April 14 2026 Printers, fswebcam, LLMs, Konqueror, birthDate
John has managed to connect his friend’s computer to his old Samsung laser printer after installing two missing files; because Samsung printers will only work with a PPD he has set CUPS to hold because CUPS will in due course drop support for PPDs and only use the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP).
Bernie showed the unit he has constructed, consisting of a Raspberry Pi, a power management unit and batteries, which he plans to use to get time lapse photographs of the apple tree throughout the year. The Raspberry Pi can turn itself off except for its clock; so he can turn it on at midday each day for about ten minutes and get a time lapse of the apple tree. He is using fswebcam which can capture images from a stream.
He has bought a waterproof USB camera from AliExpress and now has to box everything up and mount it in the garden.
He mentioned that they had stopped following the hedgehogs because the hedgehogs had been driven out by rats.
John said that he had been to talk about hedgehogs and was told that the rolling over is when hedgehogs are fighting, mostly when competing for mates. The hedgehog sanctuary often receives hedgehogs with injuries to their sides caused by being rolled over.
Darren shared a presentation he is developing on the subject ‘LLMs lie to you.’ For example, one gave bogus advice about configuring a program. Another, when faced with the question: ‘I live 100 yards from a car wash; shall I go on foot or take a car?’ replied, ‘On foot.’
He drew attention to H-Neurons: On the Existence, Impact, and Origin of Hallucination-Associated Neurons in LLMs by Gao et al. of Tsinghua University showing that H-Neurons survive from the early training of LLMs and their existence can predict whether an LLM will give a false answer.
David drew attention to the paper by Donald Knuth, Claude’s Cycles, in which he reports that Claude was able to solve a problem to which he had devoted some time and did so in ways which had surprised him. David commented that he was more inclined to be with Darren but wondered whether Claude was genuinely moving forward or whether it was hype.
John gave a brief presentation on Konqueror which, twenty years earlier, had been the best browser available. Interestingly, while Microsoft had been forced to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows to enable other browsers to be installed, no-one noticed that Konqueror was similarly embedded into KDE.
Konqueror is a file manager with the ability to split windows vertically and horizontally, making it very easy to move files around. If you right-click on any file or folder, Konqueror displays the range of options/programs you can use with the file/folder.
It is also a fully fledged browser and you can use one tab as a file manager and another as a browser. When you click on a link in a browser tab, it immediately responds with the option of opening a program appropriate to the link or saving a file. This meant that, when doing a lot of research, John could examine files on a website and decide whether they were relevant to his research or not without ever leaving Konqueror. Browsers like Firefox and Chromium do not have the option to examine files in the way that Konqueror does.
Konqueror also comes with a long list of (mostly) two character shortcuts followed by a colon. You are advised not to activate all these as a large number will slow the browser down.
wp: Tony Hoare, for example, takes you directly to the Tony Hoare page in Wikipedia.
dd: uses DuckDuckGo as the search engine while gg: uses Google as the search engine.
The three letter shortcut man: followed by a program name loads the man pages for the program which are navigable as in a browser.
The original code was used in Apple’s Safari but KDE dropped Konqueror in favour of having a separate browser, Falkon, and file manager, Dolphin. More recently, Konqueror has acquired the Qt WebEngine but it does not have everything that many websites expect. So John uses Firefox for the things which Konqueror cannot manage.
David commented that, when someone entered ‘man pages’ in Alta Vista in the 1990s, it responded with pornography!
Steve suggested trying tldr pages which seeks to simplify man pages with practical examples.
Brian pointed to the YouTube video about all the problems with Windows 11 Updates and shared a question he had posed about people switching to Linux as well as people moving back to Windows. He had written to his MP, Anna Dixon, about depending on Windows and US software and she had responded agreeing with him.
David shared an account of the systemd birthDate merge, which appears to have been prompted by California's Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) which requires every operating system provider in California to collect age information from users at account setup and transmit that data to app developers via a real-time API.
Lennart Poettering, Christopher Wilson Kühl and Christian Brauner left Microsoft in January 2026 after setting up Amutable; in March 2026 birthDate was merged into systemd.
While people can decide whether or not to use systemd, David pointed out that KDE and Gnome are all having to include systemd and that what might have been optional in the past will gradually become essential.
Brian asked how one could avoid this and Devuan was suggested as the way to avoid systemd. Steve also suggested FreeBSD.
Brian recommended the Linux and Open Source News podcast.
Thereafter the meeting descended (?) into a political discussion which will no doubt animate future meetings.
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