I'm taking the afternoon off today – I have easily enough OT for that – for a spontaneous visit to Eva (where “spontaneous” means “organised the day before yesterday”) to deal with some computer issues and generally have a chat, which we didn't have an opportunity to do since before Christmas.

We did learn a few useful things:

• If you connect an external monitor to a Windows 11 laptop, if the laptop is open the external monitor will mirror the laptop's built-in display. This sucks if the external monitor is a 3440-by-1440-pixel “UWQHD” display like Eva (and I) are using, because with a full-HD laptop, most of the extra real estate on the monitor will remain unused. The apparent solution to that is to close the laptop's lid, which will cause the computer to use all of the external display. – We have yet to figure out whether Windows 11 will remember if we increase the screen magnification for the external display, in order to restore the setting when the same external display is reconnected later. OTOH, spending 30 seconds to tweak the magnification factor ahead of an 8-hour working day seems a reasonable investment in time.

• On the Linux side, we were facing the issue that a friend of Eva's had given her a USB thumb drive with two directories full of iPhone photographs (and silly short 2-second videos – we were wondering what was the deal with those). The photographs were taken on separate iPhones during the same trip and the question was how to sort these together in order to be able to have one set of pictures in chronological order? First of all, we got rid of all the videos by making a new folder and copying every file whose name ended in, e.g., .MOV or .MP4 into that. This left us with just the image files. We copied them into a common directory and used the magic command, exiftool -d '%Y%m%d-%H%M%%-03.c.%%e' '-filename<CreateDate' ., to rename them such that their file names reflect the creation date of the photographs according to their embedded EXIF data. This means that looking at the photographs in lexicographically ascending order of their file names will return them in the proper sequence. Tadaa! Problem solved.

• The correct approach for a low-stakes slide show on KDE is to use Gwenview. A right-click on a folder in the Dolphin file manager actually yields a “Start slide show” entry in the pop-up menu and that will launch Gwenview in full-screen mode on the folder in question. In our case this is a little more tricky because we're using a dinky little LCD projector with Eva's laptop, and the projector's resolution is lower than that of the laptop's built-in display, so simply mirroring the laptop display on the projector sucks. Instead, if we put the projector's part of the desktop beside the built-in display's part of the desktop, even if we move the Dolphin window to the projector before launching the slide show, Gwenview will come up on the built-in display instead, which sucks too because once it is in full-screen mode it cannot be moved. – It's easier to eschew the “Start slide show” menu entry entirely and simply launch Gwenview, from the projector display, on the first image file in the folder to be displayed. This will bring up Gwenview on the projector display, and if you then start the slide show from within Gwenview it will stay there.

Other than that, a very nice day! The trip back was a bit tedious owing to a traffic jam between the Bad Homburger Kreuz and the Nordwestkreuz, with a projected 15-minute delay. I took a detour via the Offenbacher Kreuz instead, which probably took 15 extra minutes, too, but at least you're moving and who knows what the real delay would have been.

At home all that remained after picking up Marie from the dancing and having a quick dinner was getting the Christmas tree ready to be collected. I don't like carrying it through the flat and down the staircase, which would leave an extended trail of dried needles that I'd have to clean up afterwards, so the easy solution is to take the tree out onto the back balcony (a distance of less than two metres from where the tree stands to the balcony door) and drop it from the far end of the balcony down to between our house and the bike shed. We're only one floor up from the ground, so if you dangle the tree from its tip before letting go, this involves a sheer drop of only a metre or so, and of course if you do it at 11pm there is no danger at all of hitting anyone. The tree can then be conveniently carried around the house to the trash bin enclosure where the municipal workers will pick it up. Job done.