After reading B lint s blog post about Firebuild (a compile cache) [1] I decided to give it a go. It s non-free, the project web site [2] says that it s free for non-commercial use or commercial trials. My first attempt at building a Debian package failed due to man-recode using a seccomp() sandbox, I filed Debian bug #1032619 [3] about this (thanks for the quick response B lint). The solution for me was to edit /etc/firebuild.conf and add man-recode to the dont_intercept list. The new version that s just been uploaded to Debian fixes it by disabling seccomp() and will presumably allow slightly better performance. Here are the results of building the refpolicy package with Firebuild, a regular build, the first build with Firebuild (30% slower) and a rebuild with Firebuild that reduced the time by almost 42%.

real    1m32.026s
user    4m20.200s
sys     2m33.324s
real    2m4.111s
user    6m31.769s
sys     3m53.681s
real    0m53.632s
user    1m41.334s
sys     3m36.227s

Next I did a test of building a Linux 6.1.10 kernel with make bzImage -j18 , here are the results from a normal build, first build with firebuild, and second build. The real time is worse with firebuild for this on my machine. I think that the relative speeds of my CPU (reasonably fast 18 core) and storage (two of the slower NVMe devices in a BTRFS RAID-1) is the cause of the first build being relatively so much slower for make bzImage than for building the refpolicy, as the kernel build process involves a lot more data. For the final build I moved ~/.cache/firebuild to a tmpfs (I have 128G of RAM and not much running on my machine at the time of the tests), even then building with firebuild was slightly slower in real time but took significantly less CPU time (user+real being 20mins instead of 36m). I also ran several tests with the kernel source tree on a tmpfs but for unknown reasons those tests each took about 6 minutes. Does firebuild or the Linux kernel build process dislike tmpfs for some reason?

real    2m43.020s
user    31m30.551s
sys     5m15.279s
real    8m49.675s
user    64m11.258s
sys     19m39.016s
real    3m6.858s
user    7m47.556s
sys     9m22.513s
real    2m51.910s
user    10m53.870s
sys     9m21.307s

One thing I noticed from the kernel build tests is that the total CPU time taken by the firebuild process (as reported by ps) was more than 2/3 of the run time and top usually reported it as taking around 75% of a CPU core. It seems to me that the firebuild process itself is a bottleneck on build speed. Building refpolicy without firebuild has an average of 4.5 cores in use while building the kernel haas 13.5. Unless they make a multi-threaded version of firebuild it seems that it won t give the performance one would hope for from a CPU with 18+ cores. I presume that if I had been running with hyper-threading enabled then firebuild would have been even worse for kernel builds as it would sometimes get on the second thread of a core. It looks like firebuild would perform better on AMD CPUs as they tend to have fewer CPU cores with greater average performance per core so a single CPU core for firebuild will be less limited. I presume that the firebuild developers will make it perform better with large numbers of cores in future, the latest Intel laptop CPUs have 16+ cores and servers with 2*40core CPUs are common. The performance improvement for refpolicy is significant as a portion of build time, but insignificant in terms of real time. A full build of refpolicy doesn t take enough time to get a Coke and reducing it doesn t offer a huge benefit, if Firebuild was available in past years when refpolicy took 20 minutes to build (when DDR2 was the best RAM available) then it would be a different story. There is some potential to optimise the build of refpolicy for the non-firebuild case. Getting it to average more than 4.5 cores in use when there s 18 available should be possible, there are a number of shell for loops in the main Makefile and maybe some of them can be replaced by make constructs to allow running in parallel. If it used 7 cores on average then it would be faster in a regular build than it currently is with firebuild and a hot cache. Any advice from make experts would be appreciated.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2qjfpb7r
• [2] http://firebuild.com/
• [3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1032619

For a while I ve had my monitoring systems alert me via XMPP (Jabber). To do that I used the sendxmpp command-line program which worked well for it s basic tasks. I recently noticed that my laptop and workstation which I had upgraded to Debian/Testing weren t sending messages, I m not sure when it started as my main monitoring of such machines is to touch a key and see if there s a response if I m not at the keyboard then a failure doesn t bother me too much. I ve filed Debian bug #1032868 [1] about this. As sendxmpp is apparently not supported upstream and we are preparing for a release it could be that the next version of Debian is released without this working (if it s specific to talking to Prosody) or without sendxmpp (if it fails on all Jabber servers). I next tested xmppc which doesn t send messages (gives no error when I have apparently correct parameters and just doesn t send anything) and doesn t display any text output for info related commands while not giving error messages or an error return code. I filed Debian bug #1032869 [2] about this. Currently the only success I ve found with Debian/Testing for this is with go-sendxmpp. To configure that you setup a file named ~/.config/go-sendxmpp/config with the following contents:

username: JABBER-ID
password: PASSWORD

Go-sendxmpp can take a username and password on the command-line but that s bad for security as in the absence of SE Linux or other advanced security systems the password can be seen by any user on the same system who runs ps. To send a message run echo $MESSAGE go-sendxmpp $ADDR to send $MESSAGE to $ADDR. It also has the option go-sendxmpp -l to listen for incoming messages. I don t have an immediate need to receive messages from the command-line but it s handy to have the option. I probably won t be able to get a new version of etbemon in Debian for the Bookworm release. So to get go-sendxmpp to work with etbemon you need to edit /usr/lib/mon/alert.d/mailxmpp.alert and change this sendxmpp line to this go-sendxmpp line:

open (XMPP, "  /usr/bin/sendxmpp -a /etc/ssl/certs -t @xmpprec -r $host")  
open (XMPP, "  /usr/bin/go-sendxmpp @xmpprec")  

• [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1032868
• [2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1032869

I just did some quick tests of hyper-threading on my new E5-2696v3 CPU. I compiled the Linux 6.0.10 kernel with and without hyper-threading enabled. Here s the times for make -j36 bzImage and make -j36 modules with HT enabled:

real    2m26.540s
user    55m25.121s
sys     9m56.443s
real    10m57.374s
user    309m21.531s
sys     58m1.070s

Here s the times for make -j18 bzImage and make -j18 modules with HT disabled:

real    2m40.501s
user    31m35.295s
sys     5m43.523s
real    11m39.313s
user    170m46.840s
sys     31m37.756s

That s 9.6% faster for bzImage and 6.4% faster for modules. So for a performance boost that s between 5% and 10% I get greater exposure to kernel security issues and more difficulty tracking CPU time. That doesn t seem like a good trade-off so I ve put the nosmt kernel command-line option back.

Vox has an insightful interview with the author of Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century [1]. The main claim of that book is that The 140 years from 1870 to 2010 of the long twentieth century were, I strongly believe, the most consequential years of all humanity s centuries . A claim that seems well supported. PostMarketOS is an interesting OS for hardware designed for Android [2]. It is based on Alpine Linux, is small, and modular. If you want to change something just change that package not the entire image. Also an aim is to have as much commonality between devices as possible, all phones with the same CPU family can run the same packages apart from the kernel and maybe some utilities related to hardware. Abhijithpa blogged about getting started with pmOS, it seems easy to do [3]. Interesting article about gay samurai [4]. Regarding sex with men or women an elderly arbiter, after hearing the impassioned arguments of the two sides, counsels that the wisest course is to follow both paths in moderation, thereby helping to prevent overindulgence in either . Wow. The SCP project is an interesting collaborative SciFi/horror fiction project [5] based on an organisation that aims to Secure and Contain dangerous objects and beings and Protect the world from them. The series of stories about the Anti-Memetics Division [6] is a good place to start reading.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2y6ynv4k
• [2] https://postmarketos.org/
• [3] https://abhijithpa.me/2022/Running-postmarketos-on-my-phone/
• [4] https://www.tofugu.com/japan/gay-samurai/
• [5] https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/
• [6] https://qntm.org/scp

I just got a E5-2696 v3 CPU for my ML110 Gen9 home workstation, this has a Passmark score of 23326 which is almost 3 times faster than the E5-2620 v4 which rated 9224. Previously it took over 40 minutes real time to compile a 6.10 kernel that was based on the Debian kernel configuration, now it takes 14 minutes of real time, 202 minutes of user time, and 37 minutes of system CPU time. That s a definite benefit of having a faster CPU, I don t often compile kernels but when I do I don t want to wait 40+ minutes for a result. I also expanded the system from 96G of RAM to 128G, most of the time I don t need so much RAM but it s better to have too much than too little, particularly as my friend got me a good deal on RAM. The extra RAM might have helped improve performance too, going from 6/8 DIMM slots full to 8/8 might help the CPU balance access. That series of HP machines has a plastic mounting bracket for the CPU, see this video about the HP Proliant Smart Socket for details [1]. I was working on this with a friend who has the same model of HP server as I do, after buying myself a system I was so happy with it that I bought another the same when I saw it going for a good price and then sold it to my friend when I realised that I had too many tower servers at home. It turns out that getting the same model of computer as a friend is a really good strategy so then you can work together to solve problems with it. My friend s first idea was to try and buy new clips for the new CPUs (which would have delayed things and cost more money), but Reddit and some blog posts suggested that you can just skip the smart-socket guide clip and when the chip was resting in the socket it felt secure as the protrusions on the sides of the socket fit firmly enough into the notches in the CPU to prevent it moving far enough to short a connection. Testing on 2 systems showed that you don t need the clip. As an aside it would be nice if Intel made every CPU that fits a particular socket have the same physical dimensions so clips and heatsinks can work well on all CPUs. The TDP of the new CPU is 145W and the old one was 85W. One would hope that in a server class system that wouldn t make a lot of difference but unfortunately the difference was significant. Previously I could have the system running 7/8 cores with BOINC 24*7 and I wouldn t notice the fans being louder. It is possible that 100% CPU use on a hot day might make the fans sound louder if I didn t have an air-conditioner on that was loud enough to drown them out, but the noteworthy fact is that with the previous CPU the system fans were a minor annoyance. Now if I have 16 cores running BOINC it s quite loud, the sort of noise that makes most people avoid using tower servers as workstations! I ve found that if I limit it to 4 or 5 cores then the system is about as quiet as it was before. As a rough approximation I can use as much CPU power as before without making the fans louder but if I use more CPU power than was previously available it gets noisy. I also got some new NVMe devices, I was previously using 2*Crucial 1TB P1 NVMes in a BTRFS RAID-1 and now I have 2*Crucial 1TB P3 NVMes (where P1 is the slowest Crucial offering, P3 is better and more expensive, P5 is even better, etc). When doing the BTRFS migrations to move my workstation to new NVMe devices and my server to the old NVMe devices I found that the P3 series seem to have a limit of about 70MB/s for sustained random writes and the P1 series is about 35MB/s. Apparently with the cheaper NVMe devices they slow down if you do lots of random writes, pity that all the review articles talking about GB/s speeds don t mention this. To see how bad reviews are Google some reviews of these SSDs, you will find a couple of comment threads on places like Reddit of them slowing down with lots of writes and lots of review articles on well known sites that don t mention it. Generally I d recommend not upgrading from P1 to P3 NVMe devices, the benefit isn t enough to cover the effort. For every capacity of NVMe devices the most expensive devices cost more than twice as much as the cheapest devices, and sometimes it will be worth the money. Getting the most expensive device won t guarantee great performance but getting cheap devices will guarantee that it s slow. It seems that CPU development isn t progressing as well as it used to, the CPU I just bought was released in 2015 and scored 23,343 according to Passmark [2]. The most expensive Intel CPU on offer at my local computer store is the i9-13900K which was released this year and scores 62,914 [3]. One might say that CPUs designed for servers are different from ones designed for desktop PCs, but the i9 in question has a TDP Up of 253W which is too big for the PSU I have! According to the HP web site the new ML110 Gen10 servers aren t sold with a CPU as fast as the E5-2696 v3! In the period from 1988 to about 2015 every year there were new CPUs with new capabilities that were worth an upgrade. Now for the last 8 years or so there hasn t been much improvement at all. Buy a new PC for better USB ports or something not for a faster CPU!

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2l4wydk7
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/2hrrnqfr
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/2e7wxrlt

In response to a post about my latest laptop I had someone ask why I chose an Intel CPU. I ve been a fan of the Thinkpad series of laptops since the 90s. They have always seemed well constructed (given the constraints of being light etc) and had a good feature set. Also I really like the TrackPoint. I ve been a fan of the smaller Thinkpads since I got an X-301 from e-waste [1] and the X1-Carbon series is the latest and greatest line of small Thinkpads. AMD makes some nice laptop CPUs which appear to have low power use and good performance particularly for smaller numbers of threads, it seems that generally AMD CPUs are designed for fewer cores with higher performance per core which is good for laptops. But Lenovo only makes the Thinkpad Carbon X1 series with Intel CPUs so choosing that model of laptop means choosing Intel. It could be that for some combination of size, TDP, speed, etc Intel just happens to beat AMD for all the times when Lenovo was designing a new motherboard for the Carbon X1. But it seems more likely that Intel has been lobbying Lenovo for this. It would be nice if there was an anti-trust investigation into Intel, everyone who s involved in the computer industry knows of some of the anti-competitive things that they have done. Also it would be nice if Lenovo started shipping laptops with ARM CPUs across their entire range. But for the moment I guess I have to keep buying laptops with Intel CPUs.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2017/12/13/thinkpad-x301/

The Dell T320 Almost 2 years ago I made a Dell PowerEdge T320 my home server [1]. It was a decent upgrade from the PowerEdge T110 II that I had used previously. One benefit of that system was that I needed more RAM and the PowerEdge T1xx series use unbuffered ECC RAM which is unreasonably expensive as well as the DIMMs tending to be smaller (no Load Reduced DIMMS) and only having 4 slots. As I had bought two T320s I put all the RAM in a single server getting a total of 96G and then put some cheap DIMMs in the other one and sold it with 48G. The T320 has all the server reliability features including hot-swap redundant PSUs and hot-swap hard drives. One thing it doesn t have redundancy on is the motherboard management system known as iDRAC. 3 days ago my suburb had a power outage and when power came back on the T320 gave an error message about a failure to initialise the iDRAC and put all the fans on maximum speed, which is extremely loud. When a T320 is running in a room that s not particularly hot and it doesn t have SAS disks it s a very quiet server, one of the quietest I ve ever owned. When it goes into emergency cooling mode due to iDRAC failure it s loud enough to be heard from the other end of the house with doors closed in between. Googling this failure gave a few possible answers. One was for some combinations of booting with the iDRAC button held down, turning off for a while and booting with the iDRAC button held down, etc (this didn t work). One was for putting a iDRAC firmware file on the SD card so iDRAC could automatically load it (which I tested even though I didn t have the flashing LED which indicates that it is likely to work, but it didn t do anything). The last was to enable serial console and configure the iDRAC to load new firmware via TFTP, I didn t get a iDRAC message from the serial console just the regular BIOS stuff. So it looks like I ll have to sell the T320 for parts or find someone who wants to run it in it s current form. Currently to boot it I have to press F1 a few times to bypass BIOS messages (someone on the Internet reported making a device to key-jam F1). Then when it boots it s unreasonably loud, but apparently if you are really keen you can buy fans that have temperature sensors to control their own speed and bypass the motherboard control. I d appreciate any advice on how to get this going. At this stage I m not going to go back to it but if I can get it working properly I can sell it for a decent price. The HP Z640 I ve replaced the T320 with a HP Z640 workstation with 32G of RAM which I had recently bought to play with Stable Diffusion. There were hundreds of Z640 workstations with NVidia Quadro M6000 GPUs going on eBay for under $400 each, it looked like a company that did a lot of ML work had either gone bankrupt or upgraded all their employees systems. The price for the systems was surprisingly cheap, at regular eBay prices it seems that the GPU and the RAM go for about the same price as the system. It turned out that Stable Diffusion didn t like the video card in my setup for unknown reasons but also that the E5-1650v3 CPU could render an image in 15 minutes which is fast enough to test it out but not fast enough for serious use. I had been planning to blog about that. When I bought the T320 server the DDR3 Registered ECC RAM it uses cost about $100 for 8*8G DIMMs, with 16G DIMMs being much more expensive. Now the DDR4 Registered ECC RAM used by my Z640 goes for about $120 for 2*16G DIMMs. In the near future I ll upgrade that system to 64G of RAM. It s disappointing that the Z640 only has 4 DIMM sockets per CPU so if you get a single-CPU version (as I did) and don t get the really expensive Load Reduced RAM then you are limited to 64G. So the supposed capacity benefit of going from DDR3 to DDR4 doesn t seem to apply to this upgrade. The Z640 I got has 4 bays for hot-swap SAS/SATA 2.5 SSD/HDDs and 2 internal bays for 3.5 hard drives. The T320 has 8*3.5 hot swap bays and I had 3 hard drives in them in a BTRFS RAID-10 configuration. Currently I ve got one hard drive attached via USB but that s obviously not a long-term solution. The 3 hard drives are 4TB, they have worked since 4TB was a good size. I have a spare 8TB disk so I could buy a second ($179 for a shingle HDD) to make a 8TB RAID-1 array. The other option is to pay $369 for a 4TB SSD (or $389 for a 4TB NVMe + $10 for the PCIe card) to keep the 3 device RAID-10. As tempting as 4TB SSDs are I ll probably get a cheap 8TB disk which will take capacity from 6TB to 8TB and I could use some extra 4TB disks for backups. I haven t played with the AMT/MEBX features on this system, I presume that they will work the same way as AMT/MEBX on the HP Z420 I ve used previously [2]. Update: HP has free updates for the BIOS etc available here [3]. Unfortunately it seems to require loading a kernel module supplied by HP to do this. This is a bad thing, kernel code that isn t in the mainline kernel is either of poor quality or isn t licensed correctly. I had to change my monitoring system to alert on temperatures over 100% of the high range while on the T320 I had it set at 95% of high and never got warnings. This is disappointing, enterprise class gear running in a reasonably cool environment (ambient temperature of about 22C) should be able to run all CPU cores at full performance without hitting 95% of the high temperature level.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2021/06/07/dell-poweredge-t320-linux/
• [2] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/03/31/amt-mebx-debian/
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/2nafdjzx

We are getting towards the freeze for Debian/Bookworm so the current state of packages isn t going to change much before the release. Bugs will get fixed but missing features will mostly be missing until the next release. Anarcat wrote an excellent blog post about using Wayland with the Sway window manager [1]. It seems pretty good if you like Sway, but I like KDE and plan to continue using it. Several of the important utility programs referenced by Anarcat won t run with KDE/Wayland and give errors such as Compositor doesn t support wlr-output-management-unstable-v1 . One noteworthy thing about Wayland is the the Window manager and the equivalent to the X server are the same program so KDE has different Wayland code than Sway and doesn t support some features. The lack of these features limits my ability to manage multiple displays and therefore makes KDE/Wayland unsuitable for many laptop uses. My work laptop runs Ubuntu 22.04 with KDE and wouldn t correctly display on the pair of monitors on a USB-C dock that s the standard desktop configuration where I work. In my previous post about Wayland [2] I wrote about converting 2 of my systems to Wayland. Since then I had changed them back to X because of problems with supporting strange monitor configurations on laptops and also due to the KDE window manager crashing occasionally which terminates the session in Wayland but merely requires restarting the window manager in X. More recently I had a problem with the GPU in my main workstation sometimes not being recognised by the system (reporting no PCIe device), when I got a new one I couldn t get X to work with the error Cannot run in framebuffer mode. Please specify busIDs for all framebuffer devices so I tried Wayland again. Now in the later stage of the Bookworm development process it seems that the problem with the KDE window manager crashing has been solved or mitigates and there is a new problem of the plasmashell process crashing. As I can restart plasmashell without logging out that s much less annoying. So now my main workstation is running on Wayland with a slower GPU than I previously had while also giving a faster user experience so Wayland is providing a definite performance benefit. Maybe for Trixie (the next release of Debian after Bookworm) we should have a release goal of having full Wayland support in all the major GUI systems.

• [1] https://anarc.at/software/desktop/wayland/
• [2] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/03/25/wayland/

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

• pydispatcher: fix doc build with Python 3.11
• pyemd: cleanups
• sourcehut: add repo description to git, hg summary page titles
• Debian security tracker: add more CVE search services
• Debian BTS usertags: fixed some cross, ftp-master, website, porting usertags
• Debian screenshots:
  • deleted wine (WinXP not Wine)
• Debian package uploads: python-docutils, pydispatcher, celery
• Debian wiki pages: ArchitectureSpecificsMemo, BSP, bugs.debian.org/usertags, DebConf/25/Bids/Portugal, DebianDay, (2022, 2023), DebianDesktop/Artwork/Bookworm, DebianIndia/MiniDebConfTamilNadu2023, DebianNetDomains, DeveloperNews, Exploits, Hardware/Wanted, HostingBSP, InstallingDebianOn, IRC, LTS/Development, Netbeans, PlanetDebian, PortalTemplate, Ports (arc, ia64, loong64, riscv64 (1 2)), PortTemplate, PressCoverage, Printing, PrivacyIssues, qa.debian.org (ArchiveTesting, MIATeam), Sprints, SystemBuildTools, Year
• FOSSjobs wiki pages: Resources

Issues

• Security issue with a software hosting service (sent privately)
• Crashes in alot, pypi2deb
• Missing dependency in itinerary
• Broken link in buskill
• Bogus package description in yq
• Future orphaning of purple-discord, harmony
• Features in libpipeline, lintian (1 2)
• Migration to pyproject.toml needed for pyemd

Review

• Spam: reported 2 Debian bug reports and 38 Debian mailing list posts
• Debian packages: sponsored cruft-ng (x2)
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved adjtimex apt bfbtester check-dfsg-status checksec cpu-x ctwm dconf-editor debian-archive-keyring debian-keyring deepin-log-viewer dpkg-www edgar elektroid extremetuxracer glances glew-utils glogg gnome-characters gnome-font-viewer gnome-tweaks grub-customizer hashalot hashrat hexcurse hexter hexyl ldm ldm-ubuntu-theme ldm-ubuntu-themes libc-bin linuxinfo lsof netr poedit prusa-slicer qdmr sawfish thefuck ttf-mscorefonts-installer twm util-linux-extra
  • rejected nvidia-smi (non-free), gir1.2-gtop-2.0 (error message), stockfish (random chess website), nodm (black screen), ldm (Windows), awscli (logo), hostap-utils (QR code photo), wine (WSL not Wine), apt (screenshots website), orthanc (private patient info), ipython3-qtconsole (wallpaper), qarecord (portrait photo)

Administration

• Debian BTS: unarchive/reopen/triage bugs for reintroduced packages cycle/pygopherd and ask about guile-2.2 reintroduction bugs
• Debian IRC: fix topic/info of obsolete channel
• Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts, approve domains.

Communication

• Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The celery, docutils, pyemd work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

The Intercept has an amusing and interesting article about senior Facebook employees testifying that they don t know where Facebook stores all it s data on users [1]. One lesson all programmers can learn from this is to document all these things in an orderly manner. Cory Doctorow wrote a short informative article about inflation from a modern monetary theory perspective [2]. Russ Allbery wrote an insightful blog post about effecive altruism and respect for disadvantaged people [3]. GiveDirectly sounds good. The Conversation has an interesting article about the Google and Apple app stores providing different versions of apps for users in different regions [4]. Apparently there are specific versions to comply with GDPR and versions that differ in adverts. The hope that GDPR would affect enough people to become essentially a world-wide standard was apparently overly optimistic. We need political lobbying in all countries for laws like the GDPR to force the app stores to give us the better versions of apps. Arya Voronova wrote an informative article about USB-C and extension or data blocker cables [5]. USB just keeps getting more horrible in technology while getting more useful in functionality. Laptops and phones catching fire will probably become more common in future. John McBride wrote an insightful article about the problems in the security of the software supply chain [6]. His main suggestion for addressing problems is If you are on a team that relies on some piece of open source software, allocate real engineering time to contributing , the problem with this is that real engineering time means real money and companies don t want to do that. Maybe having companies contribute moderate amounts of money to a foundation that hires people would be a viable option. Toms Guide has an interesting article describing problems with the Tesla [7]. It doesn t cover things like autopilot driving over children and bikers but instead covers issues of the user interface that make it less pleasant to drive and also remove concentration from the road. The BBC has an interesting article about the way mathematical skill is correlated with the way language is used to express numbers [8]. Every country with a lesser way of expressing numbers should switch to some variation of the East-Asian way. Science 2.0 has an interesting blog post about the JP Aerospace plans to use airships to get most of the way through the atmosphere and then a plane to get to orbit [9]. It s a wild idea but seems plausible. The idea of going to space in balloons seems considerably scarier to me than the current space craft. Interesting list of red team and physical entry gear with links to YouTube videos showing how to use them [10]. The Verge has an informative summary of the way Elon mismanaged Twitter after taking it over [11].

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2enk6rlv
• [2] https://doctorow.medium.com/sound-money-28792205f564
• [3] https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-09/001.html
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/2onsrm4m
• [5] https://hackaday.com/2022/12/27/all-about-usb-c-illegal-adapters/
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/2nywkp89
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/2lmy5nom
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/uz7zax3
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/2m27yo8m
• [10] https://tinyurl.com/2grryezf
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/2hex55ol

In May 2014 I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 edition tablet (wikipedia page [1]) with 32G of RAM. It s display is 2560 1600 resolution which still compares well to the latest tablets. The Galaxy Tab S8 [2] is the latest high-end tablet series from Samsung and the 11 inch tablet in that series also has a 2560 1600 giving it a slightly lower DPI! The latest series also has 12.4 and 14.6 tablets with resolutions of 2800 1752 and 2960 1848 respectively. Obviously if you want a 14 tablet then the latest offerings are good, but if you want a 10 or 11 tablet then Samsung hasn t improved much. The Note 10.1 has 3G of RAM and a choice of 16G, 32G, or 64G of storage. The latest Tab S8 tablets have 8G to 16G of RAM and 128G to 512G of internal storage, which are great if you need such things. For many tasks 3G of RAM is quite adequate and as I chose the 32G model I haven t had a problem with storage. The s-pen is a feature of this tablet which is also on the latest high-end Samsung tablets, it is useful for accessing small elements in web sites designed for desktop use and for graphics editing. One noteworthy feature of this tablet is the fact that when in landscape orientation it has speakers on each side, which is the correct layout as the vast majority of video with stereo sound is in a landscape orientation. After using that tablet for about 4 years I bought myself a newer tablet and gave it to my wife. She has since passed it on to another relative who is using it regularly. That tablet seems to have lasted well still being quite usable when it s almost 9 years old. The price including delivery was $579, that works out to about $1.30 per week (disregarding interest and inflation). According to the Reserve Bank of Australia inflation calculator [3] $579 in 2014 is equivalent to $652 in 2021, they don t have results for later than 2021 so I ll assume it would be $675 in 2023. Currently the main problems with this tablet are lack of USB-C support (which means it s difficult to connect to an external display among other things) and lack of a recent version of Android, 4.4.2 was the latest OTA update available. The XDA Developers forum has a section for this tablet [4] which includes discussion of updates to Android 5.x for devices which didn t get it automatically and for upgrading to very recent Android versions in LineageOS. I m idly considering one of those options, but for the current user the Google Play store is a requirement. Newer Samsung Tablets The current equivalent Samsung tablet is the Galaxy Tab S8 which is currently being sold for $1055 which is 56% higher than the inflation adjusted price of my tablet. I don t think this is reasonable given that I bought it 7 months after release and it s now 11 months since the release of the Tab S8. The Tab S8 has more RAM, more storage, and a faster CPU due to improvements over the entire computer industry replacing old parts with newer versions of the same things (including changing to USB-C) doesn t justify a price rise. Increasing RAM size by a factor of 3-5 and increasing storage by a factor of 8 over the last 9 years doesn t match the industry trends for PCs, also as an aside my latest laptop only has 8G of RAM and works well for much more demanding tasks. The Tab S8 series also has significantly better cameras, but I don t think that s a big deal, the 2Mp front camera in my tablet can provide adequate quality for video conferencing and usually saturate the upload bandwidth and again that s an issue of the entire industry moving to newer hardware. I don t think it s bad to take a form factor and display that works well and put newer versions of the CPU, RAM, storage, cameras, and OS on it. But asking for 56% more money for the updated tablet seems unreasonable. The current S8 Ultra is going for $1760 and the S8+ is $1479. I think those are ridiculous prices for tablets as there is a decent range of new laptops that are cheaper. I believe that the purpose of a tablet is to be easy to carry and quick to start using (no waiting for a laptop to connect to wifi after leaving suspend). The largest of the S8 Tabs is about the same length and width as a Thinkpad X1 Carbon with the benefits being that it s thinner and lighter, but if you got a tablet case with keyboard then it would be thicker and heavier. The S8 seems like bad value for money and the S8+ and S8 Ultra don t seem to compare well to laptops and Chromebooks with touch screens unless you have a specific need for Android tablet apps. If Samsung are going to just make new tablets without any significant improvements other than refreshing to the latest CPU, RAM, storage, and Camera technology and force users to upgrade via a lack of new OS support then they shouldn t charge so much. Stick well below $1000 and people will be more inclined to replace items, expensive items are expected to last. Conclusion Buying this tablet was definitely a good choice. It has performed well for many years and after a couple of years of light use it s back in daily use again. The value for money it offered was significantly greater than newer tablets, when it was new it was really high-end, the current S8 Tab series of tablets aren t anything special when compared to other tablets.

• [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_Note_10.1_2014_Edition
• [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_Tab_S8
• [3] https://www.rba.gov.au/calculator/annualDecimal.html
• [4] https://forum.xda-developers.com/c/samsung-galaxy-note-10-1-2014-edition.2500/

Charles Stross wrote an informative summary of the problems with the UK monarchy [1], conveniently before the queen died. The blog post To The Next Mass Shooter, A Modest Proposal is a well written suggestion to potential mass murderers [2]. The New Yorker has an interesting and amusing article about the former CIA employee who released the Vault 7 collection of CIA attack software [3]. This exposes the ridiculously poor hiring practices of the CIA which involved far less background checks than the reporter writing the story did. Wired has an interesting 6 part series about the hunt for Alpha02 the admin of the Alphabay dark web marketplace [4]. The Atlantic has an interesting and informative article about Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the most horrible politicians in the world [5]. Anarcat wrote a long and detailed blog post about Matrix [6]. It s mostly about comparing Matrix to other services and analysing the overall environment of IM systms. I recommend using Matrix, it is quite good although having a server with SSD storage is required for the database. Edent wrote an interesting thought experiment on how one might try to regain access to all their digital data if a lightning strike destroyed everything in their home [7]. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article about the crapification of literary contracts [8]. A lot of this applies to most contracts between corporations and individuals. We need legislation to restrict corporations from such abuse. Jared A Brock wrote an insightful article about why AirBNB is horrible and how it will fail [9]. Habr has an interesting article on circumventing UEFI secure boot [10]. This doesn t make secure boot worthless but does expose some weaknesses in it. Matthew Garrett wrote an interesting blog post about stewartship of the UEFI boot ecosystem and how Microsoft has made some strange and possibly hypocritical decisions about it [11]. It also has a lot of background information on how UEFI can be used and misused. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article Let s Make Amazon Into a Dumb Pipe [12]. The idea is to use the Amazon search and reviews to find a product and then buy it elsewhere, a reverse of the showrooming practice where people look at products in stores and buy them online. There is already a browser plugin to search local libraries for Amazon books. Charles Stross wrote an interesting blog post about the UK Tory plan to destroy higher education [13]. There s a lot of similarities to what conservatives are doing in other countries. Antoine Beaupr wrote an insightful blog post How to nationalize the internet in Canada [14]. They cover the technical issues to be addressed as well as some social justice points that are often missed when discussing such issues. Internet is not a luxuary nowadays, it s an important part of daily life and the governments need to treat it the same way as roads and other national infrastructure.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2gatbh3g
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/2je74ywp
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/26qhberp
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/2b92lwha
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/2nqd3jb7
• [6] https://anarc.at/blog/2022-06-17-matrix-notes/
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/2yx4du3b
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/2gfjkrw5
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/2ewylxv3
• [10] https://habr.com/en/post/446238/
• [11] https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/60248.html
• [12] https://doctorow.medium.com/view-a-sku-32721d623aee
• [13] https://tinyurl.com/2qmkbwjc
• [14] https://anarc.at/blog/2022-08-26-nationalize-internet/

I m currently reading the second book of the TriSolar Sci-Fi series by Cixin Liu, I ve only just started it so this post can t have spoilers for it and I will also only have minimal spoilers for the first book (nothing more than you will get from pop culture references to it). In the second book there are people called Wall Facers who have broad powers to shape the course of the Human response to an alien invasion in 400+ years time. The idea is that as the aliens have an ability to see everything that can be seen on Earth any ideas that leave the brain of one person can be snooped on, so if some people act independently without communicating their plans they can take the aliens by surprise. While that is probably going to work out well in the books history in general seems to show that people who act independently without any useful feedback from others tend to perform poorly, every king and dictator seems to demonstrate this. Efficient Work I ve been thinking about what I would do if I had significant powers to guide the response to an alien threat in some hundreds of years. The first thing to do would be to get all people working as efficiently as possible. Without the imminent threat of alien invasion we can have debates about how much time to spend working vs leisure time. Should we make 24 hours per week the new normal work week? But if the threat of annihilation is looming then the discussion should be about how to get as many people as possible working as much as possible. Currently 1/4 of the world population lack access to safe drinking water [1], there s a plan to achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all by 2030 . But 2030 isn t soon enough, another 8 years where 1/4 of children born won t reach their potential due to poor water is unacceptable. Currently 13% of the world population don t have access to electricity and 40% don t have access to clean fuels for cooking [2]. Lack of energy access reduces health and opportunities for education. Healthcare is another major obstacle to human development and therefore economic development. Even some allegedly first-world countries like the US lack universal affordable healthcare. I think we could reasonably get safe water to 99% of the world population before 2025 if we tried hard (IE applied a small fraction of the resources of a single war to it). Getting electricity to 95% of the world population and clean cooking fuels to 90% of the world population are probably achievable goals for 2025 as well. Healthcare is a slightly harder problem as we need to train more nurses and doctors. A registered nurse apparently needs 3 years of training after completing high school. We may have to improve high schools to get more students up to the standard of nursing degrees. If it takes 3 years to improve schools in year 9+ and then 3 years to get more high school graduates that would mean that it would take about 9 years to get an increase in nurses. Doing this would require increasing the capacity of universities and making university almost free (as it was for decades). So in about 2031 we could start sending a significant number of nurses from developed countries to help out developing countries. Becoming a doctor apparently requires 8 years of study plus a minimum of 3 years residency . So if doctors were entirely trained in first world countries then we wouldn t be able to send many doctors to developing countries until 2039. If the residency was performed in other countries then it could be as early as 2036. According to the WHO currently only half the world s population have adequate healthcare [3]. To get adequate healthcare to the world we need to more than double the number of doctors because currently we don t have enough in countries with decent healthcare systems such as Australia. It would probably take to at least 2060 to get enough doctors trained. The end goal of course would be to have every country able to train enough of it s citizens to provide all medical services, but countries that have serious widespread healthcare problems that reduce the number of people who can pursue higher education will have difficulty in that until some of the healthcare problems are alleviated. Education Obviously education is important to all achievements. Currently education seems very poorly run, it is possible to create a school system that teaches children effectively without the bullying that is common in Australia and without the sort of pressure that South Korea is infamous for. One of the main issues to resolve with the school system is the idea that everyone should learn at the same speed, that goal can only be achieved by making the majority of the students learn slowly. Students should be able to freely skip ahead as their skill permits and finish school at any age. Also high school isn t for everyone, the tech schools that teach trades need to be brought back. Deceiving Aliens A plot point in the TriSolar series is that the aliens can see each other s thoughts, the local communication (their equivalent to talking) is based on reading each other s thoughts without the possibility of deception. While deceptive written communication is potentially possible for them they haven t developed skills in that area. As a first step towards exploiting this humans could focus more on linguistic development that increases language complexity, such as the way the English language adopts words from other languages and gives them slightly different meanings for example the difference between driver and chauffeur and the difference between dog and hound is not obvious to many Europeans who otherwise speak English fluently. When involved in conversation it s possible to convey meaning without directly stating things, this is used extensively by people who are interested in security. My observations of this are based on conversations with people who do government work, but I imagine that criminal organisations also do similar things for similar reasons. An increased focus on poetry in schools might be helpful in developing skills for conveying ideas to people who think in human ways where the message is unclear to non-humans who have no experience of deception. I wonder whether the ability to understand human poetry would make aliens less hostile to humans, if they can think like us then they would be less likely to want to exterminate us. Poker is a game that depends on the ability to deceive others, I ve never been any good at it. I wonder if making it part of the school curriculum would help improve the overall human ability to deceive aliens. I don t think that such schools would become dens of sociopathy as depicted in Kakegurui, but it might have some negative results. Spreading education to a larger portion of the world s population requires more use of electronic education. Anything learned via text can be more easily assimilated by aliens than things that are learned directly from other people. For high school and the basics of a university degree this is fine. But for more advanced education it seems that having a large face to face component might help keep the value away from the aliens. More Ideas? What do you think I missed on this list? I wasn t trying to list every possibility, just the more important ones. Also for any goals other than increasing inequality for it s own sake we should improve health and education for the world.

• [1] https://ourworldindata.org/water-access
• [2] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-access
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/y7gyrjwu

I have just bought a Pixel 6A [1] for my wife. It s one of the latest Google phones that was released almost at the same time as the Pixel 7 series, so if you want to spend a lot of money on a phone that s the latest and greatest then the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro are the options, but if you want to save some money and don t need something really high end then the Pixel 6A is a good option. The one I bought cost $550 when I bought it from Google which seemed like a good deal when it was advertised as being discounted from $750. Later I discovered that other retailers were selling it for $500 or for $550 when bundled with a Chromecast. Also one of the other retailers was a company that I could get discount gift cards for. So this is the type of item you should really shop around for. It doesn t come with a charger so you don t have the gray-market disadvantage of getting yet another charger that doesn t fit the sockets in your country. The main new feature of this phone is a fingerprint scanner built in to the screen. I don t think this is a good thing, sure it s neat technology to both display pictures and read fingerprints through the same piece of glass but there are benefits to using a different location. Huawei phones with a fingerprint reader at the rear of the phone allow the user to answer calls, drag down the notifications list, and scroll sideways via touching the fingerprint reader. So the Pixel 6A clearly gives less functionality than some Huawei phones in this regard. One major annoyance with the phone is a combination of the phone hardware and Android 13 which gives no back arrow (swipe sideways) and no button to get the task list (swipe upwards at the correct speed from the bottom of the screen). The Android 12 way of swiping up from the bottom of the screen to get buttons for back, task-list, and home-screen is much better IMHO. Hopefully they will release a software update to make this a configuration option. Generally this is a nice phone, but the lack of buttons for back and task-list is annoying. Maybe the lack of buttons is something you can get used to after using it for a while. But millions of people just taking whatever companies like Google offer isn t what I imagined when I first hoped for a large portion of the world using Linux. On PCs we have a choice between KDE, GNOME, and other UIs. It would be nice if we had similar choices on phones.

• [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_6a

A recent development is cheap Gallium Nitride based power supplies that provide better efficiency in a smaller space than other technologies. Kogan recently had a special on such devices so I decided to try them out with my new Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 5 [1]. Google searches for power supplies for that Thinkpad included results for 30W PSUs which implies that any 30W USB-C PSU should work. I bought a 30W charger for $10 that can supply 15V/2A or 20V/1.5A on a single USB-C port or 15W on the USB-C port and 15W on the USB-2 port at the same time and expected it to work as a laptop charger. Unfortunately it didn t, I don t know whether the adverts for 30W Thinkpad PSUs were false or whether the claim of the GaN charger I bought being 30W was false, all I know is that the KDE power applet said that the PSU couldn t supply enough power. I then bought a 68W charger for $28 that can supply 20.0V/3.0A on a single USB-C port if the USB-2 port isn t used and 50W on the USB-C port if the USB-2 port is also being used. This worked well which wasn t a great surprise as I had previously run the laptop on 45W PSUs. If I connect a phone to the USB-2 port while the laptop is being charged then the laptop will be briefly cut off, presumably the voltage and current are being renegotiated when that happens. As you can see the 68W charger is significantly larger than the 30W charger, but still small enough to easily fit in a jacket pocket and smaller than a regular laptop charger. One of my uses for this will be to put it in a jacket pocket when I have my laptop in another pocket. Another use will be for charging in my car as the cables from the inverter to convert 12VDC to 240VAC takes enough space. I will probably get a ~50W USB-PD charger that connects to a car cigarette lighter socket when a GaN version of such a charger becomes available.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/12/08/thinkpad-x1-carbon-gen5/

Wayland First up, I read Antoine Beaupr s Wayland to Sway migration with interest. While he said it s done and dusted or something similar, the post shows there s still quite a ways to go. I wouldn t say it s done or whatever till it s integrated so well that a person installs it and doesn t really need to fiddle with config files as an average user. For specific use-cases you may need to, but that should be outside of a normal user (layperson) experience. I have been using mate for a long long time and truth be told been very happy with it. The only thing I found about Wayland on mate is this discussion or rather this entry. The roadmap on Ubuntu Mate is also quite iffy. The Mate Wayland entry on Debian wiki also perhaps need an updation but dunno much as the latest update it shares is 2019 and it s 2022. One thing to note, at least according to Antoine, things should be better as and when it gets integrated even on legacy hardware. I would be interested to know how it would work on old desktops and laptops rather than new or is there some barrier? I, for one would have liked to see or know about why lightdm didn t work on Wayland and if there s support. From what little I know lightdm is much lighter than gdm3 and doesn t require much memory and from what little I have experienced works very well with mate. I have been using it since 2015/16 although the Debian changelog tells me that it has been present since 2011. I was hoping to see if there was a Wayland specific mailing list, something like debian-wayland but apparently there s not :(. Using mate desktop wayland (tried few other variations on the keywords) but search fails to find any meaningful answer :(. FWIW and I don t know the reason why but Archwiki never fails to amaze me. Interestingly, it just says No for mate. I probably would contact upstream in the coming days to know what their plans are and hopefully they will document what their plans are on integrating Wayland in both short-term and long-term with an update, or if there is something more recent they have documented elsewhere, get that update on the Debian wiki so people know. The other interesting thread I read was Russel Coker s Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 entry. I would be in the market in a few months to find/buy a Thinkpad but probably of AMD rather than Intel because part of recent past history with Intel as well as AMD having a bit of an edge over Intel as far as graphics is concerned. I wonder why Russel was looking into Intel and not AMD. Would be interested to know why Intel and not AMD? Any specific reason ???

Hearing Aids I finally bought hearing aids about a couple of weeks back and have been practicing using them. I was able to have quite a few conversations although music is still I m not able to listen clearly but it is still a far cry from before and for the better. I am able to have conversations with people and also reply and they do not have to make that extra effort that they needed to. Make things easier for everybody. The one I bought is at the starting range although the hearing aids go all the way to 8 lakhs for a pair (INR 800,000), the more expensive ones having WiFi, Bluetooth and more channels, it all depends on how much can one afford. And AFAIK there is not a single Indian manufacturer who is known in this business.

One thing I did notice is while the hearing aids are remarkably sturdy if they fall down as they are small, yet you have to be careful of both dust and water . That does makes life a bit difficult as my house and city both gets sand quite a bit everyday. I don t think they made any India-specific changes, if they had, would probably make things better. I haven t yet looked at it, but it may be possible to hack it remotely. There may or may not be security issues involved, probably would try once I ve bit more time am bit more comfortable to try and see what I can find out. If I had bought it before, maybe I would have applied for the Debian event happening in Kerala, if nothing else, would have been to document what happened there in detail. I probably would have to get a new motherboard for my desktop probably in a year or two as quite a few motherboards also have WiFi (WiFi 6 ?) think on the southbridge. I at least would have a look in new year and know more as to what s been happening. For last at least 2-3 years there has been a rumor which has been confirmed time and again that the Tata Group has been in talks with multiple vendors to set chip fabrication and testing business but to date they haven t been able to find one. They do keep on giving press conferences about the same but that s all they do :(. Just shared the latest one above.

The Long War Terry Pratchett, Stephen Braxter Long Earth Terry Pratchett, Stephen Braxter ISBN13: 9780062067777 Last month there was also a seconds books sale where I was lucky enough to get my hands on the Long War. But before I share about the book itself, I had a discussion with another of my friends and had to re-share part of that conversation. While the gentleman was adamant that non-fiction books are great, my point as always is both are equal. As I shared perhaps on this blog itself, perhaps multiple times, that I had seen a YT video in which a professor shared multiple textbooks of physics and shared how they are wrong and have been wrong and kept them in a specific corner. He took the latest book which he honestly said doesn t have any mistakes as far as he know and yet still kept in that same corner denoting that it is highly possible that future understanding will make the knowledge or understanding we know different. An example of physics in the nano world and how that is different and basically turns our understanding than what we know. Now as far as the book is concerned, remember Michael Crichton s Timeline. Now that book was originally written in the 1960 s while this one was written by both the honorable gentleman in 2013. So almost 50+ years difference between the two books, and that even shows how they think about things. In this book, you no longer need a big machine, but have something called a stepper machine which is say similar to a cellphone, that size and that frame, thickness etc. In this one, the idea of multiverse is also there but done a tad differently. In this, we do not have other humans or copy humans but have multiple earths that may have same or different geography as how evolution happened. None of the multiverse earths have humans but have different species depending on the evolution that happened there. There are something called as trolls but they have a much different meaning and way about them about how most fantasy authors portray trolls. While they are big in this as well, they are as gentle as bears or rabbits. So the whole thing is about real estate and how humans have spread out on multiple earths and the politics therein. Interestingly, the story was trashed or given negative reviews on Goodreads. The sad part is/was that it was written and published in 2013 when perhaps the possibility of war or anything like that was very remote especially in the States, but now we are now in 2022 and just had an insurrection happen and whole lot of Americans are radicalized, whether you see the left or the right depending on your ideology. An American did share few weeks ago how some shares are looking at Proportional Representation and that should make both parties come more towards the center and be a bit more transparent. What was interesting to me is the fact that states have much more rights to do elections and electioneering the way they want rather than a set model which everyone has common which is what happens in India. This also does poke holes into the whole Donald Trump stolen democracy drama but that s a different story altogether. One of the more interesting things I came to know about is that there are 4 books in the long series and this was the second book in itself. I do not want to dwell on the characters themselves as frankly speaking I haven t read all the four books and it would be gross injustice on my part to talk about the characters themselves. Did I enjoy reading the book, for sure. What was interesting and very true of human nature is that even if we have the ability or had the ability to have whole worlds to ourselves, we are bound to mess it up. And in that aspect, I don t think he is too far off the mark. If I had a whole world, wouldn t I try to exploit it to the best or worse of my ability. One of the more interesting topics in the book is the barter system they have thought of that is called as favors. If you are in multiple worlds, then having a currency, even fiat money is of no use and they have to find ways and means to trade with one another. The book also touches a bit on slavery but only just and doesn t really explore it as much as it could have.

Identity Now this has many meanings to it. Couple of weeks ago, saw a transgender meet. For the uninitiated or rather people like me, basically it is about people who are born in one gender but do not identify with it but the other and they express it first through their clothes and expression and the end of the journey perhaps is with having the organs but this may or may not be feasible, as such surgery is expensive and also not available everywhere. After section 377 was repealed few years ago, we do have a third gender on forms as well as have something called a Transgender Act but how much the needle has moved in society is still a question. They were doing a roadshow near my house hence I was able to talk with them with my new hearing aids and while there was lot of traffic was able to understand some of their issues. For e.g. they find it difficult to get houses on rent, but then it is similar for bachelor guys or girls also. One could argue to what degree it is, and that perhaps maybe. Also, there is a myth that they are somehow promiscuous but that I believe is neither here or there. Osho said an average person thinks about the opposite sex every few seconds or a minute. I am sure even Freud would have similar ideas. So, if you look in that way everybody is promiscuous as far as thought is concerned. The other part being opportunity but that again is function of so many other things. Some people are able to attract a lot of people, others might not. And then whether they chose to act on that opportunity or not is another thing altogether. Another word that is or was used is called gender fluid, but that too is iffy as gender fluid may or may not mean transgender. Also, while watching some nature documentary few days/weeks back had come to know that trees have something like 18 odd genders. That just blows me out of the mind and does re-question this whole idea of sexuality and identity to only two which seems somewhat regressive at least to me. If we think humans are part of nature, then we need to be open up perhaps a bit more. But identity as I shared above has more than one meaning. For e.g. citizenship, that one is born in India is even messier to know, understand and define. I had come across this article about couple of months back. Now think about this. Now, there have been studies and surveys about citizenship and it says something like 60% birth registrations are done in metro cities. Now Metro cities are 10 as defined by Indian state. But there are roughly an odd 4k cities in India and probably twice the number of villages and those are conservative numbers as we still don t record things meticulously, maybe due to the Indian oral tradition or just being lazy or both, one part is also that if you document people and villages and towns, then you are also obligated to give them some things as a state and that perhaps is not what the Indian state wants. A small village in India could be anywhere from few hundreds of people to a few thousand. And all the new interventions whether it is PAN, Aadhar has just made holes rather than making things better. They are not inclusive but exclusive. And none of this takes into account Indian character and the way things are done in India. In most households, excluding the celebs (they are in a world of pain altogether when it comes to baby names but then it s big business but that s an entire different saga altogether, so not going to touch that.) I would use or say my individual case as that is and seems to be something which is regular even today. I was given a nickname when I was 3 years old and given a name when I was 5-6 when I was put in school. I also came to know in school few kids who didn t like their names and couple of them cajoled and actually changed their names while they were kids, most of us just stayed with what we got. I do remember sharing about nakushi or something similar a name given to few girls in Maharashtra by their parents and the state intervened and changed their names. But that too is another story in itself. What I find most problematic is that the state seems to be blind, and this seems to be by design rather than a mistake. Couple of years back, Assam did something called NRC (National Register of Citizens) and by the Govt s own account it was a failure of massive proportions. And they still want to bring in CAA, screwing up Assam more. And this is the same Govt. went shown how incorrect it was, blamed it all on the High Court and it s the same Govt. that shopped around for judges to put somebody called Mr. Saibaba (an invalid 90 year adivasi) against whom the Govt. hasn t even a single proof as of date. Apparently, they went to 6 judges who couldn t give what the decision the Govt. wanted. All this info. is in public domain. So the current party ruling, i.e. BJP just wants to make more divisions rather than taking people along as they don t have answers either on economy, inflation or issues that people are facing. One bright light has been Rahul Gandhi who has been doing a padhyatra (walking) from Kanyakumari to Kashmir and has had tremendous success although mainstream media has showed almost nothing what he is doing or why he is doing that. Not only he had people following him, there are and were many who took his example and using the same values of inclusiveness are walking where they can. And this is not to do with just a political party but more with a political thought of inclusiveness, that we are one irrespective of what I believe, eat, wear etc. And that gentleman has been giving press conferences while our dear P.M. even after 8 years doesn t have the guts to do a single press conference. Before closing, I do want to take another aspect, Rahul Gandhi s mother is an Italian or was from Italy before she married. But for BJP she is still Italian. Rishi Sunak, who has become the UK Prime Minister they think of him as Indian and yet he has sworn using the Queen s name. And the same goes for Canada Kumar (Akshay Kumar) and many others. How the right is able to blind and deaf to what it thinks is beyond me. All these people have taken an oath in the name of the Queen and they have to be loyal to her or rather now King Charles III. The disconnect continues.

Gen1 Since February 2018 I have been using a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen1 [1] as my main laptop. Generally I ve been very happy with it, it s small and light, has good performance for web browsing etc, and with my transition to doing all compiles etc on servers it works well. When I wrote my original review I was unhappy with the keyboard, but I got used to that and found it to be reasonably good. The things that I have found as limits on it are the display resolution as 1600*900 isn t that great by modern standards (most phones are a lot higher resolution), the size (slightly too large for the pocket of my Scott e Vest [2] jacket), and the lack of USB-C. Modern laptops can charge via USB-C/Thunderbolt while also doing USB and DisplayPort video over the same cable. USB-C monitors which support charging a laptop over the same cable as used for video input are becoming common (last time I checked the Dell web site for many models of monitor there was a USB-C one that cost about $100 more). I work at a company with lots of USB-C monitors and docks so being able to use my personal laptop with the same displays when on breaks is really handy. A final problem with the Gen1 is that it has a proprietary and unusual connector for the SSD which means that a replacement SSD costs about what I paid for the entire laptop. Ever since the SSD gave a BTRFS checksum error I ve been thinking of replacing it. Choosing a Replacement The Gen5 is the first Thinkpad X1 Carbon to have USB-C. For work I had used a Gen6 which was quite nice [3]. But it didn t seem to offer much over the Gen5. So I started looking for cheap Thinkpad X1 Carbons of Gen5+. A Cheap? Gen5 In July I saw an ebay advert for a Gen5 with FullHD display for $370 or nearest offer, with the downside being that the BIOS password had been lost. I offered $330 and the seller accepted, in retrospect that was unusually cheap and should have been a clue that I needed to do further investigation. It turned out that resetting the BIOS password is unusually difficult as it s in the TPM so the system would only boot Windows. When I learned that I should have sold the laptop to someone who wanted to run Windows and bought another. Instead I followed some instructions on the Internet about entering a wrong password multiple times to get to a password recovery screen, instead the machine locked up entirely and became unusable for windows (so don t do that). Then I looked for ways of fixing the motherboard. The cheapest was $75.25 for a replacement BIOS flash chip that had a BIOS that didn t check the validity of passwords. The aim was to solder that on, set a new password (with any random text being accepted as the old password), then solder the old one back on for normal functionality. It turned out that I m not good at fine soldering, after I had hacked at it a friend diagnosed the chip and motherboard to probably both be damaged (he couldn t get it going). The end solution was that my friend found a replacement motherboard for $170 from China. This gave a total cost of $575.25 for the laptop which is more than the usual price of a Gen6 and more than I expected to pay. In the past when advocating buying second hand or refurbished laptops people would say what happens if you get one that doesn t work properly , the answer to that question is that I paid a lot less than the new cost of $2700+ for a Thinkpad X1 Carbon and got a computer that does everything I need. One of the advantages of getting a cheap laptop is that I won t be so unhappy if I happen to drop it. A Cheap Gen6 After the failed experiment with a replacement BIOS on the Gen5 I was considering selling it for scrap. So I bought a Gen6 from Australian Computer Traders via Amazon for $390 in August. The advert clearly stated that it was for a laptop with USB-C and Thunderbolt (Gen5+ features) but they shipped me a Gen4 that didn t even have USB-C. They eventually refunded me but I will try to avoid buying from them again. Finally Working The laptop I now have has a i5-6300U CPU that rates 3242 on cpubenchmark.net. My Gen1 thinkpad has a i7-3667U CPU that rates 2378 on cpubenchmark.net, note that the cpubenchmark.net people have rescaled their benchmark since my review of the Gen1 in 2018. So according to the benchmarks my latest laptop is about 36% faster for CPU operations. Not much of a difference when comparing systems manufactured in 2012 and 2017! According to the benchmarks a medium to high end recent CPU will be more than 10* faster than the one in my Gen5 laptop, but such a CPU would cost more than my laptop cost. The storage is a 256G NVMe device that can do sustained reads at 900MB/s, that s not even twice as fast as the SSD in my Gen1 laptop although NVMe is designed to perform better for small IO. It has 2*USB-C ports both of which can be used for charging, which is a significant benefit over the Gen6 I had for work in 2018 which only had one. I don t know why Lenovo made Gen6 machines that were lesser than Gen5 in such an important way. It can power my Desklab portable 4K monitor [4] but won t send a DisplayPort signal over the same USB-C cable. I don t know if this is a USB-C cable issue or some problem with the laptop recognising displays. It works nicely with Dell USB-C monitors and docks that power the laptop over the same cable as used for DisplayPort. Also the HDMI port works with 4K monitors, so at worst I could connect my Desklab monitor via a USB-C cable for power and HDMI for data. The inability to change the battery without disassembly is still a problem, but hopefully USB-C connected batteries capable of charging such a laptop will become affordable in the near future and I have had some practice at disassembling this laptop. It still has the Ethernet dongle annoyance, and of course the seller didn t include that. But USB ethernet devices are quite good and I have a few of them. In conclusion it s worth the $575.25 I paid for it and would have been even better value for money if I had been a bit smarter when buying. It meets the initial criteria of USB-C power and display and of fitting in my jacket pocket as well as being slightly better than my old laptop in every other way.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2018/02/08/thinkpad-x1-carbon/
• [2] https://www.scottevest.com/
• [3] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2018/09/11/thinkpad-x1-carbon-gen-6/
• [4] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2020/07/02/desklab-portable-usb-c-monitor/

Here s the US Senate Statement of Frances Haugen who used to work for Facebook countering misinformation and espionage [1]. She believes that Facebook is capable of dealing with the online radicalisation and promotion of bad things on it s platform but is unwilling to do so for financial reasons. We need strong regulation of Facebook and it probably needs to be broken up. Interesting article from The Atlantic about filtered cigarettes being more unhealthy than unfiltered [2]. Every time I think I know how evil tobacco companies are I get surprised by some new evidence. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article about resistance to rubber hose cryptanalysis [3]. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article When Automation Becomes Enforcement with a new way of thinking about Snapchat etc [4]. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful and informative article Big Tech Isn t Stealing News Publishers Content, It s Stealing Their Money [5] which should be read by politicians from all countries that are trying to restrict quoting news on the Internet. Interesting articl;e on Santiago Genoves who could be considered as a pioneer of reality TV for deliberately creating disputes between a group of young men and women on a raft in the Atlantic for 3 months [6]. Matthew Garrett wrote an interesting review of the Freedom Phone, seems that it s not good for privacy and linked to some companies doing weird stuff [7]. Definitely worth reading. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting and amusing article about backdoors for machine learning [8] Petter Reinholdtsen wrote an informative post on how to make a bootable USB stick image from an ISO file [9]. Apparently Lenovo provides ISO images to update laptops that don t have DVD drives. :( Barry Gander wrote an interesting article about the fall of Rome and the decline of the US [10]. It s a great concern that the US might fail in the same way as Rome. Ethan Siegel wrote an interesting article about Iapetus, a moon of Saturn that is one of the strangest objects in the solar system [11]. Cory Doctorow s article Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs has some good insights into the horrible things that companies like Amazon are doing to their employees and how we can correct that [12]. Charles Stross wrote an insightful blog post about Billionaires [13]. They can t do much for themselves with the extra money beyond about $10m or $100m (EG Steve Jobs was unable to extend his own life much when he had cancer) and their money is trivial when compared to the global economy. They are however effective parasites capable of performing great damage to the country that hosts them. Cory Doctorow has an interesting article about how John Deere is being evil again [14]. This time with potentially catastrophic results.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/yeppy78q
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/28yt5wbg
• [3] https://onezero.medium.com/rubber-hoses-fd685385dcd4
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/2ztqaw9a
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/2kv68veo
• [6] https://en.culturess.com/view/?id=santiago-genoves-experiment-cul
• [7] https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/59479.html
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/yy8pyg65
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/2qr9evgb
• [10] https://tinyurl.com/2ngytzuh
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/2qjffrt3
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/2ote6mw7
• [13] https://tinyurl.com/yxe75yel
• [14] https://tinyurl.com/y23lbw2n

Tony Kern wrote an insightful document about the crash of a B-52 at Fairchild air base in 1994 as a case study of failed leadership [1]. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful medium article We Should Not Endure a King describing the case for anti-trust laws [2]. We need them badly. Insightful Guardian article about the way reasonable responses to the bad situations people are in are diagnosed as mental health problems [3]. Providing better mental healthcare is good, but the government should also work on poverty etc. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful Locus article about some of the issues that have to be dealt with in applying anti-trust legislation to tech companies [4]. We really need this to be done. Ars Technica has an interesting article about Stable Diffusion, an open source ML system for generating images [5], the results that it can produce are very impressive. One interesting thing is that the license has a set of conditions for usage which precludes exploiting or harming minors or generating false information [6]. This means it will need to go in the non-free section of Debian at best. Dan Wang wrote an interesting article on optimism as human capital [7] which covers the reasons that people feel inspired to create things.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/29bexyah
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/2g632oah
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/2zjkf45t
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/2f8pqq55
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/2jr94rm2
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/2ev8vwfb
• [7] https://danwang.co/definite-optimism-as-human-capital/

In the operation of a normal Linux system there are many secrets stored on behalf of a user. Wifi passwords, passwords from web sites, etc. Ideally you want them to be quickly and conveniently accessible to the rightful user but also be as difficult as possible for hostile parties to access. The solution in GNOME and KDE is to have a wallet that is encrypted to store such passwords, the idea is that if a hostile party gets access to a PC that doesn t use full disk encryption then the secrets will be protected. This is an OK feature. In early versions it required entering a password every time you logged in. The current default mode of operation is to have the login password used to decrypt the wallet which is very convenient. The problem is the case where the user login password has a scope larger than the local PC, EG a domain login password for Active Directory, Kerberos, or similar systems. In such a case if an attacker gets the encrypted wallet that could facilitate a brute force attack on the password used for domain logins. I think that a better option for this would be to store wallets in a directory that the user can t access directly, EG a mode 1770 directory with group wallet . Then when logging in a PAM process running as root could open the wallet and pass a file handle to a process running in the context of the user. For access apart from login there could be SETGID programs to manage it which could require authenticating the user s password before any operation that exports the data so that a vulnerability in a web browser or other Internet facing program can t just grab the file contents. Storing the data in a file that needs a SETGID or root owned process to access it doesn t preclude the possibility of encrypting that file. The same encryption options would be available including encrypting with the login password and unlocking at login time via PAM. The difference is that a brute force attack to discover the login password would first require breaking the security of one of those SETGID programs to get access to the raw data direct attacks by running the wallet open command repeatedly could be managed by the usual rate limiting mechanisms and logging in the system logs. The same methods could be used for protecting the secret keys for GPG and SSH which by default are readable by all processes running in the user context and encrypted with a passphrase. The next issue to consider is where to store such an restricted directory for wallets. Under the user home directory would give the advantage of having the same secrets operate over a network filesystem and not need anything special in backup configuration. Under /var/lib would give the advantage of better isolation from all the less secret (in a cryptographic sense) data in the user home directories. What do you think?