0:10

Hello

0:11

and welcome to episode 255 of Late Night Linux,

0:13

recorded on the 6th of November 2023. I'm

0:15

Joe, and with me are Faelan, Graham, Will, and Will. Anyway,

0:22

let's get straight on with our

0:24

discoveries. Will,

0:35

yours is amazing. It

0:37

turns out that a lot of Thinkpads, or

0:39

most Thinkpads, have a

0:42

1x1 pixel display on them. You're

0:44

just so in the club now that you want to have

0:46

it as well. Yeah,

0:48

I just saw this on Masterdon

0:51

from Lennart Pottering talking about

0:53

how you can control, with the latest

0:55

kernels anyway, how you can control the

0:57

red dot on the outside of the lid

1:00

on your Thinkpad. And you can

1:02

make it certain brightness, and you can make

1:04

it turn on and off, you know, breathe

1:05

in and out. And well, that's all

1:07

you can do with it. But great fun. And

1:09

to know that I can do this on my Thinkpad

1:12

is quite good. Has he made a systemd

1:14

unit out of it yet? I would imagine

1:16

so. Well, I was thinking you've got to be

1:18

able to use pulse audio

1:20

or pipewire or something to like pipe

1:23

it into it to flash along

1:25

with music.

1:26

That's got to be doable. Just

1:29

read in the comments on the rest of the thread, and people

1:31

have tried to flash it on and off very

1:33

fast, and apparently it just stays on. So there's

1:36

quite a lot of lag, it seems, between when

1:38

you tell it to turn on and when you tell it

1:40

to turn off. And

1:42

it's probably not good enough to have a disco. Well,

1:45

I did try it with my X270 and

1:47

I tried to do it fairly quickly. And yeah, it

1:49

did just seem to stay on. I wonder if that's

1:51

a security feature, because isn't there a kind

1:53

of vulnerability in the variants of lights

1:56

and LEDs when people are doing certain things on

1:58

their computers?

1:59

Maybe. I would think it's probably

2:02

less a security feature and more the cheapest

2:04

LED that I've ever been to find. But

2:07

that is just one of those cool, just

2:10

nerdy things that only

2:12

a Linux user would discover and

2:14

care about. And I love it. You've

2:17

also discovered Octopus Energy

2:19

Home Assistant add-on. Now this one is

2:21

slightly more useful and well,

2:24

it's quite niche still, I admit, but it is

2:26

more useful. If you are with

2:28

Octopus Energy, implies that

2:30

you're on one of their smart tariffs. They

2:33

offer a number of different tariffs that have different

2:35

pricing structures depending on what you need

2:37

it for. So if you've got an electric car, for example,

2:39

and you need to charge at a much lower

2:42

rate for six or seven

2:44

hours a day, they have a tariff

2:46

just for you where you get cheap rate overnight

2:48

and during the day, it's more expensive. They

2:51

also have one called Agile, which

2:53

is the wholesale rate plus

2:55

their markup of whatever it is, 10, 15% or

2:58

whatever. And that varies every 30 minutes

3:00

throughout the day. And so

3:02

if you're clever and you have a battery and

3:05

photo panels and whatnot, then you can

3:07

configure your battery to charge

3:09

on the very cheap rate. And then you

3:11

can avoid the very expensive rate. Normally,

3:14

the most expensive rate in a day is

3:16

between about 4pm and about 7pm, which

3:19

is when people are cooking dinner and

3:22

using a lot more electricity. So

3:24

if you have a battery and you're able to

3:26

charge it up on a cheaper rate, then

3:29

you can avoid that very expensive rate. And you can

3:31

save probably a couple of quid a day, I

3:33

would say, which over the course

3:35

of a year is quite a considerable saving.

3:38

This is essentially storage heaters for the 21st

3:40

century, isn't it? Exactly

3:42

what it is. Load shifting is they call

3:44

it. Right. And that's exactly what it is.

3:47

And so I spent an awful lot

3:49

of time writing a Python script to

3:52

download the prices from their API, calculate

3:54

when the cheapest four hour slot

3:56

was, and then tell my battery to charge

3:59

at those times. Well, it turns out

4:01

that BottlecapDave on GitHub has

4:03

done this in Home Assistant and he's done it

4:05

in a much better way than I ever could. It

4:08

downloads the prices, you can configure

4:10

it to calculate rolling averages over

4:13

any period of time you like. So

4:15

if your car takes four hours

4:17

to charge, you can find the cheapest four

4:19

hour rate. If your car takes eight hours

4:22

to charge, you can find the cheapest eight hour rate.

4:24

And you can configure it to use

4:27

individual 30 minute slots in a non-contiguous

4:30

block. So you can charge half

4:32

an hour here, half an hour, an hour and a half later,

4:35

half an hour, 30 minutes later than that

4:37

still. And sometimes on Agile,

4:40

when there's a lot of wind, for example,

4:42

the price goes negative. And so

4:44

you are paid for any electricity

4:46

you use. And this package allows

4:48

you to find those negative times

4:51

and take actions when the price goes

4:53

negative. So using Home Assistant, you

4:55

can call pretty much any script that you've

4:58

written in Home Assistant, turn on fan

5:00

heaters, set an alarm to go off

5:02

to tell you to turn the tumble dryer on or whatever.

5:05

And so yeah, BottlecapDave has put all

5:07

of this together in a nice, easy to use add-on,

5:10

which if I'd have bothered to look for, it would have

5:12

saved me quite a number of days of

5:14

software development. Are you not worried that

5:16

one day your house is just going to turn against you and

5:19

kill you or lock you in or

5:21

something? No, I'll be all right. I'll

5:23

be all right. I know where the big switch is. I

5:25

suppose the good thing is that all of this is open

5:27

source. Whereas if you'd built it all

5:30

using proprietary bullshit, then there

5:32

might be a danger that it'd kill you. Whereas at

5:34

least Home Assistant, everything's all open source. So

5:37

someone would have caught it by now. Yeah. And

5:40

I think it offers a lot of real

5:43

value. There is a lot of money

5:45

to be saved by shifting your

5:47

energy usage to these very, very cheap times. And

5:50

the reason that that electricity is cheap

5:52

is because it is green, because the wind

5:55

is blowing extra hard and there's more electricity

5:57

in the grid than really it needs. So

6:00

using that electricity up is your civic duty

6:02

as a green person to save

6:05

the planet and you get paid for it and

6:07

this makes it easy. So I think everybody

6:09

should get on board with it. It's well smart but

6:11

I just wish you could teleport this into

6:13

our segment 30 years in the past

6:16

where a lab called bottle cap Dave allows

6:18

you to install into your house a script

6:21

which allows your octopus energy company

6:23

to charge your electric car. Totally

6:27

normal things. I think it sounds absolutely

6:30

amazing. I love the idea that there's

6:32

such a nerdy aspect for all of this

6:34

alongside the fact that you're using green electricity

6:37

and producing your own. It's just another

6:39

reason to try and get a solar setup for

6:41

me I think. Yeah I'm tempted to get a lot

6:43

of panels and batteries and just live half

6:46

off grid like you do. And you also

6:48

you feel typically so powerless with energy

6:50

companies you know the amount of money they take out of your

6:52

account every month the amount they have in the buffer the

6:55

kind of lack of transparency

6:57

over their tariffs or when you've come to the

6:59

end of a tariff. It's great

7:01

to be able to control something to such a fine degree

7:03

as most props to octopus. I do

7:05

worry a little bit that well at the moment

7:08

octopus is still working off

7:10

startup capital or you know it's VC funded

7:12

I think at some point they're

7:14

going to change their mind. And

7:16

somebody in the finance department is going

7:19

to go hang about you're telling me we're giving our

7:21

customers money for electricity we could

7:23

be selling to them. Let's not do that anymore.

7:25

And then the party will be over. But until

7:28

that day make the most of it. Fae

7:31

Lim Ruf now has a former term.

7:33

Yes. So I talked about

7:35

Ruf before it's a tip and solvable

7:38

way to check the syntax of your code

7:40

the lint essentially. But they

7:42

have now added more to it. This

7:44

is the astral the company that's running it. They've now

7:47

added a formatter to it which

7:49

is something like 98 percent compatible

7:51

with black which is a really famous Python

7:54

formatter. And this is essentially a way of if you

7:56

write shape format and code like I

7:58

do you can just. set it to go and reformat

8:01

it properly, then change the syntax structure

8:04

of things. So you are say

8:06

wrapping things in brackets and then putting one on each line.

8:08

I have a tendency to make a big line and split

8:11

them with the escape backslash. And

8:14

it does a proper version of that. And

8:16

it is exceptionally fast, pretty

8:18

much out. Well, it

8:20

runs in 0.1 of a second versus 3.2 seconds

8:24

for a 250,000 line of code piece of code base. And

8:29

a couple of other ones run it in the 19, 17 second

8:32

sort of region. So exceptionally fast. So again,

8:35

they've done really well. They're building more tools

8:37

for Python. And I

8:40

am all for that. Those benchmarks

8:42

are quite amazing. But auto

8:44

PEP 8, 19.56 seconds rough, 0.1 seconds. Amazing,

8:50

absolutely amazing. I mean, my code

8:53

is so shite, but it makes it look

8:55

nicer at least anyway. Graham,

8:58

ZSH profiling. I guess

9:00

quite a few of us use ZSH

9:02

instead of bash for our terminals.

9:05

Especially Mac users, eh? Dodger

9:08

means ZFS. What are you talking about? Yeah,

9:11

that's the only Z thing we care about. Well,

9:14

yeah, I mean, I think it is default on Mac

9:16

OS, but I've used it everywhere for

9:19

a long time and copy my

9:21

profile and settings from my

9:23

config Git repo. It lets

9:26

you do lots of things. It's

9:28

more convenient for pass names and navigating.

9:31

And also it's got a really good kind of plugin system

9:33

and there's a theming. There's lots

9:35

of theming engines, but I

9:38

use all my ZSH, which

9:41

is a very popular option that comes

9:43

with its own set of themes to

9:45

create like power line effects. Anyway,

9:48

the end result of me doing all this for so long is

9:50

that my ZSH

9:53

was running very, very poorly. Whenever

9:55

I opened up a terminal, it would take

9:57

a couple of seconds.

9:59

not that long but it took a there was a

10:18

zshrc which is zshrc.

10:22

All you have to do is that in this config file

10:24

you put I can't remember the name of the command

10:26

now but it's easy to find you put the

10:28

same command at the beginning of the config file

10:31

and then you put the same command at the end of the profile

10:34

so that when you next run zsh it

10:36

creates a kind

10:38

of a log a zprof log of all

10:40

of the things that are run from your configuration

10:44

and the time it takes for them to run and

10:46

then you can take a look at this and see

10:49

what's taking all the time and it

10:51

was incredibly revealing what mine was

10:53

doing and in fact it was a huge cache

10:56

of .zsh underscore

10:59

session profiles that had been cached

11:02

that I was get cloning across all

11:04

of the places that got this configured and moving back it

11:06

was like I don't know how big it was it was megabytes

11:09

and megabytes and this was being passed every time

11:11

although we did up a new session so it

11:13

now loads instantly. I do quite like

11:15

oh my zsh as a

11:18

kind of novelty shell there's

11:20

so many ways of configuring it and so

11:22

many sort of standard or downloadable

11:25

themes that you can get for it it's a nice

11:27

tool to have but I did find it it

11:29

would get slow the longer I fiddled

11:31

with it and you're never quite sure which

11:34

bit of the change it was that broke

11:36

it I did not know that this profiling existed

11:38

that would have been a real life saver. I'm

11:41

going to pull back the curtain a little bit have you noticed

11:43

that Graham keeps saying zsh that's

11:46

because he tried it a couple of times quickly

11:49

zsh and fucked it up and I've

11:51

had to edit them out you know it's a great

11:54

name for something when you have

11:56

to say zsh. all

12:00

for using Z. I think Z is the answer,

12:02

it's ZSH. Oh, kick them off the podcast.

12:04

Yeah. Boo. But

12:07

I thought fish was like the hot shit these

12:10

days with Linux users. No.

12:13

Bash, who installs a new

12:15

shell? What type of weirdos are you? Well,

12:17

yeah, certainly not me because surely

12:20

it's just one extra step to set up any

12:22

machine if you're using a different shell. Like

12:25

I get that there's advantages to using

12:27

fish and zealousation various other

12:29

shells. But like any machine apart

12:31

from a Mac, any Linux machine that you sit down in

12:33

front of is going to be running

12:36

Bash. And so, yeah,

12:38

I'm with you failing man. Just let's just have

12:40

the old school shit shell because it's

12:42

default. It doesn't have to call it shit. Jesus,

12:45

it's not that bad. Well, it also

12:48

means you don't have to learn anything new, which is handy

12:50

as well. Yes, I'm off with that. Do

12:53

you use a funny shell, Will, or do you just stick with

12:55

Bash? No, I just use Bash. I did use

12:58

ZSH on the Mac, but

13:00

now I'm back on Linux. I just use Bash, and

13:02

it's fine. Thank you very much. Yeah, you're

13:05

just some sort of fancy man, Graham. I

13:08

think maybe it's because we've got a terrible memory. It's great

13:10

for like navigating your history and not having to

13:12

type CD and... What's wrong with controller?

13:14

Come on. I mean, I know there's

13:17

fuzzy search for Bash as well, but it's

13:19

so nicely integrated into ZSH. The

13:22

Git management was very good. It would

13:25

tell you what branch you're in and whether you

13:27

had committed changes and all that. I'm

13:30

sure you can do that in Bash. I just can't be asked.

13:32

Yeah, there's Powerline for Bash, which is what I used

13:34

to use, which is a Python thing. It

13:36

just strikes me as a very sort of arch

13:38

Linux user thing to do, changing your shell.

13:41

That's right. He does run out of ZSH. You're

13:43

right. I'd forgotten that. He didn't

13:45

even say. I've not mentioned

13:48

it for a while. I think you got away with it. Okay.

13:51

This episode is sponsored by people who support

13:53

us with PayPal and Patreon. Go to latenightlinux.com

13:57

slash support for details of how you can

13:59

support us too. For $10

14:01

a month on Patreon, you can get access to an

14:03

RSS feed that contains all the Late

14:05

Night Linux family shows without adverts

14:08

like this. There's also an option to get

14:10

just this show ad-free for $5 a month. Some

14:13

episodes are even released a day or so early for

14:15

Patreon supporters. So if

14:17

you like what we do and can afford it, it'd

14:19

be great if you could support us at latenightlinx.com

14:22

slash support. Phalim,

14:25

Pi Telegram Bot API. Yeah,

14:27

so I have kind of two

14:30

things that I've got. I've got Pi Telegram

14:32

Bot because I want to have a

14:35

out of band or out of email way

14:37

to alert on something because alerting

14:39

on email is fine until email's fucked

14:42

and then, you know, let's face it, email's fucked.

14:45

So I use this for quite a few things. There's

14:47

a cool utility. I heard Martin

14:50

actually talk about it on Linux Matters

14:52

only the last episode where he was talking about

14:54

NetData and how good it is. And I've used that for

14:56

quite a while. It's like running your

14:58

own sort of both monitoring and

15:01

graphing solution on the same host. But

15:04

you can also set it up to notify

15:07

you via various channels. And one

15:09

of them is actually Telegram. And

15:11

I use that for some stuff, but I also use command-line

15:14

alerts for various things. And it's quite

15:16

handy to set up a Telegram group and

15:18

then use this script, which is all Python-based.

15:21

And essentially, you can set up a... You

15:23

go to the bot father, you get yourself

15:26

a bot handle, and then you assign

15:28

it to a group. And then you've got notifications

15:30

coming in from boxes that you can ignore in your

15:33

Telegram chat because there's too many of them.

15:35

And you just realize that it was a few of them

15:37

I left for all along anyway, and it felt broken.

15:40

But it is very handy. And I use one

15:42

for a... I've got my... Obviously,

15:45

my Pi that listens for airplanes flying by. I

15:47

watch for certain aircraft. I've even

15:50

found a DB that a

15:52

electronics firm, funnily enough, updates

15:55

and is used by a lot of people to determine whether aircraft

15:57

are military or not. And I use

15:59

that for... to then notify me if there's any military aircraft

16:01

I'm by because they might be interesting. And

16:04

it telegrams me all the time.

16:07

It's really amazing. Yeah, it

16:09

sounds great. Yeah. I have to

16:11

wonder I have migraines every time I wake up for

16:13

the last eight days. Bing!

16:18

And you've got a related one which I refuse

16:21

to call Notify. I read it as nifty.sh.

16:25

Yeah. So telegrams good,

16:27

but it could go away. It could run out

16:29

of funny. It could be blocked or whatever. And yes,

16:33

I also don't know what it is.

16:35

It's ntfy.sh. So whatever you want to call

16:37

that. We're calling it nifty. That's the official

16:40

name for it on our show. Even though they say

16:42

it's Notify. Aye. So well,

16:44

you can get that on Google Play, App Store and

16:46

F-Droid. It allows you to, without

16:49

paying, set up a

16:51

sort of a channel name. You have to kind

16:53

of set one unique so you don't have a collision. I

16:56

believe there's a pro version where you can pay for it

16:58

too so you can actually sort of reserve

17:00

one. But it's a way to send notifications

17:03

to this sort of channel that you're all listening on.

17:06

Now, I haven't tried it myself. I

17:08

have thought about using it before, but

17:10

I sort of fell back to telegram by the fact that lots

17:12

of people that I work with all use telegram anyway.

17:15

So it's still quite handy to use that. But if

17:18

people are looking for a way to get a sort of non-email

17:21

based alert coming through, it's got

17:23

ways for you to get on your mobile phone. It's quite interesting.

17:26

And I believe you can run it yourself.

17:29

So you could have your own version of this as

17:31

a gateway that you can then listen in on. Well,

17:34

I've got a discovery that Ryan sent in.

17:36

It's a book that he's written called Beyond Doubt.

17:39

And he basically said, you lot are a bunch of godless

17:42

heathens. Maybe you'll enjoy this book. And it's

17:44

all about how secularism

17:46

is on the rise and don't be fooled by

17:49

the various evidence

17:51

to the contrary or supposed evidence to the contrary.

17:54

It sounds like quite an academic study

17:56

of secularism. It

18:00

doesn't seem like everyone will be interested, but

18:02

maybe one or two people will. So I thought I'd give it a quick

18:04

mention. So I'll put a link in the show notes, but it's called

18:06

Beyond Doubt anyway. Quick

18:09

update on my running Ubuntu

18:12

Asahi on my Mac experience

18:15

and how, I don't know if

18:17

it was recent bugs

18:20

that the Asahi folks found with

18:22

macOS or not. But

18:25

anyway, I tried to do updates

18:27

on the Mac and the macOS side of things, and

18:29

it just fucking wouldn't work.

18:32

It just kept saying, unable to

18:34

personalize the update. And I was like, what?

18:37

Looked it up. Okay. Try booting

18:39

in like some sort of safe mode equivalent. No,

18:42

still wouldn't do it. It sort of start downloading

18:44

and then go, nah, sorry. And

18:46

then try this, try that. And in

18:48

the end, I had to do a DFU restore,

18:51

which someone in the telegram

18:53

said, does that stand for done fucked up? And

18:56

yeah, I think it does. I had something

18:59

direct firmware update, some of that anyway.

19:02

And even that failed

19:04

at first. And then I had to like do an update

19:06

of the Apple configurator.

19:08

And I thought I'd bricked the Mac at some

19:11

point. I thought, Jesus Christ, I paid a lot of money for

19:13

this thing and it's still worth a few hundred quid

19:15

and I might've fucking bricked it. I was thinking,

19:17

hmm, maybe I can buy an M2 one to replace it. But

19:20

now in the end, I got it working again.

19:22

And so the Ubuntu situation

19:24

lasted about a week and a half before

19:26

I had to totally wipe it off again. So

19:30

that's a bit shit really. And I blame

19:32

Apple for it and not at all the Asahi folks who

19:34

actually are doing a good job

19:36

of finding bugs that I

19:38

don't, I don't know if it's right. I'm too thick

19:40

to work out whether it's related to it or not, but

19:44

maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. Maybe just max

19:46

a shit. Was that an Apple security

19:48

bug that got pushed out and then it just wouldn't install

19:51

because it didn't like the look of it or? Well,

19:53

I don't know why it wouldn't do it, but

19:55

yeah, the reason that I was keen to install

19:57

it was because there's this recent speculative. execution

20:00

vulnerability with the arm max. So

20:02

yeah, I was very keen to get

20:05

it installed, but no, it

20:07

just fucking wouldn't. So I don't

20:09

know, I really have not got to the

20:11

bottom of what caused it because it doesn't seem

20:13

related to the other bugs that were

20:16

found recently, but nothing

20:18

I tried would work except for

20:21

just completely new

20:23

compaving the whole thing. Thankfully I did have a time

20:25

machine backup, so I got it all back and

20:28

running within a few minutes. Well, actually

20:30

more like about an hour, but yeah,

20:32

weird. So now I'm a bit scared really

20:35

to run a Sahih again, but it's

20:37

not my main machine, so it'll be fine. I'll just do

20:39

that again when I get bored. Let's

20:42

do some feedback then. Christian writes,

20:44

hi Joe, congratulations on your X270. Nice

20:47

to hear you've finally joined the ThinkPad cult. It's

20:50

a lovely device, I'm sure you'll have a lot of fun with it,

20:52

excited to see whether you'll get additional ThinkPads later.

20:55

Usually it won't stop with the first device, and

20:57

I admit I have been looking, oh the

20:59

ones, I haven't bought any yet, but

21:02

I'm looking, let's just say that, I want a T-series

21:04

one now. But anyway, maybe

21:07

for Christmas we'll see. Anyway, he continues,

21:09

I'm also a ThinkPad enthusiast and a heavy

21:11

collector, and then he sends a link to

21:14

his list of ThinkPads, and yeah,

21:16

he's not wrong, he is a heavy

21:19

collector. Right now

21:21

I'm about to start a virtual museum and a dedicated

21:23

podcast about ThinkPad history. So

21:26

whenever you have any questions or want to dig deeper, let

21:28

me know, I'm happy to help. So yeah,

21:30

definitely let us know when you get your virtual museum and

21:32

podcast started, we'll give it a shout out on the show.

21:34

But just looking through his

21:37

list of ThinkPads, it

21:39

is quite impressive.

21:42

Yes, impressive, that's a word for

21:44

it. It

21:46

makes your collection look shit Will, is all I'm saying.

21:50

I think somebody needs to send help immediately.

21:55

I'm only joking. Yeah, I think he might

21:57

become the leader of this cult. essentially.

22:01

And it's quite the range as well from some quite modern

22:03

ones to some like proper ancient ones running

22:07

XP and way older than

22:09

that as well. Windows 98, you've got a ThinkPad 240

22:12

for example, which has got 128

22:14

megabytes of RAM and a 6 gigabyte

22:18

IDE hard drive and

22:20

Windows 98 second edition. And

22:23

he's also got a wish list as well which is brilliant.

22:26

It just doesn't stop, does it? I think I need

22:28

to just get rid of this ThinkPad of mine and

22:30

not join this call. It seems dangerous to

22:32

me. Salem, how about

22:34

you read this next one? Yes, I see why

22:36

you might have got me to try and telly-fuzzah,

22:40

telly-fuzzah, who knows? Who

22:42

knows? They write in and say,

22:45

in episode 250 you mentioned that the

22:47

Pixel 8 will get updates for the next seven years

22:49

and that that would be unparalleled in the Android

22:52

world. I just wanted to mention

22:54

that Fairphone has that kind of support commitment.

22:57

Five years for the Fairphone 4 and eight

22:59

years for the new Fairphone 5 with

23:02

a track record. Fairphone 2 got seven

23:04

years of updates. Yeah, which

23:07

I think was a bit of an oversight really when

23:09

we talked about this. Fairphone is

23:12

very much the outlier and they go through,

23:14

I mean they just jump through hoops man

23:16

to get this support for

23:18

so long and to make it all work.

23:21

And so I think it was definitely remiss of

23:23

us to not mention them. So yes,

23:25

thank you for pointing that out. And

23:27

it's interesting that I saw an article on notebook

23:29

check. It looks like the Pixel 8

23:32

offloads AI to the cloud. Which

23:35

is exactly what Gary had said

23:38

in that episode where we talked about it. He suggested

23:40

that that's probably how

23:42

they will end up supporting them for

23:44

so long. So yeah, I think

23:46

he was right there. I was looking at a Fairphone

23:49

last week when I thought my phone had died

23:51

horribly because I couldn't delete a chain

23:53

of SMS messages and I couldn't send and receive

23:55

them either because everything just looked like it was

23:58

stuck in concrete.

23:59

just end up clearing the cash and deleting

24:02

all the onboard stuff and then it all, funnily

24:04

enough, came back and then worked again. So

24:07

crisis averted, I don't have to look for a new phone

24:09

for a while. So yay! Yeah

24:11

but the Fairphone, you pay for it, don't you? You

24:13

do, yeah. You pay the premium. It is expensive.

24:16

But fair play to them. They

24:19

are a small-ish company offering

24:22

something that is otherwise unprecedented and

24:24

I suppose that the, in

24:26

our defense, it's unprecedented for

24:29

a big company like Google to do something

24:31

like this and not a sort of specialist

24:33

like Fairphone but yes we should have definitely mentioned

24:36

them. Michael says, how

24:38

are Linux market share numbers compiled? Mostly

24:41

from the user agent string? I only

24:43

run Linux and mostly Firefox and my user

24:46

agent strings shows Windows. Is

24:48

this common? Hocus pocus. Are

24:50

Linux desktop installations being under-counted

24:53

due to this misreporting? To be fair, no

24:55

one else in my circle uses a Linux desktop

24:58

and I'm not suggesting a massive reporting miss. The

25:01

bottom line is that there is no

25:03

true way to know what

25:06

market share various operating systems

25:08

and desktops and everything has. There's

25:11

loads of different ways to count it and none

25:13

of them are truly scientific. I think it's

25:15

all made up. Well it's not all made up

25:17

is it? It's people having their best guess. It's people

25:20

using things like user agent strings and getting

25:23

logs and everything but it's

25:26

an impossible problem I think. Maybe

25:29

if you have a distro and it's big you

25:31

can then say X number of hosts

25:33

when to hit the server every error for

25:36

updates but are

25:39

they all gone through a proxy? I don't know. I'd

25:42

say you had you know some sort of

25:44

packaging format that checked in every

25:47

six hours for updates maybe that'll give you

25:49

accurate stats. What would you call that?

25:52

I don't know. Pop? It'd need to be something

25:54

quite snappy. Crackle. Yeah. But

25:57

yeah the bottom line is Michael fucking

25:59

nobody knows. don't trust anyone who tells

26:01

you any sort of stats.

26:04

You know you've got the Steam surveys and there's

26:07

lots of data points but no one is going

26:09

to give you a truly accurate representation

26:12

of desktop market share.

26:14

Right well we'd better get out of here then. We'll

26:17

be back in a couple of weeks when it might be some news

26:19

it might be from random bollocks who knows.

26:22

But until then I've been John. I've been

26:24

Tom. I've been Graham. And I've been Will.

26:27

See you later.