Year review 2016

This year I used my laptop like 10 days, mostly for planning complex trips on Google Maps, because of the external monitor.

Which means I am basically at one phone video interface from bringing my laptop to the recycling center. USB-C probably.

Firefox OS is dead. Makes sense given that Mozilla can barely keep up maintaining Firefox relevant.

Looking forward to see Ubuntu Phone becoming relevant.

Which will happen only if they actually sell some phone with Ubuntu Phone on it.

Internet Explorer 11 is the only IE above 0.5 % of market share. The dreamed app-capable Web is here.

Disproportionate ads are slowly but surely ruining my experience on iPhone. Will give a chance to an Android + Firefox + uBlock Origin soon.

Sigh, no VP9 for WebRTC on Firefox yet. Everytime I videocall on Hangouts my battery not only gets hot, but *inflates*. Time to try those video calls on Slack I guess.

Yeah, Slack app is built on JavaScript-based Electron. 🤘

Angular 2 will be soon everywhere. I hope ECMAScript stays close to TypeScript, and browsers close to ECMAScript. Otherwise multi megabyte downloads will be necessary for every web app ... and that will justify a second wave of mobile app worship.

Guessing 2017 will bring more USB-C phones and JS (web and native) applications.

The title of this blog does not make sense anymore. Should rename it or start a new one.

Predictions 2016

Is that time of the year again. Half the World is expecting it. Is the time for:

Linux for targets: Predictions 2016

Retrospective of predictions 2015.

I will write few-to-none new posts on this blog.

Correct. This one was easy.

There will be zero new projects made on Adobe Flash.

Correct! as far as I know. Except for those crappy free online games.

WebRTC will support VP9 and kick ass.

Well, that sentence does not even make sense. I guess I meant that Firefox would support VP9 for WebRTC. It has not been the case :(

Related: I tried Firefox Hello during the year and, even though the video was OK, the audio was crap. To the level of "I can barely understand you". Pfff no replacement for Skype at sight yet.

Somebody at YouTube will realize that refreshing the page on log-in sucks, and will do that on Ajax

HAHA no.

The most interesting OS in the world (Firefox OS) will continue to be shipped only on infra-hardware

Correct. I guess creating drivers for average 200-300 USD phones is so fucking hard. Is still sad not being able to use one of them with Firefox. Who called "high-end" to this?

Will buy a new battery for my 4 year old laptop, since newer laptops are not really that better.

Did not happen. I'm seeing nearly interesting replacements appearing, although above 1000 USD. My dream is something based on a 14- nm Atom (or Core M) expandable up to 16+ GB of RAM. I would pay whatever it takes for that. Whatever factor it has.

And now, predictions 2016.

• JavaScript will start to raise as platform for native applications, as it has just done with Calypso.
• Eww who cares about the desktop anymore. Life goes on the web. Let's just hope Mozilla can really focus on Firefox and save us from doom.

What if XFCE on a 4K monitor

From Xfce 4.12 tour:

Window tiling mode was improved by providing support for corner-tiling

This little addition might just be enough to make XFCE 4K-friendly.

By tiling a Full HD window on each corner of the screen, one can work as having four Full HD monitors.

With window searching reduced to a fourth of what it used to be, time savings for professional uses are massive.

Loving to see those 4K TVs dropping price in the last year.

The pressure for cheaper HiDPI displays will continue over 2016 thanks to mobile.

That will make 4K monitors affordable for most freelancers and companies by 2017.

XFCE is alive

XFCE, imo the only desktop non-crazy, non-underdeveloped as of 2015, just got a new release that according to the release notes, it keeps the good things getting better: XFCE 4.12!.

Which is great, because after 3 years from the previous release, I thought XFCE was dead and buried.

Meanwhile, pre-1.0 LXQt releases still look promising. When I tried 0.8 it gave me a black screen, but I really believe that it is working for someone out there. Will try 0.9 soon.

Predictions 2015

Retrospective of predictions 2014.

My mother will master Ubuntu 12.04 - a very cheap OS that allows you to focus on web browsing.

Well not a master but she was able to use it indeed for web-based email, web-based chat, and web searches. There was a complain nevertheless: "there are always updates". Interesting comment. Prompts for updates should IMHO be an easily findable opt-in. Then again 3% of the users think that the OS should ask confirmation for each byte of input/output by default, and that changing it should require to create your own fork of GNU.

Firefox OS will get a ridiculous but historical 2% of share among web users, and I will buy one.

I don't know what the market share of Firefox OS is, and I did not buy one. Very poor hardware is still the only one sold with support for Firefox OS. A camera that I don't regret to use is certainly a must feature for me. Hopefully during 2016 this will change.

Internet Explorer 9- will only matter if you are addressing hardcore dinosaurs. Hopefully jQuery guys will realize of this and will release a half-sized version of jQuery named jQuery 3, that I will not use anyway.

Yes! IE9- does not matter anymore. jQuery guys realized of this: no. Do I care: no.

The only remaining mainstream usage for desktop applications will be accessing USB devices. The rest of the mainstream things will be done through the web. asm.js' utopic but real 1.5x slower than native speed will be a big factor.

Wrong :( WebRTC is, as a matter of fact, still in "release candidate" state. There has not been also enough increase on web-based apps to acknowledge yet that "everything but USB stuff is on the web". ES6 will soon make things easier but I think the resulting apps will not flourish until 2016.

And now predictions 2015:

1. I will write few-to-none new posts on this blog. It feels like there is no point anymore. The situation now is so different. Back in 2009 Microsoft owned our asses, and all but using Windows caused unavoidable frustration. But now mobile _is_ the new personal computing platform, and Microsoft has lost this war by far. Android is the new Windows, and it comes with a first-class web browser. Now if only spreadsheets made on LibreOffice did not suck when opened on Excel...
2. There will be zero new projects made on Adobe Flash.
3. WebRTC will support VP9 and kick ass.
4. Somebody at YouTube will realize that refreshing the page on log-in sucks, and will do that on Ajax.
5. The most interesting OS in the world (Firefox OS) will continue to be shipped only on infra-hardware.
6. Will buy a new battery for my 4 year old laptop, since newer laptops are not really that better.

Fix for noise on Skype for Ubuntu 14.04

Instead of running simply skype, run this:

env PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30 skype

Source: Get The Sound Working In Skype With Ubuntu 13.10

Together with the fix for the camera, the thing to run is:

export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libv4l/v4l1compat.so && env PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30 skype

Which sucks.

A bit better is to have this in a script on the desktop that you can simply double click. So write the following in it.

#!/bin/bash
export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libv4l/v4l1compat.so && env PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30 skype

And give it run permissions by doing right-click on the file > "Properties" > "Permissions" > and check "Execution permission".

I hate Skype.

Desktop wars: Linux 1, Windows 56929

How Munich switched 15,000 PCs from Windows to Linux.

Sumario en castellano de cómo Munich ha migrado 15.000 PCs de Windows a Linux.

Once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning.

Fix slow Windows 7

1. Create a bootable Xubuntu USB installer. You can follow these instructions. Latest version recommended.
2. Stick the USB in the computer, reboot, and on the BIOS, select the USB as boot drive with priority over the hard disk.
3. On the Xubuntu installer, follow the steps to replace Windows 7 by Xubuntu.
4. Once booted up and logged in, run these commands on a terminal to replace the default crappy office and multimedia applications by the excellent LibreOffice and VLC:
   1. sudo apt-get remove abiword gnumeric gmusicbrowser parole
   2. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa
   3. sudo apt-get update
   4. sudo apt-get install libreoffice vlc
5. Optional: if it is the computer of a friend, amaze him/her by telling that there are no viruses an no antivirus is needed.
6. Open Firefox and install Adblock Plus.
7. Enjoy for many years without virus nor performance drop!

Preview of the result:

Before	After

Predictions 2014

Retrospective of predictions 2013:

Chrome hará un 95 % en el HTML5 test. Firefox menos.

Uishh almost. Current Chrome is 91 % and Firefox is 80 %.

El share en desktop Chrome/IE/Firefox será 40/30/20.

No but close. IE is below expected thanks to Safari keeping the pace and Chrome pushing harder.

- Saldrá Firefox OS, funcionará en móviles de 150 euros, será la plataforma con menor coste de desarrollo marginal y deployment para el 90 % de las aplicaciones móviles, pero no llegará a los targets porque Telefónica no hará la correspondiente inversión en marketing, porque... - No más del 50 % de las aplicaciones que interesan a los targets tendrá versión "compatible con Firefox OS" (o sea, HTML5). - Saldrá un listo que inventará una palabra moderna para One Web. Los empresaurios oirán la palabra en alguna conversación y empezarán a decir que ellos "ya lo hacen", provocando el punto anterior.

Hmmm I am pretty impressed of how Telefonica is marketing Firefox OS. Is like they are doing that for real.

It is the first prepaid phone they offer as of today, and the "more info" page offers a quite friendly and useful video about its basic setup and usage.

Sadly they are out of stock. I guess that that is a good sign though!

Los targets seguirán comprándose móviles de 600 euros y pagando tarifas de 600 euros al año porque "necesitan movilidad", pero seguirán rechazando Google Drive para trabajar porque "no es seguro".

Regarding the 600 euros, I can understand because they are already using quite more their phone than their computer - so it makes total sense to spend more in the first one. And regarding Google Drive, well, turns out that mostly any guy with a federal badge in the United States can peek at everything you do on the Internet - so I quite understand this one as well.

And now predictions 2014

1. My mother will master Ubuntu 12.04 - a very cheap OS (free on acquisition, very low maintenance cost) that allows you to focus on web browsing (instead of avoiding crapware, managing updates, and reinstalling things because malware ruined them).
2. Firefox OS will get a ridiculous but historical 2% of share among web users, and I will buy one.
3. Internet Explorer 9- will only matter if you are addressing hardcore dinosaurs. Hopefully jQuery guys will realize of this and will release a half-sized version of jQuery named jQuery 3, that I will not use anyway.
4. The only remaining mainstream usage for desktop applications will be accessing USB devices. The rest of the mainstream things will be done through the web. asm.js' utopic but real 1.5x slower than native speed will be a big factor.
5. Linux will take over the desktop. Joke!

Android 4.4 has a real browser, but it won't matter for two years

Finally the Android browser scores something decent on the HTML5test.

The reason is luckily not a reinvention of the wheel but the use of Chromium as base for it.

However, given the crappy upgrade policy reality of Android, this improvement is going to result irrelevant for at least the next two years. The quota of incapable Androids will be, in the meanwhile, still too big.

Users not wanting to spend 600 USD/EUR/something to have a fast, capable, respectful browser are encouraged to use Firefox for Android.

Buyers of new phones not wanting to face the same problem in the future are encouraged to buy a Firefox OS phone.

Fix for flipped (rotated 180º) webcam on Skype for Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install libv4l-0

sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/skype.desktop

Replace "Exec=skype" with the following.

Exec=bash -c 'LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype'

Source: How To Fix Webcam Problem In Skype.

Tested on Ubuntu 12.04

Reset sound configuration on Ubuntu

I tried to install a sound equalizer on Ubuntu and ended up without sound equalizer, and also without sound. Classic Linux mess. To fix this and other similar problems run the following command.

alsactl init

Source: Hard Resetting alsa Configuration?

LibreOffice has to fix its presence on distros

Something that LibreOffice has to fix is its presence on distros.

Is close to value-less that you don't get LibreOffice upgrades if you don't upgrade your distro.

I use Ubuntu 12.04 based distros at home and at work, and I plan to keep doing that at least until May 2014.

Xubuntu 12.04

They just work, and they work fast.

They don't give me problems because Ubuntu 12.04 is the Linux distro developers look at when they do develop. It has been like so since a year ago, and it is going to be so for the next year at least.

But LibreOffice 3.5 is a piece of shit. Relatively at least.

Why do I have to miss all the new love that the community put in LibreOffice 4.1?

LibreOffice 4.1

Why will I have to miss it again for LibreOffice 4.2?

Early preview of LibreOffice 4.2

If Ubuntu 12.04 can receive Firefox upgrades each 6 weeks, for sure it can receive LibreOffice upgrades each 6 months.

So, gals and guys: Let's do it!

Using the discrete GPU on Ubuntu

The following might be interesting for you if you match the following:

• You have a CPU with integrated graphics
• You have a discrete GPU that your Ubuntu (or Ubuntu-based distro) does not use
• You need those goddamn extra FPS now!

Open a console, secure the perimeter of your modem/router whatever, and enter the following commands.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install linux-source linux-headers-generic sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia

Restart

optirun firefox

With that, Firefox will use your discrete GPU instead of your integrated graphics. The WebGL Aquarium benchmark should run like 10 times faster.

You should also be able to run other programs besides Firefox using this "optirun" command, of course. For example Kerbal Space Program, with something like the following.

LC_ALL=C optirun "/opt/software/SteamLibrary/SteamApps/common/Kerbal Space Program/KSP.x86"

Note that that "LC_ALL=C" is some kind of magic fix for multiple issues for Kerbal on Linux; I'm not explaining what it does here (neither I know, if you ask).

Source: A Noob’s Guide to Installing NVIDIA Optimus Driver in Ubuntu

What to use after Windows XP?

Lubuntu!

www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/06/germany-to-hand-out-free-ubuntu-cds-on-xps-deat

Download Lubuntu

More info about Lubuntu

Sweet

Scroll para hoy

En Firefox > about:config > mousewheel.acceleration.start > 3

Esto hará que al hacer scroll "con ganas" la velocidad aumente notablemente. Así podrás scrollear rápidamente documentos de varias páginas sin destruir completamente la articulación de tu dedo medio.

Facebook app: HTML5 better than native

Sencha Fastbook from Sencha on Vimeo.

Predicciones 2013

Retrospectiva de predicciones para 2012:

Los browsers ganarán acceso a casi todo el hardware que les hace funcionar.

50 % fail.

Apple perderá el rumbo y el iPhone 4S+1 se comerá un mojón.

Fail.

Ubuntu tardará 5 minutos en arrancar, tiraré el portátil y me compraré un Chromebook.

50 % fail. Me instalé Lubuntu, pero el soporte para monitores externos de LXDE es tan cutre que resulta más agradable usar xrandr desde la consola. Luego instalé Xubuntu.

Seguiré enviando documentos en ODT, aunque luego me pidan que los reenvíe en Word 2003.

75 % fail. Lo que he enviado han sido enlaces a Google Drive o a LinkedIn. Aunque sí que es verdad que los 4 o 5 documentos de escritorio que he hecho fueron en ODT/ODS porque parece que los targets han descubierto Office 2007.

Predicciones para 2013:

1. Chrome hará un 95 % en el HTML5 test. Firefox menos.
2. El share en desktop Chrome/IE/Firefox será 40/30/20.
3. Saldrá Firefox OS, funcionará en móviles de 150 euros, será la plataforma con menor coste de desarrollo marginal y deployment para el 90 % de las aplicaciones móviles, pero no llegará a los targets porque Telefónica no hará la correspondiente inversión en marketing, porque... (ver punto 4)
4. No más del 50 % de las aplicaciones que interesan a los targets tendrá versión "compatible con Firefox OS" (o sea, HTML5).
5. Saldrá un listo que inventará una palabra moderna para One Web. Los empresaurios oirán la palabra en alguna conversación y empezarán a decir que ellos "ya lo hacen", provocando el punto 4.
6. Los targets seguirán comprándose móviles de 600 euros y pagando tarifas de 600 euros al año porque "necesitan movilidad", pero seguirán rechazando Google Drive para trabajar porque "no es seguro".

Edit 5 de enero: Cambio "Google Docs" por "Google Drive". Gracias a Mario por señalarlo.

Please Google stop doing this

143 useless pixels

WebAPIs demo

Es junio. Casi la mitad del año ha pasado. Casi la mitad del WebAPI ha sido implementado. Sneak peak del trabajo hecho hasta ahora:

Más info en WebAPI - MozillaWiki.