Are you calling for a ban on human driven cars? They killed more than zero people yesterday! If you aren’t, you’ve accepted a human-driven vehicular homicide rate above zero.

OK, so I looked though my browser history, and here are some relevant pages I found:

• keepassxc-browser Issue 1267
• keepassxc-browser Issue 1631
• keepassxc-browser Issue 1783
• browserpass-native Issue 93

I don’t remember how much I used each one, but eventually I pieced together enough information information to get the Browserpass extension working in the Google Chrome flatpak. But three of those links are KeePassXC, which should be useful for adapting this for your use.

The main file that was having problems was the Browserpass Native Messaging Hosts file in my config directory for the Chrome flatpak, ~/.var/app/com.google.Chrome/config/google-chrome/NativeMessagingHosts/com.github.browserpass.native.json. Originally it was a symlink to a file at /usr/lib/browserpass/hosts/chromium/com.github.browserpass.native.json:

{
    "name": "com.github.browserpass.native",
    "description": "Browserpass native component for the Chromium extension",
    "path": "/usr/bin/browserpass-linux64",
    "type": "stdio",
    "allowed_origins": [
        "chrome-extension://naepdomgkenhinolocfifgehidddafch/"
    ]
}

The call to /usr/bin/browserpass-linux64 did not see to work for me, so I ended up making a copy of the file in the NativeMessagingHosts directory and modified it to point to a script in my home mount:

wile_e8 NativeMessagingHosts $ diff com.github.browserpass.native.json.orig com.github.browserpass.native.json
4c4
<     "path": "/usr/bin/browserpass-linux64",
---
>     "path": "/home/wile_e8/.config/browserpass/browserpass.sh",

I don’t remember why I picked to do it inside the ~/.config directory, but it worked so I left it. And here is the script I put at ~/.config/browerpass/browserpass.sh:

#!/bin/sh
cd ~
/usr/bin/flatpak-spawn --host /usr/bin/browserpass-linux64 2>/tmp/error.log

I don’t remember how I came up with that script, it must be somewhere in the four links at the top.

Finally, I needed to use Flatseal to allow access to the script. In the Google Chrome settings, under “Filesystem->Other files”, I added an entry saying ~/.config/browserpass:ro. Also modified from the default in Flatseal, I have “Filesystem->All user files” enabled, along with “Socket->D-Bus session bus” and “Socket->D-Bus system bus”. I don’t know how necessary the last three are, but I’m not messing with it now that I have it working.

So, that’s what I did to get the Browserpass extension working in the Google Chrome flatpak. You’ll have to modify some things to get it working for KeePassXC, or for Firefox. But that general pattern should work.

Keep an eye out, I’ll come back to this. It involves posting config file diffs and a script I wrote, it’ll be a longer post I don’t have the time to write right at this moment.

But yes, the fact that I need to find the time to post all the changes I needed to make to get this to work is part of the problem here.

FWIW I figured out how to get a password manager (Browserpass, not KeePassXC) to communicate with flatpak Chrome if you want some advice on how to get it to work.

But yes, it was way more difficult than it should have been (which is “should work out of the box, just like a regular package”). So if you’re just listing some of the shortcomings of flatpak, never mind.

Hasn’t Android had a thing for a while where it gives update priority to people who manually check for updates? Like, my phone (7a) didn’t say an update was available, but then I clicked the “Check for update” button, and now it said Android 14 is available.

So I don’t think anyone who really wants the update soon needs to sideload the OTA, just check for an update and you’ll probably get it.

Is there any mirror for this? I don’t know if this has been posted to some other site as well, but the web site seems to be overloaded with traffic right now and I can’t see the article.

So, as someone that’s been on flavors of Ubuntu/Linux Mint for me personal computer since Breezy Badger, any good distro recommendations? I’ve been using Ubuntu Mate and upgrading in place for the last ~5 years, so I’ve mostly avoided Snaps, but I’m looking to upgrade my computer and I’m probably going to need a fresh install. I’d like to stay on the Ubuntu/Debian tree, but I’ve been using RHEL on my work computer for a while now, so I’m not totally unfamiliar with that distro branch.

Also, should I be as concerned about Flatpaks as everyone seems to be concerned about Snaps?

I agree that those shouldn’t be patented - they’re ideas, not implementations. If you have a particular ingenious implementation for one-click shopping, go ahead and patent it. But don’t sue people if they come up with a different way to do the same thing - that just means your implementation wasn’t particularly novel.

So yes, there have been some bad software patents given out. That just means that the process for giving software patents needs to be reformed, not that we need to get rid of software patents.

From a certain point of view, everything is mathematics. It still takes time and effort to figure out the mathematics to make new things work. Patents guarantee that the people who figure out the math will be able to profit off of it before a whole bunch of copycats steal the work. That should apply to software too - assuming that people actually figured out the math and didn’t just patent some idea without an implementation.

I think patents make some sense for software, if you patent a particular algorithm you developed for doing something useful. An example I always use for a good software patent is Google’s original PageRank algorithm - it was a specific algorithm that provided significantly better search results than existing search algorithms. But that patent just covered one specific algorithm for ranking search results, not the idea of searching the web (which was around before Google). Patents that are given for an idea, not an implementation, are bad.

This article is unclear, but it sure makes it seem like this patent was given for the idea of sending video from one device to another, not a specific algorithm for doing so. So that would be a bad patent. But I don’t think it means we should get rid of software patents altogether.

Just told this one to my son.

Him: “I could have said Mom’s foot, or my sister’s foot, or anyone else’s foot!”

Me: “But you didn’t.”