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:
Using Fedora Kinoite Thunderbird comes in a Flatpak. This caused me issues with mailto links in Firefox not opening Thunderbird’s new email window.
Usually just setting Thunderbird as the default email client inside Thunderbird’s settings or KDE’s default applications would have worked. Even selecting Thunderbird inside the Firefox file handler applications settings would have done the job. However mailto links did nothing but open up the application selector in Firefox which did not work.
The first two places were already set correctly (in Thunderbird and KDE) so not much more to do there. As I cannot directly select Thunderbird’s binary since it is a Flatpak, I tried to get Firefox to open the Flatpak binary instead and somehow customise the command being run.
There was just no way to customise the command through its interface, unless I fiddled with handlers.json directly in my Firefox profile directory. I tried a few combinations and no dice. I was also still reluctant to believe that all other users would go through this mess just to get mailto links working which is such a basic feature.
The most annoying part was that XDG actually returned Thunderbird as the default handler for mailto links:
But checking my ~/.config/mimeapps.list file revealed that there was no mailto handler defined. Adding the corresponding entries finally fixed the issue:
Glad that I got it working but still not satisfied that this was really the way to go, so I decided to start from scratch.
I went back to KDE’s System Settings>Apps & Windows>Default Applications>Email client. Despite having Thunderbird already selected I went and selected Other… instead. Here I could select Thunderbird again but interestingly there were more options:
You will notice in my screen-shot the check-box stating “Remember application association for all files of type “x-scheme-handler/mailto“. This check-box once checked actually updates the same ~/.config/mimeapps.list file with the previous entries I mentioned earlier.
So apparently this is an option which is not enabled by default when just selecting Thunderbird in the default applications list. Why not having mailto links working by default in KDE is a conundrum.
I am sure there are edge cases not wanting mailto links to open the default email client, but I would assume the vast majority of users expect this behaviour of the default email client. What is the point otherwise of selecting a default application?
I have used the API of hostip.info for long time to resolve IP addresses to country codes or country names. The web service has been hit by some severe downtime lately returning “500 – Internal Server Error” for any calls including both API and website page requests. As of now hostip.info has been down and unreachable for several days in a row, with no signs of coming up in the near future. Perhaps the maintainer is on holiday or something…
I manage several applications depending on this web service so I started searching for an alternative solution to lookup IP addresses. I did not find anything suitable so I decided to launch my own free IP to country lookup API instead.
This new web service can be found at ip2.cc (IP to Country Code) for everyone to use.
