Home made venison goulash with red cabbage and dumplings as family dinner for my mother’s 80th birthday.
Rehgulasch mit Klößen
More mobile settings: keyboard & wired network
Recently, I’ve worked on making certain “less obvious” system settings more accessible for Plasma Mobile users. The modules I’ve worked on fall just outside the typical mobile phone use-case, but can be important to users of other types of devices. Specifically, users that plug in or connect a keyboard once in a while and need to change its layout or language, or devices that are connected using an ethernet cable, as often is the case with embedded industrial devices.
These two settings module offer a subset of their “desktop companions'” settings and cater to simpler use-cases while sporting a leaner and more focused user interface. Most of the business logic and the more complex UI components are also shared with the desktop versions.
Reviewers needed!
The merge requests for both are currently under review and I’d appreciate if people could help ironing out issues so we can go ahead and merge the code:
Update: Both modules have been merged and will ship as part of Plasma 6.6.
Home-made Berliner Currywurst
Alhoewel ik een paar weken geleden, na meer dan 27 jaar in Nederland te wonen mijn Duits paspoort heb ingeleverd, zijn er toch een paar dingen uit de Duitse cultuur die een plaats mijn hart zullen blijven hebben (naast lange zinnen met comma’s). Een daarvan is het toppunt van Duitse fast-food menu’s (naast Döner Kebab), good old Currywurst.
Het recept (in het Duits, uiteraard) vind je hier. Tip: voeg een heel klein beetje chilipoeder toe voor wat extra pit. Dat mag van mij wel.
Tomato and burrata pasta with basil Parmesan
End of summmer means home-grown tomatoes. Credits for this luscious Italian recipe from foodblogger Notorious Foodie. For full recipe see below. Their presentation beats mine, of course (make sure to turn the music on as well!).
- Slice in half ~400g of sweet, plump tomatoes – any small variety you like, datterini, piccolo, cherry – I used piccolo here
- In a med-heat pan, add 4tbsp EV olive oil, followed by 3 cloves garlic, half a shallot, 1 peperoncino / red chilli – fry ~4 mins till oil is infused and fragrant
- Add in tomatoes and season with sea salt + black pepp and basil – allow to cook for 15-20 mins, lid on – careful heat isn’t too high, you want a gentle simmer
- Remove lid and deglaze with a 200ml white wine – I used this Soave Classico from Inama Vigneti
- Allow to reduce for further 10 mins – you should see the tomato skins loosen and fall off – at this point, remove as many skins as poss + the garlic, basil, shallot and peperoncino, they’ve done their work
- Remove from heat and add sauce to pot along with 1 whole burrata
- Add 2tbsp olive oil and blitz together till smooth and creamy – taste and adjust for seasoning
- Add spaghetti to salted boiling water and add sauce back into the pan to heat up
- Throw your al dente pasta into the sauce along with some pasta water and continue melding together till perfectly cooked – once almost done, kill heat, add in some grated parmigiano and combine
- Basil Parmesan: add 75g cold parmigiano + a handful of basil leaves to a food processor and blitz till crumbly and bright green – this stuff is amazing
- Plate up, spooning over more of the tomato burrata sauce and sprinkling over your basil parm
Back in Action on Plasma (Mobile)
After I took a longer break from KDE development, I’ve been back in action for a few months now. It’s really nice to be back among friends, hacking on what I like most: Plasma. My focus has been on Plasma Mobile with some work naturally bleeding over into other areas.
Plasma on more Devices
I’d like to share some bits and pieces that I’ve worked on in the past months. Most of my efforts have revolved around making Plasma Mobile suitable for a wider range of devices and use-cases. The purpose of this work is that I want to make Plasma Mobile a more viable base for all kinds of products, not just mobile phones. We have a really mature software stack and great tools and applications which make it relatively easy for companies to create amazing products without having to hire large teams and many years to get the product ready for their market. This is I think a very interesting and worthwhile niche for Plasma to get into and I’m sure that Valve is not the only company that understands this.
Convergence Improvements
Convergence, or rather being able to support and switch between formfactors and usage patterns has always been a pet-peeve of mine and still is.
One area was improving using the available screen real estate use landscape displays (Plasma Mobile has quite naturally been rather “portrait-focused”, though a few smaller patches go a long way.)
I also improve usability with different pixel densities in the mobile shell by making the size of the top panel configurable. Also, when plugging in a second monitor, Plasma Mobile now switches from “all apps are maximized” to normal window management. (I’m currently working on KWin supporting more fine-grained window management. Currently, we just maximize all windows which has problems especially with modal dialogs.)
One changeset I worked on earlier this year makes it possible to ship multiple user interfaces for settings modules (“kcms”). An example is the “remote desktop” kcm which now shows a mobile-focused UI in Plasma Mobile. What happens here is that we load a main_phone.qml file in Plasma Mobile (where “phone” is picked from a list of form factors set in the environment of the session, so basically the “main” QML file gets picked based on the device. This mechanism allows us to share components quite easily, reducing the delta between different device UIs.
This actually builds on top of work that I’ve done ten years ago which added support for form factors to our plugin metadata system.
I’ve also made the “Display & Monitor” kcm usable on mobile, this is a pretty important thing to have working when you want to be able to plug in an external monitor into your device. I have a mobile version of the keyboard KCM in the pipeline, too, but this will need a bit more work before it’s ready for prime-time.
More Features
There’s a new page in the mobile Wi-fi settings module, showing connection details and tranfer speeds. The code for this was amazingly simple since I could lift most of the functionality from the desktop panel widget. A shared code-base across devices really speeds up development.
Adding useful features here and there, such as having the list of available bluetooth devices now filtered by default and only showing devices which actually make sense to pair (with an option to “Show all devices” in good Plasma manner). This feature isn’t mobile-specific, so desktop and laptop users will benefit.
Welcome to Okular Mobile
Not all my work goes into infrastructural and “shell” bits. The mobile okular version has now kind of caught up with the desktop version since it got a nice welcome screen when opened. This allows the user to easily open a document either from the “Documents” directory on disk (this is actually configurable) or one of the recent files viewed.
Going to Akademy ’25
After having missed our yearly world conference for a number of years, this year I will be at Akademy again. I’m really looking forward to seeing everybody in person again!
See you in Berlin!
Gravad lax en ribeye
Picanha
Barbecue met groenten in de hoofdrol.
American Pancakes
American pancakes met blauwe bessen en maple syrup.
icecream!
Lots of KDE hacking these days, and that comes with compiling large amounts of code. Right now, I am installing, well building from source Plasma Mobile on an “old” laptop so I can test some patches natively on a touchscreen device. The machine has just two cores (hyperthreaded), so builds take rather long, especially if you build Qt and all that 80+ packages that are needed for a fully working Plasma system.
One of the tools that do an incredible job while being super flexible to use is icecream. Icecream (or “icecc“) allows you to distribute your build over multiple machines, it basically ships compile-jobs with all that’s needed to other machines on a local network, meaning you can parallelize your builds.
Icecream has this nice visualization tool, called icecream-monitor which you can stare at while your builds are running (in case you don’t have anyone handy for a sword-fight). In the screenshot you can see manta, the underpowered laptop doing a 32 parallel job build over the network. miro is my heavy workstation, 8 cores and 128GB of RAM, it duely gets the bulk of the work assigned, frame is my (Framework) laptop, which is also quite beefy, gets something to do too, but not taxed as heavily as that build monster in my basement office.
Icecream can be used with most environments that have you run your compiler locally. Different distros are no problem! Just a matching CPU architecture is needed. Icecream does its job by providing its own g++ and gcc binaries, which will relay the build jobs transparently to either your local machine or across the network. So you basically install it, adjust your PATH variable to make sure icecc’s g++ is found before your system’s compiler and start your build. Other machines you want to join in for the fun just need to run icecc-scheduler and they will be automatically discovered as build slaves on your network. If you want to further speed up builds, it works with ccache as well.
Please note that you only want to do this in a trusted environment, we’re shipping executables around the network without authorization!