simon.schönbeck.dk

  • EU Stars On My Passport (STAR-PASS)

    If you are a European Union citizen you may be interested in this initiative.

    After harmonising and integrating several important aspects in the EU I have always looked forward to when we will get a common EU passport. It is true that the burgundy red theme runs in most EU countries, however all passports still have each member’s national design.

    Now the STAR-PASS initiative tries to bring it up to the European Commission for review and implementation. All the details are well explained in the website so no reason to repeat them, but in summary it is meant to be an alternative option to the ordinary burgundy passport, that is, the citizen can choose the design when ordering the new passport.

    In my own view it should be the only option available, eliminating national designs altogether, but there are always reticent citizens, so at least having the two options is the fairest compromise.

    Ultimately this initiative does not eliminate national citizenships for only the common EU citizenship which already exists. It is purely a cosmetic change of the passport.

    You can sign the initiative by following the aforementioned link or directly on the European Comission’s petition collection website

    I used the eID option so did not have to input any data, just sign through electronic means.

  • Google Earth – Another instance of this application is already running

    Being unable to launch Google Earth Pro because it thinks it is already running seems to be happening frequently for me. I am using the Flatpak version if it matters.

    Despite killing the application there is still a lock file lingering preventing Google Earth Pro to launch. The error message is specifically:

    Google Earth
    Another instance of this application is already running.

    To launch Google Earth again you need to delete this stale lock file which is inside your user directory:

    rm -v $HOME/.var/app/com.google.EarthPro/.googleearth/instance-running-lock

    Once gone Google Earth Pro will run again without complaining.

  • Fedora Thunderbird Flatpak wrong file association

    I struggled for a while with jpg image files not properly opening with the “System Handler” in Thunderbird. Despite changing the file association setting back to “Always ask” to reset it, the wrong application opened the images.

    Usually one would just select another application in the list of applications but since it is a Flatpak the sandbox restricts access and none where displaying.

    Fiddling around I deleted the second order in the chain where Thunderbird Flatpak searches for the right application to open (after the handlers.json):

    rm ~/.var/app/net.thunderbird.Thunderbird/config/mimeapps.list

    After a restart the “System Handler” finally opened up the correct application as it was using the third level in the lookup chain, the XDG Desktop Portal, which gracefully forwarded the request to Loupe in this case.

  • Static ARP Ubiquiti EdgeOS

    There are times when one needs to reach a certain device on the network and cannot as multiple devices have the same IP address. This should in theory not happen but it does in networks where people can freely connect devices themselves. If the device has a static IP address which another device already has, it is nearly impossible to reach it to reconfigure it remotely as packets would end up on the wrong device. This where a static ARP entry can smooth out things forcing the router to only send packets to that single device of one’s choice

    sudo arp -s 192.168.0.1 e4:ea:b4:08:a8:32 -i eth1

    This tells the router that “192.168.0.1” is at MAC “e4:ea:b4:08:a8:32” and will stop it broadcasting ARP requests; it just sends packets directly to that MAC.

    When done simply delete it again:

    sudo arp -d 192.168.0.1 -i eth1


    After that, the router will go back to the normal ARP behaviour of broadcasting ARP requests instead of using the fixed MAC.

    If you run show arp eth1 after deletion, you should see the static entry removed.

  • Rapidly reduce the size of a PDF

    I am sure you have been there before, trying to submit an important form and your PDF with high resolution scans is too big to be accepted.

    As you probably entered a lot of other data, you do not want to repeat the entire form if the page times out (which they seem to always do!).

    This is an instant one-liner that substantially reduces the PDF size without much quality degradation (my PDF went from 8.9 MiB to 1.1 Mib):

    gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 \
    -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \
    -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH \
    -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

    There are tons of options and parameters in Ghostscript to play with if you are interested, but the above will work for a start. Simply edit the input.pdf and output.pdf paths/files.