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i.Disk cross platform release
Date: 2/3/2022
Tags: idisk
i.Disk is now available on all 3 platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux. There is a roll up of all the changes over the last 2 years. Mostly aimed at better updating of status during a scan and cleaner listing of folders and drives including their free space and total size. This also marks my first attempt at distributing a Linux based appimage. It would be interesting to see if it runs on a variety of Linux systems.
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IMAP Gmail support in Scribe
Date: 15/8/2021
Tags: Scribe Google
This is an update on the support for Gmail IMAP connections. I'm sure that if you have tried to connect to Gmail with Scribe you get a warning about the app being "unverified". You can click into the advanced section and bypass that warning to get access. But as of right now that is limited to 100 users (of which 81 have taken advantage of bypassing the warning). So very soon that will not be a valid path to gaining access to Gmail from within Scribe.

So this verification process? What's involved? Well you have to tick certain boxes. Things like having a homepage that meets certain criteria, having a privacy policy that states what you'll do with the user's data. And also using certain "scopes" that Google deem responsible. And that's where the trouble starts. Because Google (more specifically the app verification team) on one hand wants the apps to use fine grained scopes like "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.modify" but if you actually try and implement that you find that the OAUTH2 process fails with a scope error. If you then revert to using the more broad scope of "https://mail.google.com/" you can create a connection but the app verification team won't accept the app on the basis of the scope being too broad. They then contend that you should re-implement your client using the native Gmail restful API.

The native API? Really... just implement a whole backend to support one company's server? The whole point of IMAP and SMTP is that the client supports ONE protocol used by everyone. This would be a lot of work to support just one service. And even then Google states that you SHOULDN'T do that here: https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/guides. What is one to do?

Well right now. Nothing. Nothing can be done, Google have painted all the email client developers into a corner where there is no way forward. Some mutually exclusive options that don't work for us. What should they do? Probably enable the gmail.modify scope for IMAP and then allow apps to use than and be accepted for verification. Is that going to happen? Probably not. For reasons unknown. Google is now far to large and political to get things like that right.

So at some point Gmail support will just cease to work anymore and there is nothing I can do about it. I'm considering just yanking it out completely. The office 365 support has also been borked for a long time for extremely similar reasons... "use our proprietary API not this well known standard". And beyond Google and Microsoft there aren't any other OAUTH2 services I tried to support. (Am I missing something?)
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Gtk3 bugs on Debian (Gnome WM)
Date: 26/6/2021
Tags: linux gtk3 debian
So over the last month I've been poking at Lgi (the framework Scribe uses) on Debian trying to fix the numerous graphical glitches in the GTK3 port. And I've come to the realization that it's just horribly broken. Unlike the Ubuntu 16/18/20 installs I have that "just work". Debian seems to include the window shadow in all the coordinates. WTF? So mouse cursor x/y values are +24 compared to the window. (Ie if you move the mouse to the top left corner it's still 26,28 or something) Setting the size of the window results in a GTK_CONFIGURE message with a wildly different rectangle (out by something like 24 x 2?). Leaving all the controls in the window scaled off the right and bottom edges. None of the invalidation of dirty client content work correctly. And on top of that they use a different glib version.

They cookin up a mess over there in Debian land. So in the short to medium term I'm just going to not support Debian. Unless someone wants to chime in with some good ideas.
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Setting a DNS domain search in Ubuntu 20
Date: 10/3/2021
Tags: linux
There doesn't seem to be many good results for that search in Google so I'm documenting it. If you want to have an automatic domain suffix set for DNS in Ubuntu 20 you need to edit:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/resolved.conf

And uncomment the Domains field like this:

[Resolve]
Domains=myDomainSuffix

Then restart the service:

sudo service systemd-resolved restart

or reboot.
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Vnc startup on recent Ubuntu for Gnome
Date: 4/12/2020
Tags: linux
It's been bugging me for ages that there doesn't seem to be a valid recipe to use the Gnome desktop on Ubuntu under VNC. There are lots of "recipes" out there, mostly for older version of Ubuntu, but often they force a change of window manager or just plain don't work.

Anyway, after some time of hobbling along with a half working VNC server, I stumbled upon a working setup and though it was high time I documented it.

My .vnc/xstartup for Gnome:
#!/bin/sh
[ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
vncconfig -iconic &

dbus-update-activation-environment --all
dbus-launch --exit-with-session gnome-session --session=ubuntu &
gnome-shell &
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New Site Host
Date: 24/9/2020
Tags: website
I think I've now got most things setup ok. The InScribe purchase page is working as best I can gauge. The forums are ok...? I can read and post stuff. There aren't a lot of old builds but no one needs them as far as I can tell.

Yell out if you do though.
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