Author: Don

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Unleashing the Future: BlueSky and Its Open-Source Vision for Social Networking

Social networks have proliferated and they are at the center of much of our modern discourse. They can provide a level of sharing and learning that is not easily matched. Their asynchronous communication means that users do not have to be online at the same time. I joined Twitter in 2008 at the behest of the NYSCATE conference where I was presenting that year. I used it sparingly at first not knowing exactly how or what to share but over time I became a prolific user of the platform and the Twitterverse became integral to my pursuit of lifelong learning. Later when I started writing for Opensource.com it became a way to share our article for a wider audience.

That experience worked quite well for a while but we learned at a community conference in 2018 that what we were sharing wasn’t getting the traction it used to get as the medium was becoming increasingly controlled by algorithms that didn’t allow us to share our posts as we had. I don’t give up easily but in 2022 I began to move away from the Twitterverse and begin to explore Mastodon. It was a new gig and it took some time to learn how to share and find others who were open source nerds like me.

Then a new star emerged in the social media constellation when public signups for BlueSky in February 2024. BlueSky was launched by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. BlueSky embraces decentralization, giving users more control over their data and interactions. This approach fosters greater privcacy and security while encouraging a diverse and vibrant community. BlueSky is deeply rooted in open source principles. The platform runs on the AT protocol which is open source and allows for decentralized social networking. The AT protocol does not connect with ActivityPub which is the protocol that Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse runs on. BlueSky users can post three hundred character ‘skeets’ which are what user shared sare called. Mastodon users are used to five hundred character shares which are called ‘toots.’

Regardless of whether you are skeeting or tooting there is a great deal to celebrate with BlueSky. I signed up yesterday and it’s been great. The signup process is easy and there is a friendly algorithm to based on the people you follow and the ‘skeets’ you like. I have found it easy to connect with open source folks I have followed on the other platforms too. Though the platform is decentralized I have found following folks I know was much easier than follwing Mastdon users. According to ZDNet BlueSky currently has about 16.7 million users.

My primary interests are in Linux, open source and education. I found it easy to connect with folks in those areas and to easily connect and share what I’m learning. You can follow the Linux Foundation, Fedora Linux, Linux Mint, David Both, All Things Open. You can follow me on BlueSky. Happy skeeting!

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How to Easily Remove Metadata from Photos with ExifCleaner

In today’s world, nearly everyone owns a digital camera. Cameras are now integral components of smartphones and laptops. If you use consumer electronics, you likely have access to a digital camera.

As a result, billions of digital images are available on the Internet from various devices and sources. Each image taken with a digital camera includes Exchangeable Image File Format (Exif) metadata, which provides information about when and where the picture was taken, the camera used, file size, MIME type, color space, and much more.

Every picture you capture with a digital camera contains numerous tags with a wealth of information, some of which may be considered confidential. Major social media platforms claim to remove this metadata to protect users from cybercrime; however, this is not true for individuals who run their blogs or wikis and post images of family gatherings or classrooms. Someone could download an image from these sites and potentially access sensitive personal information stored in the metadata.

Viewing Exif Data

How can you check what metadata is included in the images you share, and how can you remove it? I recently discovered an open-source project called ExifCleaner. ExifCleaner is a cross-platform tool that easily removes all Exif metadata from images, videos, PDFs, and other file types.

Installing EXIFCleaner

ExifCleaner is released under the MIT license and is easy to use and install. Download and install the AppImage, deb or rpm file for your distribution. MacOS and Windows downloads are available too. If you are a Homebrew user you can install Exifcleaner with the following command:

brew install --cask exifcleaner

Exifcleaner was built for Intel MacOS exifcleaner and so requires Rosetta 2 to be installed.

Use ExifCleaner

Once installed, launch the graphical application. You can drag and drop an image into the window or use the “Open” option from the File menu to load an image. Multiple images can be loaded at once.

Screen picture by Don Watkins CC by SA 4.0
Screen picture by Don Watkins CC by SA 4.0

Once loaded, ExifCleaner clears all metadata instantly. There’s no further action required, but there’s also no confirmation or warning. Only open files in ExifCleaner that you want to scrub metadata from.ExifCleaner can process dozens of file types, including JPG, 3G2, 3GP2, AAX, CR2, MOV, PDF, PNG, etc.

Try ExifCleaner

ExifCleaner is available in twenty-four languages and boasts a large development community. If you’re interested in contributing to the project’s development, contact the team and check out the source code. To learn more about ExifCleaner, visit the official website.



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Mastering space management with ‘dfc’

The dfc command in Linux is a powerful tool that provides users with file system space usage information. It is a tool similar to df which provides a snapshot your file system. Here is a look at my file system using the df command:

don@Jude:~$ df
Filesystem     1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
tmpfs            6548596      2272   6546324   1% /run
/dev/nvme0n1p2 959786032 288646724 622311100  32% /
tmpfs           32742976     84192  32658784   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs               5120        12      5108   1% /run/lock
efivarfs             192       125        63  67% /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
tmpfs           32742976         0  32742976   0% /run/qemu
/dev/nvme0n1p1    523248      6284    516964   2% /boot/efi
tmpfs            6548592       208   6548384   1% /run/user/1000

I can tell with a quick glance that I still have a lot of space available on my system. Using dfc offers additional features such as color-coded output and graphical representations, making it easier to visualize disk usage at a glance. Here is a quick look at my system using dfc:

Screen picture by Don Watkins CC by SA 4.0

You can easily see that dfc provides more information and it color and in a format that is more readable for the user. You can turn off the default color option by issuing the following command:

$ dfc -c never

This provides a non color read out of the same data.

Screen picture by Don Watkins CC by SA 4.0

You can display all the file systems including pseudo, duplicate and inaccessible filesystems by using the following command:

$ dfc -a
Screen picture by Don Watkins CC by SA 4.0

The dfc command was not included with my distribution and had to be installed from the command line for Ubuntu based distributions.

$ sudo apt install dfc

installation for .rpm based distributions would be the following:

$ sudo dnf install dfc

The command is open source with a BSD-Clause License. You can export the output of the command in HTML, JSON, Tex and CSV formats. The man page provides excellent documentation and explanation of the various switches for the command. Use the dfc -h command display an excellent help menu with all the options for the command.

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Educators to Follow on Mastodon for Innovative Teaching Insights

I have been using Mastodon for almost six years. I continue to be amazed at the quality of discourse and the diverse community of educators and folks interested in education in the Fediverse. If you are a person who is accustomed to algorithm driven centralized social networks then Mastodon is going to seem a bit unusual at first. If you are WordPress user you can connect your blog to Mastodon with the ActivityPub plugin. You don’t need a blog to connect to Mastodon. You just need to create an account on anyone of dozens of Mastodon instances that exist around the world. One you are connected to an instance you can find other users and connect to them whether they are on your particular server instance or not.

Mastodon communications are driven by hashtags which many of you are already familiar with. Some of my favorites are #edtech

A toot on Mastodon is typically five hundred characters long. Like other microblogging platforms you may have used before brevity is prized but there’s more than enough space to get your information across and then you use hashtags to let your audience know what your toot is about.

Here’s a list of twenty-one educators currently using Mastodon.

Eric Sheninger – @esheninger@mastodon.social
Sandy Kendell – @SandyKendell@mastodon.education
Wesley Fryer – @wfryer@mastodon.cloud
Martin Dougiamas – @martin@openedtech.social
Alice Barr – @alicebarr@techhub.social
Miguel Guhlin – @mguhlin@mastodon.education
EdTech Group – @edtech@chirp.social
Clint LaLonde – @clintlalonde@mastodon.oeru.org
Doug Holton – https://mastodon.social/@dougholton
Anna Millis – @amills@mastodon.oeru.org
Open at Virginia Tech – @openatvt@fosstodon.org
SPARC – @sparc@mastodon.social
Project Gutenberg – @gutenberg_org@mastodon.social
Smithsonian Magazine – @Smithsonianmag@flipboard.com
Steven Beschloss – @StevenBeschloss@mastodon.social
Bill Fitzgerald = @funnymonkey@freeradical.zone
WikiEducation – @WikiEducation@wikis.world
CreativeCommons – @creativecommons@mastodon.social
Edutopia – @edutopia@mastodon.education
Cognitively Accessible Math – @geonz@mathstodon.xyz
NPR – @npr@mastodon.social
Open Source Science – @os-sci@mastodon.social

In conclusion, Mastodon offers a refreshing alternative to traditional, algorithm-driven social networks. Its decentralized nature and vibrant community provide an enriching environment for educators and those passionate about education. Whether you’re sharing your thoughts, discovering new ideas through hashtags, or connecting your WordPress blog with the ActivityPub plugin, Mastodon opens up a world of possibilities. Embrace the change and dive into meaningful conversations on this unique platform. Happy tooting!

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The Perfect Open Source Solution for Creating Stunning Photo Collages on Linux

Open source software is amazing and it seems like there are always solutions that come in handy when I look hard enough. Today was one of those days when a internet search for a query I read on Mastodon netted another open source solution. Mastodon user, Bryan Mitchell asked “Are there any photo editing software programs out there where you can put a set of photos into a collage?” Bryan had used Google’s Picasa formerly but that is no longer available. A quick search revealed an open source project called Photocollage. It is an easy to use software package written in Python with a GPL 2.0 license. It was easy for me to find the correct install script for Linux Mint. 

$ sudo apt install photocollage

You can also install Photocollage on RPM based distributions by using the following command: 

$ sudo dnf install photocollage

You can elect to install it with Python by using the following command. 

sudo pip3 install photocollage

It can be launched from the command line or in my case from the “Graphics” submenu of my Cinnamon desktop. Click on the ‘Add images..’ button and start adding pictures to your collage.

Screen Picture by Don Watkins CC by SA 4.0

In short order I added a number of pictures from a directory on my computer. There is a button to ‘Save poster’, two buttons in the middle of the panel to ‘go back’ or ‘go forward” and one more at the end to ‘Regenerate’ the collage.’

Screen Shot by Don Watkins CC by SA 4.0

The last button on the panel is for ‘Settings’ to allow you to choose different picture sizes and templates. You can select border thickness and background color.

Screen picture by Don Watkins CC by SA 4.0

This software is easy to use and the results a very good. Images can be saved in ten different formats including: bit map paint, jpeg, gif, Microsoft Paint, pcx, png, tga, tiff, WebP and xbm. The software integrates with GNOME and is available in English, French, German, Czech, Italian, Bulgarian, Dutch, Russian, Spanish, Polish and Ukrainian. Lead developer is Adrien Verge and there are over twenty other contributors.

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We are not going back!

Mom’s birthday is in a couple of days. Had she lived she’d be ninety-eight this year. Mom was born at Misericordia Hospital in Manhattan on November 6, 1926. She was born a mere six year after a woman’s right to vote was ratified in August of 1920. Mom’s father died on her fourth birthday and her family was taken in by a kindly aunt and uncle who gave my grandmother, Mom and her two year old brother a place to live. That was in the days before there were Social Security survivor benefits and if it hadn’t been for Uncle Bill and Aunt Mae I don’t know how Mom’s family would have survived.

They did survive however and Grandma, Mom, her brother, Uncle Bill, Aunt Mae and their two children who were born eventually lived in a walk up on 90th Street in Jackson Heights. Uncle Bill and Aunt Mae also took in a couple of cousins who’s father had a serious drinking problem and couldn’t or wouldn’t care for his two sons. Ten people in one apartment in Jackson Heights. The children all went to Catholic schools in the Queens and Manhattan. As Mom was nearing high school graduation Grandma told her the only way she could go to college was to earn a scholarship. My grandmother was a stenographer in the New York City court system.

Mom came home to Jackson Heights and applied for a teaching job but was turned down because she wasn’t a coach. Nowadays’s Mom would be able to sue for discrimination but in 1947 women had few rights. A Jesuit seminarian who lived upstairs in their apartment building encouraged Mom to apply for a Masters program in mathematics at Fordham University. She was accepted and worked her way through Fordham in one year enroute to a Masters degree in Mathematics. Surely she was employable now. Alas, she was no coach and she was once again denied employment on the basis of her sex. D’Youville College offered her a position as an instructor and Mom returned to Buffalo to teach for the Grey Nuns who were the folks who ran the college back then. Mom taught college mathematics for four years. During that time she met my Dad. They got married in 1951 and I was born the following year.

They had relocated for my father to complete an internship. When they returned to Western New York for my father to setup a dental practice Mom elected to work as his dental assistant and forego a teaching career. It’s doubtful that a married woman with an infant son and another on the way would have been hired to teach anywhere in the early 1950’s. Those rights were denied women into the early 1970’s. My father’s health declined in the early 1970’s and he eventually died. Even though Mom had been a cosigner on a home mortgage with my father she was denied credit in 1973 following his death to obtain housing for our family. Women couldn’t seek credit on their own until the following year in 1974.

Mom voted for Hillary Clinton eight years ago and I’m sure she would have cast a vote for Kamala Harris this time too. Mom knew well the trials and tribulations of women who were long treated as second class citizens in a country where all citizens are guaranteed life liberty and property by the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution. Women got the right to vote eighty-four years ago with the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution but we’ve never elected one president of the United States. Let’s hope that changes this year.

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The shift to ARM and the rise of Linux integration

Apple’s computers switched from Intel X86 to ARM in 2020 when the company nnounced the M1 in November 2020. Since that time they have continued to release more ARM processors and now they have the M4 and M4 plus. ARM which stands for Advanced RISC machine. ARM is a CPU that uses a reduced instruction set and does not require a separate GPU. All the processing occurs on one chip. ARM processors are designed to be cost effective, consume less power and generate less heat than their X86 counterparts.

Not only does the ARM processor consume less power and cost less but it also has the processing power to effectively power large language models on individual personal computers and AI image generating software very quickly and robustly. Since Apple introduced the ARM processors in their computers there has been a drive to bring ARM to Linux. The Asahi Linux project aims to bring the power of Linux to Apple Silicon Macs. Pinebook Pro has brought Linux to an ARM processor powered notebook computer. Their machine is meant to deliver a solid day-to-day Linux experience.

Manjaro comes preinstalled on Pinebook Pro which can also run Debian, Arch, Armbian, BSD, Gentoo, Fedora, OpenSuse and Q4OS. Despite the progress there is still a shortage of ARM equipped computers for Linux folks to use. System76 recently announced a server line which will be powered by ARM chips. For now Linux users will have to satisfy themselves with the Pinebook Pro and Raspberry Pi 5 which are both wonderful examples of ARM computers.

Microsoft’s Surface Pro is another great example of an ARM powered mobile computer but to date I have not read of anyone installing Linux on it.

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Balancing Power and Portability: The journey of a technophile

When I attended All Things Open a year ago, I carried a Hewlett-Packard DevOne, which I had purchased the year before. Two years ago, I was anxious to try the DevOne because I wanted to try an AMD Ryzen 7 with Linux. It was a platform I had never used. I have been a solid Intel user for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. I liked the size and feel of the computer, but in an all-day conference where I attended all the keynotes and other sessions using the computer for note-taking, tweeting, and tooting, I was disappointed in the battery life.

I came home, put the laptop for sale on E-bay, and decided I was going to buy one of the newer 15-inch M2 MacBook Air computers. I have enjoyed using the MacBook to experiment with Stable Diffusion, DiffusionBee, Llamafile, Ollama, and other applications. I took the MacBook to a half-day conference in mid-April and have used it sparingly since then, but I was determined to give an actual test at All Things Open earlier this week. It surpassed all my expectations for its exceptional battery life. I attended all the keynotes and many sessions where I took notes and live-tooted what I was seeing and hearing, and at the end of the day, each day, I had around seventy percent of battery life. That is simply amazing.

I’m not ready to ditch Linux. I’m writing this article on my main desktop, which runs Linux Mint Cinnamon, but I am impressed with the battery life of the M2 MacBook Air. I have found the M2 chip equal to almost everything I have used it for. Apple has introduced the new MacBook Pro with an M4, sixteen gigabytes of RAM, and 512 GB drive with three Thunderbolt ports and HDMI. I came close to buying one today. I learned while I was at All Things Open that it might make sense for me to get a MacBook with a bit more RAM to continue experimenting with locally hosted large language models.

Being a technophile has its rewards and challenges, and I am presented with another one now. Apple will give me a five hundred eighty dollar trade-in on the M2 MacBook Air. The new MacBook Pro has a fourteen-inch display, and the MacBook Air has a fifteen-inch display. I like the larger display, but there is no doubt that there are compelling reasons to go with the newer, more powerful MacBook Pro with lots of expansion. Should I pay another two hundred dollars for a terabyte of storage, or should I stay with the stock of five hundred twelve gigabyte drives? Lots of decisions.

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Ensuring Data Security Through Disk Erasure

Many people choose to encrypt their disk drives because it is one way of ensuring that your data stays secure and safe from the prying eyes of others. I always shy away from encrypting my disk because I don’t have theneed for that kind of security. When one of my computers reaches end or life or I decide to sell it then I take special measures to ensure that all the information is erased. II am also frequently called on to help clients to help them dispose of an old computer when they purchase a new one. What do you do when selling a computer or replacing an old spinning rust drive with a newer solid state drive? That’s when I think of securely erasing them to ensure that confidential information is removed before repurposing or disposing of them. 

Fundamentally, disk erasure on Linux serves as a versatile solution that tackles security, compliance, performance, and sustainability needs, catering to the varied demands of users. Whether for individual usage or organizational requirements, disk erasure is a forward-thinking strategy in data management and information security.Here are five commands to erase a disk on Linux:

Here are five command sequences to ensure that data is securely erased from your Linux data drive(s).

dd command:

$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M

This command writes zeros to the entire disk, effectively erasing all data.

shred command:

$ sudo shred -v /dev/sdX

The shred command overwrites the disk multiple times, making data recovery very difficult.

wipe Command:

$ sudo wipe -r /dev/sdX

The wipe command is designed to securely erase disks by overwriting them with random data.

blkdiscard Command (for SSDs):

$ sudo blkdiscard /dev/sdX

This command discards all data on the specified SSD, effectively erasing it.

parted and mkfs Commands:

$ sudo parted /dev/sdX mklabel gpt
$ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX

Using parted to create a new partition table followed by mkfs to format the disk erases the existing data.

Replace /dev/sdX with your actual disk identifier. Always double-check the device identifier before running any of these commands to avoid accidental data loss.

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DIY Bootable Linux Disk Creation Without Internet Access or Additional Tools

I keep a bootable Linux disk with me most of the time because I never know when I am going to need to use one to rescue a crashed Microsoft Windows machine or turn someone on to the Linux desktop. Most distributions include my own daily driver Linux Mint Cinnamon have utilities that make boot disk creation much easier than it used to be. If you are on a Windows or MacOS platform you could use a great utility like Etcher.io which is one of my favorite boot disk creation tools. But let’s suppose that you are using a Linux computer with no connection to the internet and no other disk creation tools.

You could use dd which is tool that many folks have never used but it’s still a reliable utility and one that can make a bootable disk when all else fails. The dd command is a Linux utility that is sometimes referred to as ‘disk destroyer’ or ‘data duplicator and it is very useful and effective if you have no other way to create a bootable USB drive.

You will need a FAT32 formatted USB drive. Then you will need to determine the directory in which the iso file bearing the Linux distribution resides so that you can point to it in your command sequence. You will also need to use the lsblk command to determine which block device you are going to send your data to. Use of the dd command without good information can be devastating to the health of your system as it is easy to overwrite the wrong drive like your boot and/or data drive.

With your USB stick inserted into your computer open a terminal issue the following command:

$ lsblk

You should receive an output that looks something like this.

$ /dev/sdb1 or /dev/sdc1

Unmount the drive with the following command. 

$ sudo umount /dev/sdX1

 Use the dd command to write the ISO file to the USB drive:

$ sudo dd if=/path/to/linux.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress

Replace /path/to/linux.iso with the path to your ISO file and /dev/sdX with the correct device identifier

After the dd command completes, you can verify that the data was written correctly by chechecking the output of lsblk or fdisk -1.

Once the process is complete, safely eject the USB drive:

$ sudo eject /dev/sdX

Now you are ready to start using your newly created Linux boot drive to rescue Windows systems or turn somene on to using Linux.