ʞuᴉԀ@Paper

I was investigating a photo tool today that looked interesting. It's in the relatively early stages of development but it's functional and for me that's all it needs to be.

Getting the server for the app running was very easy on Debian 12 as docker is well supported on the platform and the application comes as a docker-compose setup.

A few short commands later, some docker image downloading, and we're up and running and connecting to http://localhost:8888 to test it.

Great. A result. Less than an hour and I was playing with it. I could leave it there but I wanted to see what the client apps were like so first of all I started with the 'desktop' app. This is an Electron App that currently has no published binary.

I don't have much experience with Electron other than fairly often going 'Fuck this, I'll just use the PWA under chromium.” but I wanted to see what this client app did at least.

So I ran through all the steps of cloning the git repo, running npm install to grab all the dependencies and then npm start, as instructed.

GPU process isn't usable. Goodbye.

Search time. Google's unsolicited AI jumps in and wants me to run DirectX Diagnostic tools on Windows despite my search including the fact I'm on Linux.

After providing some feedback to Google to tell them exactly what they can do with their stochastic parrot I went looking further.

Search more in actual results, I'm getting the theme that it's a security/sandboxing issue.

Could it be? I'm running it from an NTFS mount that is causing the problem, I think this is unlikely but well we need to start eliminating things based on pointers that have helped various other people 'fix' this on StackOverflow/Reddit.

Could it be? something about my setup means I'm not getting appropriate permissions in user space to access something that's in kernel space.

I tried various things as suggested but most of those were for compiled electron apps and I only had 'npm start' in a folder to work with.

So can I compile this app?, oh that's another rabbit hole of packaging and deploying and complaints about out of date insecure modules with breaking changes if I update them.

Then it hits me, is npm thinking the arguments I'm trying such as --no-sandbox or --in-process-gpu or --disable-gpu-sandbox are for it and not to pass through to the Electron App despite it not complaining at all about weird parameters being passed to it?

Let's just try npm start -- --no-sandbox.

Yep. That's the solution.

Well at least I can try this 'desktop' app out now and it is slightly better than the default web interface so I don't feel like I've completely wasted my time.

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This is not intended as a step by step guide but it should hopefully point someone in the right direction.

While I haven't been able to get Aurora HDR from Skylum software to run the installer under Wine 8 on Debian 12 I have recently had some success in getting an installation that I copied from Windows to run. And I'm assuming that if you're trying to run Aurora HDR then you initially bought it and ran it on windows.

It was pretty much as simple as using winetricks to install corefonts, d3dcompiler_47, and dotnet48.

winetricks -q corefonts d3dcompiler_47 dotnet48

However, I will caution you that I was doing this in a new WINEPREFIX and if you've already been messing with wine for other things you may have conflicts unless you explicitly create a new WINEPREFIX or you clean out your old one and start from scratch.

After installing core fonts, D3D, and dotnet 4.8... I then copied the “Aurora HDR” installation folder over to my wine-folder's “Program Files” folder with something along the lines of.

cp /mnt/windows/c/Program\ Files/Aurora\ HDR ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/

I then made a .desktop file to launch it.

[Desktop Entry]
Comment=Aurora HDR Image Editor
Exec=wine '~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Aurora HDR/Aurora HDR.exe' %u
Name=Aurora HDR
Path='~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Aurora HDR/'
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
Type=Application

As I wanted an icon I used 7zFM.exe – also launched under wine because I couldn't be bothered to find out how to extract from Windows executable files under linux directly – to open the Aurora HDR.exe file as an archive and extracted the icons I found at the locations... “Aurora HDR.exe.rsrc\ICON\”

The 1.ico, 2.ico, 3.ico are all windows icon files but the file just named “4” is a high resolution PNG file so I used that one and renamed it to AuroraHDR.png, copied it to the same folder as the app, and then pointed the desktop file to it.

There are, of course, a few issues.

The custom dialogs it uses for some things, such as when it asks if you want to quit without saving, glitch badly but if you click where a button is supposed to be and keep holding the mouse button down while dragging away from the buttons then the buttons do at least render.

And there are no previews of images in the very-cut-down Wine file select dialog, but I get round that with the %u in the desktop entry and choosing “Open with” from whatever app I'm browsing my images from.

Wishing you luck.

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Well What Do We Have Here

A good friend came over yesterday to spend some time checking a couple of Amiga A500s for damage.

There's probably at least one battery that needs dealing with here.

The first one is an A500+ and as it has an internal battery it's best we get it open and have a look.

Not looking bad overall but it's bit fluffy around that battery and some of the legs on the chips are pretty green.

Looking at the expansion card, that could also do with some preventative care even if we're not going to do anything else with it right now. There's been quite a bit of at least surface attack here as almost every chip now has green legs.

We're going to need a few tools. Mostly some vinegar to help neutralise that alkaline leakage and then some isopropyl alcohol to clean things up a bit. But a soldering iron will also be handy along with some cutters and a few other helpful things. Most essential of all being the flapjacks.

After removing the batteries and a whole bunch of scrubbing with the vinegar and the IPA, using an old toothbrush, we get back to something a lot cleaner and that should help prevent any further immediate degradation from occurring.

Before we put this all back together it's going to be a good idea to give it a lot of forced warm air to get rid of any remaining moisture under the chips and luckily I have a hot air solder reflow tool which we can use on a low temperature setting with a fairly directional nozzle to help that along.

This is just the beginning of the journey for these recovered machines. They'll need some testing and possibly some minor repairs such as the one done on this expansion card to fix up a couple of tracks.

But once they're back in good working condition he has a new case for one of them to go in and some more new cases on the way.

It's been quite a while since we last got to catch up so we spent a lot of time chatting and not as much time as we maybe hoped actually doing things with Amigas but the important thing was to prevent any further rot of the circuits in these.

#RetroComputing #Amiga #Amiga500 #ComputingRepair

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But I'm Not Fascist

You can't really be “Meh, not bovered” when it comes to topics such as fascism.

If you aren't anti-fascist then you're allowing fascists the freedom to move and once they've stomped all over the people you don't care about then they'll stomp on you. Hell, they'll even stomp on each other once they've run out of others to stomp on because it's not about them hating someone else it's about them finding someone else to blame for their own inadequacies and it's about feeling like they have power over others. It's about making people subservient to them. It's about them finding their niche in their little pyramid of power.

There's this scale, and you sit somewhere on it.

[] Fascist [] Fascist apologist [] Moderate [] Anti-Fascist

If you're anywhere on that scale other than Anti-Fascist then you are enabling fascists.

Antifa isn't some organisation, it's anyone who doesn't support or enable fascism.

Antifa is anyone who's ever stood up against fascists or against fascism taking hold anywhere.

I'd like to think I'm anti-fascist, but I'm not always. Not all the time. Sometimes I accidentally find myself in the moderate camp. When I do find myself in the moderate camp I try to push myself firmly back in to the anti-fascist camp because that's where I want to be.

Fascists don't take power, they're given it. They're given it by the silence of moderates who give some weight to the arguments of fascist apologists.

An apologist will use arguments of patriotism, and pride in people like “you” to try and make you feel bad about not supporting them or not giving them space to air their views.

But you already know what you should be proud of, you already know what is part of true patriotism.

Being anti-fascist!

#antifa #fascism #politics #society

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Heading Goes Here

It's been a while since I've used Markdown and I don't remember any of the formatting.

I thought I'd try out a federated blogging site so that if I want to write some longform content then I have the option to do so.

Why?

The problem I have with most social media sites is that what I want to say, in the way I want to say it, doesn't always fit well in 100, or 240, or 500, or whatever number of characters a particular implementation of “talk to other people” uses.

While I'm trying to get everything to fit, and rework it to do so, and then remember I also wanted to add some hashtags, and then think of another point I'd like to add, and then rework it again, and then decide it needs two posts, so reformat again to add 1/x. Oh now I need three. What actually was I trying to convey again?

Don't get me wrong, I'm naturally wordy when I'm writing and it's a good exercise to attempt to be concise but there are also times when I just want to let the idea flow. On most sites I delete more posts I've written before they've been posted than I actually post. If I can't find a way to get the idea or thought across then I won't post it as incomplete.

So I'm here. I don't really want a formal blog with lots of bells and whistles and annoying cookies. Something simple with Markdown as my control should do fine. And I'm hoping I can link to images on my Pixelfed instance, which might mean there will be the odd strange image uploaded there just because I want to show it here. But I'll put them all in a Blog collection or such like.

So best best try out an image then. (Yes, two bests. English is great.)

View image post here

Well that's it for now, that's why this is here and hopefully I'll find the odd use for it and be able to feed it in to my main account.

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