Jason Lengstorf

 

Pouya Saadeghi

 

Simon Willison

 

Mansehej Singh

A huge chunk of our audience is students and we have been receiving a lot of requests to talk about an open-source note-taking solution so that's why today we are going to talk about Joplin.

Taking notes the open-source style

Joplin is an open-source note-taking application that is also cross-platform so your notes and todos get synced whether you are on android or your desktop. So without any further ado, Let's get to it.

Install and Setup

Joplin provides an amazing install script to get you up and running in no time in case of Linux.

Just copy and paste this into your terminal and this will fetch the latest
  version of Joplin and install it.

wget -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/laurent22/joplin/master/Joplin_install_and_update.sh | bash

If you are a Windows User, get Joplin from here. This will download a standalone executable and you can place and use it wherever you like.

In case of Mac you can also use homebrew to install Joplin, just type in

brew cask install Joplin

Note: The official homebrew package isn't supported. For more information head over to Joplin's Github Page.

The final step is that if you want notes to be synchronized on your android device as well, you need to install the android app which you can get from the Play Store.

Taking notes

Now that we have Joplin installed we can get to its main utility ie taking notes. One of the best things about Joplin is that it supports notes in markdown. Markdown is a way to style text on the web. You control the display of the document formatting words as bold or italic, adding images, etc. For example, putting a hash in front of the text makes it a heading.

# Heading 1

## Heading 2

### Heading 3

Or maybe put * to make the text bold. For the full markdown syntax guide refer here. Now Joplin also has an option in beta to edit the text in its WYSIWYG editor as well. (P.S.: The editor is a bit flaky and not recommended if you have crucial notes you cannot afford to lose).

So as you can see this contains mainly four divisions, The first one contains your notebooks ie collection of notes. Next, there are your notes, So whatever notes you have saved in your notebook are shown here. In the end, there is your page which is written in markdown and is rendered beautifully in the final column. The UI Is very light and intuitive and I have to be honest, I like it a lot. Now let us discuss some other features this application has to offer.

Attached TUI application

So as much as people like GUI apps, a lot of times people who live in the terminal want everything in the terminal and for that Joplin provides us with a TUI or a text user interface as well. Seems like a great utility at least to me so that you don't have to get out of the terminal to look at your notes for something, you want to do in the terminal itself.

The Web clipper

Joplin has amazing functionality for a web clipper wherein you can clip whatever text, images, etc you like from the web and include it into your notes. It comes as a browser extension for all major browsers, just click on the extension and select whatever menu option you like.

Synchronization with cloud services

Using Joplin, you can synchronize all your notes with your cloud platform services as well which means that you will never miss any of your notes even if you distro hop or switch over to some other operating systems. Joplin lets you synchronize with all the major cloud service providers including but not limited to Dropbox and Nextcloud.

Global Search

Another feature that I often use is the global search feature or as Joplin likes to call it "Goto Anything". You can press Ctrl+g to access this feature. This opens up a text box wherein you can start a fuzzy search and look for whatever you want.

Export from Evernote

So this is again a feature that I believe that people are going to like. You can directly export your Evernote notes into this application and take the great leap from proprietary to OSS software :D.

Value for privacy

Joplin is an application that completely values your privacy and hence it does not send any unauthorized data back and since it is completely open-source in nature, you can believe it XD. You can also turn off sync whenever you like so Joplin will stop sending data to your sync service as well.

Alarm

This is a weird feature that I for one have never used before but seems nice to have when you want it. Alarms can be simply associated with a task in a note this can cause a notification or ring your phone or laptop.

End to end encryption

Joplin supports end-to-end encryption (E2EE) on all the applications. E2EE is a system where only the owner of the data can read it. It prevents potential eavesdroppers - including telecom providers, internet providers, and even the developers of Joplin from being able to access the data. Please see the End-To-End Encryption Tutorial for more information about this feature and how to enable it.

This is all for this amazing note-taking application Joplin is. Thanks for being O.S.S software.

Also, stay tuned because this Sunday we are going to be talking about the great tale of python.

Previously we talked about gpg keys, this week we are going to be talking about an application of gpg keys ie signing git commits using them

But why do I need to sign my commits

Git is cryptographically secure. But as with most things on the internet, you can't trust what you see. But you don't have to extremely skeptical either, the least you can do is ensure that whatever stuff you put on there is trusted and verified.

What exactly Is GPG?

GPG stands for GnuPG which is a free implementation of the OpenPGP standard for encryption. It is a command-line tool which helps you manage your keys and helps you create new ones when needed.

As Edward Snowden has rightly said,

Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to >hide is no different from saying you don't care about free speech because you have >nothing to say.

Not to bore you out of your seats, let us get to it and get our hands dirty.

Configuring GPG

First of all, you need gpg configured and your key installed. For that, open your terminal and execute this -

gpg --list-keys

This tells you if you have already had any keys. If you don't, go ahead and generate one by typing in -

gpg --gen-key

This will ask you a series of questions. Go ahead and answer them, and finally you are going to get a gpg key.

For more information on getting a gpg key, refer to our last blogpost about Introduction to GPG Keys.

Now that you finally have a key, you can use it to start signing things such as your commits and tags. For people who don't know what tags are, they are used to signify important milestones in a repositories history.

Ok now back to signing commits. So now you finally have a gpg key, let us configure it to sign your commits.

Now when you do a gpg --list-keys you are going to see something similar to this -

$ gpg --list-keys

/Users/schacon/.gnupg/pubring.gpg
---------------------------------
pub 2048R/0A46826A 2014-06-04
uid Scott Chacon (Git signing key) <schacon@gmail.com>
sub 2048R/874529A9 2014-06-04

The characters in the pub line before the slash are the ones useful to us. So, copy them down somewhere.

Now let us tell git to sign using this key -

$ git config --global user.signingkey 0A46826A

Git is now going to use our key to sign all our commits. Go ahead and sign your first commit by using this -

$ git commit -a -S -m 'Signed commit'

You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Scott Chacon (Git signing key) <schacon@gmail.com>"
2048-bit RSA key, ID 0A46826A, created 2014-06-04

[master 5c3386c] Signed commit
4 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 24 deletions(-)
rewrite Rakefile (100%)
create mode 100644 lib/git.rb

You can also see what commits you have in your history which have been signed or unsigned by using this -

$ git log --show-signature -1

You are going to see something similar to this -

commit 9368a922432e8caa6ee84eb800994322bef55095 (HEAD -> master, origin/master)
gpg: Signature made Monday 15 June 2020 09:28:28 AM IST
gpg: using RSA key B27561095B6B3DC15182CD75453432554F506A4B
gpg: Good signature from "Manav Sethi <manav.sethi@outlook.in>" [ultimate]
Author: insaanimanav <manav.sethi@outlook.in>
Date: Mon Jun 15 09:28:28 2020 +0530

Initial Commit

This means that the commit was properly signed and it can be verified.

But the next problem is what if you want git to automatically sign your commits each time without you explicitly telling it with the ** -S ** option. There is a way to prevent this. To make git automatically sign your commits you can use this

$ git config commit.gpgsign true

This is all about signing your commits locally. But there is another benefit to signing commits, which is that you can put your gpg key upon your git server and let it verify that the commit came directly from you. This can help in preventing Man In The Middle - MITM attacks.

For this guide, I am going to be using Github. But you can use whatever git server you are using.

• First of all, go ahead and login to your GitHub account.
• Head to the menu in the top right and select settings from it.
• In settings, go to the section of ssh keys and gpg keys and then go to the gpg keys. Click on add.
• This will prompt you to enter your key. Export your key and paste it here.

Voila! Now you have your gpg key imported in Github and can start working with it.

All the commits that you push to Github are now going to say verified in front of them, which means that they came directly from you.

It's the year 1991. Microsoft and Apple have been trading blows for decades now, and finally the war ground is about to settle. 

Imagine you are Microsoft at that time. With assured global dominance, things are looking pretty good for you. But, you are still cutting out the main heroes of the story, i.e. the software developers, sysadmins, etc. 

Meanwhile, this Finnish geek along with some people who call themselves "rebels" are duct taping an OS kernel together which they are calling Linux.

Initially, you are not worried about them. They are just a handful of people trying to do this as a hobby. But eventually, the sheer size of Linux gets so big that you can't help but notice this huge behemoth. The amount of people contributing to the Linux kernel gets much, much larger than the number of the Microsoft devs.

To give you an estimate of how much, there were around ten thousand lines of code in the 1990s. A decade later, that was at 3 million lines. And in case you are wondering, it is at around 20 million now. The above statistic gives you a rough estimate of how massively open-source software can grow, and it's power.

Linux was this weird Operating System that gave you the source code, the liberty to play with it and make it behave however you wanted it to. This was strange in the sense that nobody had previously thought of the idea of giving away the source code for people to modify.

Getting access to the Linux command line was a transformative experience for a lot of people. They just could not go back from this appealing experience. 

Discovering access to Linux is like gaining access to a secret society. People used to share Linux CDs, similar to how people used to share mixtapes of underground music.

Some people were always begging for access to the command line. Before the OS wars, there was Richard Stalman with GNU. But Linux was the OS that delivered like no other. 

While Apple and Microsoft were fighting for domination, the internet was more peer-to-peer in nature and not so much client-server. IBM was the opposite of Linux wherein they did have terminals, but they were all dumb terminals. This meant that they were only smart enough to manage the UI, but the user wasn't able to use it in any other way. 

The GUI was slowly becoming more and more popular, but there was always a pull in the opposite direction wherein developers wanted access to the command line.

The early contributors and lovers of the open-source software were pioneers, I  am standing on their shoulders, we all are.

Let's now forward a little bit to the year 1998, where things have changed a lot with a sudden revolution in the client-server internet realm. At this time, every business out there wanting to stay relevant not only has to get a website built, but also needs to manage databases, update the website, and a host of other things. All of which required them to pay for server space. 

Now for small businesses, paying for proprietary operating systems was not possible. The cost of working with a cheap Linux box was much less than the cost of working with a Windows box. So naturally, people went for Linux.

This is the point that Microsoft realized that Linux was taking away it's customers. Now when you poke a bear as big as Microsoft, you bet they are going to react. So to try and get people to switch over from Linux, they started spreading this propaganda called FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt). 

The idea was that as Linux is open source, it's not reliable and full of bugs. Initially, some businesses became wary of Linux. But,

Money has a funny way of convincing people to get over their hangups.

It was not just Microsoft, it was an entire industry vs this weird new guy. 

For example, anyone with a stake in Unix was concerned about Linux and its rise. The SEO group that maintained Unix at that time waged lawsuits for decades, but all in vain. Linux was on the rise and Microsoft still needed to make a move. To top it all off, one of their biggest competitors, IBM just invested a shit ton in Linux because they predicted that Linux was going to be the future. Even the money side was in Linux's favor now. 

Fast forward to a few years, 99 percent of the servers were running Linux. Along comes the smartphone, and Linux was ready, waiting.

Apple and their iPhones took up a sizeable share of the market. Microsoft hoped to get in on that but surprise surprise.

Linux was there too, ready and rearing to go.

Google used the Linux kernel to create and develop Android. 

The ground was breaking up now, and Microsoft was about to fall into the cracks. 

Microsoft's then CEO Steve Balmer's perspective on Linux was that open-source is cancer. If you give people the source code to anything, they are going to copy-paste it, and then some viral license such as GPL is going to be applied to it.

Fast forward a few years, Steve Balmer is out and Microsoft has got a new, forward-thinking CEO - Satya Nadella. Let us drop this for a minute and Imagine something. Let's say you are playing football and all of a sudden the ground becomes slick. What do you do? 

You have to change your footwear and continue playing right?

This is something that Satya realized.

Linux was the tide and trying to prevent it from coming would be extreme foolishness. The only way out was to go with the tide.

In 2013, Microsoft's cloud platform Azure supported Linux virtual machines out of the box. Satya realized that they when you release a cloud platform, you can't force people to use a particular operating system. If you want enterprises to use your cloud service, you can't shove a choice down the people's throats. It's 2013, Satya Nadella gets up on stage, and they are just trying to get one big fat point across.

Microsoft loves Linux.

He tells everyone how 20 percent of Azure is Linux and that Azure will always have world class support for it and it's distributions. Microsoft had to swallow their pride and disagree with whatever they said earlier. 

Time and time again, we see the power of open source and what it can achieve. A company even the size of Microsoft can't compete with the thousands of open source developers and volunteers. It was change or perish.

Today's Microsoft is simply not your Mom and Dad's Microsoft. Microsoft now releases a lot of their source code under the public domain. For example, when .NET was released, Microsoft didn't think there would be any contributions. But today, more than 50 percent of contributions come from outside Microsoft. 

Open source has devoured the tech world now. Linux is everywhere. Even though you don't realize it, you use it all the time. Each time you do a google search, you are using Linux. Each time you scroll your Facebook, you use Linux. The heck with that, each time you pick up your Android phone, you are using Linux.

Linux is not the enemy, it is the atmosphere.

I guess the lesson in all this is that successful companies have to remain open. When we are wired together, our capacity to work and create increases manifolds. And isn't that the whole point of software development?

That concludes our series on the OS wars, and the power of open source. 

Stay tuned because this Tuesday, we are going to have a very requested post - How to sign git commits using GPG keys.

What exactly is KDE Connect?

KDE Connect is a free and open-source cross-platform application that can be used to connect your devices and synchronize stuff within them easily.

Now without any further ado let's get started with KDE connect.

Installation

Step 1: Installing KDE connect on your desktop

So I am going to go over installing KDE connect on Windows and Linux here. If you want to install it on a mac device head over to Inoki's blog.

Linux Users

KDE Connect would be most probably available in your distro's repositories, so just use your package manager to \fetch and install it. 

For example in the case of Ubuntu shell:

 $ sudo apt-get install kdeconnect 

Or Maybe in case of Arch: 

$ sudo pacman -S kdeconnect

Windows Users

You have two possible ways now to get KDE Connect on Windows 

• Get the  Nightly build 

• Build it yourself

 I would personally fetch the nightly build instead of setting up the entire build environment and thenbuilding it. After either, you get an exe and you just need to run it.

Step 2: Installing KDE connect on Android

Install KDE connect on android from the Play Store or F-Droid.

Step 3: Setting it up

Once you have KDE connect installed on both your desktop and your android smartphone, you can start by pairing them together. Open it up on either of the devices, and you are going to see the other device provided it should be on the same network. 

For example, in the case of android, you can see that It is discovering my pc which has the hostname insaanimanav@manav. Click on the device you want to connect to. It will ask you to request pairing with the selected device. 

As soon as you do, you are going to receive a prompt on the other device. Click on accept and you are good to go.

My phone doesn't see my laptop

Troubleshoot KDE connect

OK I have set it up. But why?

KDE Connect lets you do a LOT of things, and some things are not directly visible.

So you might discover them as an Easter egg (at least I did).

First, let's go over the most obvious features, and then we will get to the Easter eggs.

Multimedia control

Imagine a scenario when you are working on your laptop and your phone is streaming music. Now if you are as lazy as me, you would never feel like reaching for your phone, unlocking it, and then swiping for the next song. KDE connect let's you do that right from your desktop. Just launch the KDE connect app on your desktop and then click on Media Control.

Now from this page you can seek specific points within the song, Go to the previous song, next song or even control the volume of your phone!

Remote Input and Presentation control

Let's say you are in the middle of an important presentation and forgot to bring your presentation remote.

KDE Connect to the rescue! 

Just head over to the KDE connect application on your android phone and then click on Remote Input.

Find your device

This is a really handy feature which is useful when you can't seem to find your phone and there is no other phone around using which you can ring yours.

All you have to do is press the ring my phone button in the application and your phone starts to ring. On your phone, there is a huge found button on the screen which you can press to stop the ringing.

This also works vice versa wherein you can ring your laptop using your phone but, to be honest, I don’t really see much practical use of the feature.

File sharing

In my opinion, This is one of the most useful and handy features of KDE connect. 

For this to work on your laptop, you need to have Dolphin (KDE's File Manager). 

When you open up Dolphin and connect to your phone, you can browse it just like you browse a Pendrive. You can see and transfer files and folders to and from your phone. 

If you don't have Dolphin installed, you can still send files to your phone and receive it from your phone.

A couple of Easter eggs

Now, both of these are kind of hidden features that are not exactly visible when you are first using KDE Connect. But as you use it, you realize that they are pretty useful.

Clipboard sharing

Clipboard sharing means that if you copy some text, some link, or anything on your laptop, you can paste it on your phone. This honestly left me awestruck the first time that I saw it in action.

Automatic Media Control

So imagine this - you are watching a movie on your laptop, and all of a sudden you receive a phone call. In a general case, you would pause your movie, go to your phone and receive your call (or deny it).

But in case you are using KDE Connect, as soon as you receive a phone call, KDE Connect pauses whatever was playing on your laptop, and you can mute the phone right from your notification panel! You can then continue with the movie or walk up to the phone and receive it.

As soon as you are done talking, KDE Connect automatically resumes your playback. This was also an extremely shocking feature when I first saw it in action.

Conclusion

We can very easily say that KDE Connect is one of the best open-source mobile phone companion applications. 

P.S. - At the time of writing this, KDE connect also has an SMS app but I did not talk about it here, since it is currently under development and will most probably improve much after GSoC 2020.

Before talking about anything we need to get some basics in place.

Everything in linux is a file.

Whatever you see in Linux is a file. Period. Devices are files, drives are files, your keyboard is a file and so is your mouse. A directory or a folder means a file that contains the names and permissions of other files. This also means that you can unknowingly delete all your keyboard drivers. Of course, Linux will not let you do that unless you are a superuser.

Superuser = Superman.

Linux has a concept of the root user, better known as the Superuser. A Superuser can do or change anything in your system. 

Never do anything as a superuser unless you know exactly what you are doing. 

The biggest problem in Linux is that it let's you do whatever you like. This can be anything from deleting some configuration files to deleting your root directory. If you do something stupid as the superuser, you can end up with a super broken system which might take a lot of time to fix. To become the superuser, open up your terminal and type in su 

It will then ask you the root password, and kaboom you are the superuser. The way you can confirm that is by observing your terminal. If it ends with a $, you are not the superuser. But, if it ends with a pound symbol ie # you are the superuser. 

For example,

[insaanimanav@manav ~]$ -----Not a superuser 
[root@manav insaanimanav]# ----- superuser

Some basic commands

The absolute bare minimum you need to know while working in a linux system is navigating directories. 

Before we go ahead, we need to know the directory structure in Linux. To do that, Open up your terminal and type in

cd /
ls

Don't worry about these commands. We are going to talk about them in just a second.

You are going to see an output similar to this.

shell bin dev home lib64 mnt proc run srv tmp var boot etc lib lost+found
opt root sbin sys usr


Now, this is your main directory structure for Linux. Let's talk a little bit about this.

1.bin -> This is what contains the binary files for all your programs.

2.dev -> This contains all the devices and their drivers.

3.home -> This is the primary directory where you will be staying most of your time. All your stuff will be in there.

4.boot  -> One of the most important directories is the boot directory. As the name suggests, boot consists of all the information that is required by your system to boot.

If you ever find yourself changing anything in the root directory, take a step back and ask yourself, “What am I doing exactly?”. If there is a reasonable answer to this, then go ahead. Else, please don't.

cd

cd stands for change directory. Putting the directory name in front of the cd command lets you change to that directory. A little caveat is that /home/username is your main home directory, which is the default for all terminal editors, and it is also aliased to ~.

The following two commands perform the same function:

cd /home/insaanimanav/Videos
cd ~/Videos 

This is probably the single most useful command that you will use while using the command line.

pwd

This is a small utility command which tells you which directory you are in.

pwd

ls

The second most useful command after cd is ls . ls is short for listing. As the name suggests, this lets you list the contents of a directory. Now, with ls, let's talk a little bit about the options available.

-l

This does the long listing of files. This means that you will see more information about a file such as the permissions.

-a

This lists the hidden files as well. Hidden files are the files whose name starts with a dot. For example, .bashrc ,.zshrc, etc.

Example 

shell ls # lists the files 

ls -l # long listing of the files 

ls -a # list all files including hidden files 

ls -al # combine both the options and show a long listing of all files including hidden files

mkdir

Another small utility command which lets you make directories. 

If you just type mkdir and the name of the directory after it, you will see that the directory is created in the same directory that you are currently on. And if you pass a path to the mkdir command, then the directory will be created in that path.

For example,

mkdir name 
mkdir /path/to/the/directory 

rm

This command lets you remove stuff from your machine. 

For example,

rm name 

This will remove the file name that you specify. 

Like all the other commands, this will remove the file in the current directory. Pass a path to this and it will remove the file at this path. 

Now, as we initially pointed out, even a directory is a file. So, can rm delete it? The answer is yes, but you have to provide it another option. 

For example, let us say Ramlal is the name of any directory. So when you write rm -r Ramlal, the -r tells it to delete the contents inside it too. It stands for recursively. 

What if you want that rm should ask before deleting the directory? Then you should use -i option with rm.

rm -i Ramlal

Sometimes, files are protected in nature and when you run rm on them, then you may get an unable to delete error. 

To fix this, you should run rm with the -f option

rm -rf Protected_Ramlal 

That's all the basic commands you are going to need for moving around in any Linux based system.

If you want to see more Linux based tutorials on Tuesdays, then let us know down in the comment box. 

Also, stay tuned because this thursday we will be talking about KDE connect - "The companion app that we all deserve".