Blogs

We are happy to announce the new Kraft version 0.98 that is available for download. Kraft is software for the Linux desktop to handle quotes and invoices in the small business. This is a version packed with bugfixes and also new features. The most important fixes were in the area of the catalog handling: Based on bug reports from the community the catalog window was completely reworked. Drag and drop of items in the catalog, the sorting and reordering of items are now working properly and as planned. ...

The good thing about this quiet holidays is that there is time to work on projects. I had a few nice changes of PDF Quirk laying around, and now finalized them to a new version. Please welcome PDF Quirk version 0.95! What is PDF Quirk? PDF Quirk is a little desktop utility to create PDF files from images, targeted to non nerdy desktop users. Sending PDFs is (still) often a requirement in offices where people are asked to transfer PDF files via email, or better by pushing them through their private ownCloud. ...

it could already be read somewhere that 2021 will be the year of Linux on the desktop :-D Fine with me. Just to support that, I did a little hackery over XMas to improve the support for ownClouds virtual file system on the Linux Desktop. What are Virtual Files? In professional usecases, users often have a huge amount of data stored in ownCloud. Syncing these completely to the desktop computer or laptop would be too much and costly in bandwidth and harddisk space. That is why most mature file sync solutions came up with the concept of virtual files. That means that users have the full structure with directories and files mirrored to their local machines, but have placeholder of the real files in the local file manager. The files, however, are not on the disk. They get downloaded on demand. ...

In the day job we use Microsoft Teams. The good news is that it is running on the Linux Desktop, and specifically KDE. So far, so good, however, there was a problem with screensharing for me. Whenever I tried to share my KDE screen, the screen became black, surrounded with a red rectangle as indicator for the shared area. The people who I shared with also just saw the black area, and also the mouse pointer as me. ...

The authors are happy to announce the new release 0.95 of Kraft. Kraft is free desktop software for managing office documents like quotes and invoices in the small enterprise for the Linux desktop. Kraft Version 0.95 With version 0.95 we do a big step forward in the way of generating documents: Until now (more than fifteen years!) Kraft uses the ReportLab python library to create high quality PDF documents. While this has served us well, it has always been cumbersome to adopt the template for users needs. ReportLab uses a XML format as the template which has a bit of a steep learning curve and is not really easy with syntax. ...

recently I learned about the Open Search Foundation in the public broadcast radio (Bayern 2 Radio Article). That surprised me: I had not heard about OSF before, even though I am active in the field of free software and culture. But this new foundation made it into the mainstream broadcast already. Reason enough to take a closer look. It is a very good sign to have the topic of internet search in the news. It is a fact that one company has a gigantic market share in searching which is indeed a threat to the freedom of internet users. The key to be found in the web is the key to success with whatever message or service a web site might come up with, and all that is controlled by one enterprise driven by commercial interests. That should be realized by a broad audience. ...

How often have you scanned a letter, a certificate or whatever and looked for the right way to call $UTILITY to convert it to a PDF that can be shared via internet? For this very common use case I could not find a tool to make that really easy for the Linux desktop. Given my mission to help making the Linux desktop more common in the small business world (do you know Kraft?) I spent some time starting this little project. ...

This blog is to inform that Kraft, the Qt and KDE based desktop software to manage documents like invoices and quotes in your small company was released in version 0.90 recently. Followup Documents A great new feature is the completely reworked handling of so called follow-up documents. Kraft has this feature to help dealing with docs that follow on a certain kind of predecessor doc in the business flow, such as an invoice follows on an offer once the work has been finished. ...

It is a great idea to encrypt files on client side before uploading them to an ownCloud server if that one is not running in controlled environment, or if one just wants to act defensive and minimize risk. Some people think it is a great idea to include the functionality in the sync client. I don’t agree because it combines two very complex topics into one code base and makes the code difficult to maintain. The risk is high to end up with a kind of code base which nobody is able to maintain properly any more. So let’s better avoid that for ownCloud and look for alternatives. ...

Usually, in my workshop I am listening to the great radio station Bayern 2 (Yeah for public law media). But sometimes you just need to listen to nice classic english punk music, speed folk or (the one and only) Lemmy and friends. For that I was looking for a so called boom box to stream to from my mobile, simple, dirty and loud. Good that I was a proud awardee at the HiFiBerry Maker Contest 2017 with my TeakEar build, where I won a nice set of a RaspberryPi Zero with a little HiFiBerry MiniAmp, coming with all what is needed to make that working. That should be enough to get proper punk sound in the workshop - and escape the boring normal commercial boom boxes all around. ...