OTA update would just keep looping without ever finishing. Furthermore, the download progress will now be printed directly to the screen on supported devices, so you’ll always know exactly what’s happening.

By switching to the connectivity manager on Android, we should stop falsely triggering an unconnected message in some edge cases such as Ethernet, which you typically don’t see on the platform (#5801).

And as a final little unexpected gift, @poire-z implemented a calendar view for the reading statistics, so you can easily see what you were reading when (#5854).

An illustration of the calendar view.

We’d like to thank all contributors for their efforts. Some highlights since the previous release include:

  • Style tweaks: adds “Enforce steady line heights”
  • Wikipedia Save as EPUB: better gallery rendering
  • cre: default to enable crengine call cache
  • View HTML: adds another extended debug view ((#5800)) @poire-z
  • Update fonts & add Noto Sans Devanagari UI (#5803) @NiLuJe
  • [i18n] GetText: ignore fuzzy strings (#5807) @Frenzie
  • Allow running shell scripts from the FileManager/Favorites (#5804) @NiLuJe
  • Switch to zsync2 (#5810) @NiLuJe
  • Stop using the “calibre catalog” wording (#5813) @NiLuJe
  • File search & BookInfo: Don’t traverse hidden folders if we’re not showing them (#5816) @NiLuJe
  • end of document: add go to beginning (#5814) @yparitcher
  • Some improvements to the file browser speed when very large folders are involved. On a slow Kobo, you’d have needed at least 500 files in one folder to even have a chance to notice. (#5819, #5827) @Frenzie
  • Add “searchable” capabilities to OPDS catalogs (#5823) @bateast
  • Add searchable version of flibusta OPDS catalog (#5826) @avsej
  • android: switch to connectivity manager (#5801) @pazos
  • Remarkable port (#5697, #5828, #5834) @tcrs
  • Open more varieties of CBT with some upstream MuPDF patches (#5835) @q3cpma
  • Don’t waste time on dir/file attributes in subdirs (#5819, #5827, #5858) @Frenzie @yparitcher
  • Print zsync2’s output on screen (#5824) @NiLuJe
    This is really useful because it gives you a much better idea how much time is remaining for an OTA update.
  • skimto: add beginning and end as hold callback (#5820) @yparitcher
  • crengine: various table and other fixes (#5840) @poire-z
  • [doc] Add some basic info on using ffi-cdecl (#5808) @tcrs
  • Footer: bold font option (#5849) @poire-z
  • Spelling: for example, Wi-Fi, turn on/off (#5855, #5855) @comradekingu
  • Statistics: new Calendar view (#5854) @poire-z
  • PRSTUX fixes (#5857) @v01d

Full changelog — closed milestone issues

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