USB-A is the original socket for USB at the PC end. There are 2 variants of it, the first is for USB 1.1 to USB 2 and the second is for USB 3 which adds extra pins in a plug and socket compatible manner – you can plug a USB-A device into a USB-A socket without worrying about the speeds of each end as long as you don’t need USB 3 speeds.

The differences between USB-A and USB-C are:

1. USB-C has the same form factor as Thunderbolt and the Thunderbolt protocol can run over it if both ends support it.
2. USB-C generally supports higher power modes for charging (like 130W for Dell laptops, monitors, and plugpacks) but there’s no technical reason why USB-A couldn’t do it. You can buy chargers that do 60W over USB-A which could power one of our laptops via a USB-A to USB-C cable. So high power USB-A is theoretically possible but generally you won’t see it.
3. USB-C has “DisplayPort alternate mode” which means using some of the wires for DisplayPort.
4. USB-C is more likely to support the highest speeds than USB-A sockets for “super speed” etc. This is not a difference in the standards just a choice made by manufacturers.

While USB-C tends to support higher power delivery modes in actual implementations for connecting to a PC the PC end seems to only support lower power modes regardless of port. I think it would be really good if workstations could connect to monitors via USB-C and provide power, DisplayPort, and keyboard, mouse, etc over the same connection. But unfortunately the PC and monitor ends don’t appear to support such things.

If you don’t need any of those benefits in the list above (IE you are using USB for almost anything we do other than connecting a laptop to a dock/monitor/charger) then USB-A will do the job just as well as USB-C. The choice of which type to use should be based on price and which ports are available, EG My laptop has 2*USB-C ports and 2*USB-A so given that one USB-C port is almost always used for the monitor or for charging I don’t really want to use USB-C for anything else to avoid running out of ports.

When buying USB devices you can’t always predict which systems you will need to connect them to. Currently there are a lot of systems without USB-C that are working well and have no need to be replaced. I haven’t yet seen a system where the majority of ports are USB-C but that will probably happen in the next few years. Maybe in 2027 there will be PCs on sale with only two USB-A sockets forcing people who don’t want to use a USB hub to save both of them for keyboard and mouse. Currently USB-C keyboards and mice are available on AliExpress but they are expensive and I haven’t seen them in Australian stores. Most computer users don’t wear out keyboards or mice so a lot of USB-A keyboard and mice will be in service for a long time. As an aside there are still many PCs with PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports in service so these things don’t go away for a long time.

There is one corner case where USB-C is convenient which is when you want to connect a mass storage device for system recovery or emergency backup, want a high speed, and don’t want to spend time figuring out which of the ports are “super speed” (which can be difficult at the back of a PC with poor lighting). With USB-C you can expect a speed of at least 5Gbit/s and don’t have to worry about accidentally connecting to a USB 2 port as is the situation with USB-A.

For my own use the only times that I prefer USB-C over USB-A are for devices to connect to phones. Eventually I’ll get a laptop that only has USB-C ports and this will change, but even then adaptors are possible.

For someone who doesn’t know the details of how things works it’s not unreasonable to just buy the newest stuff and assume it’s better as it usually is. But hopefully blog posts like this can help people make more informed decisions.

The XKCD comic Code Quality [1] inspired me to test out emoji in source. I really should have done this years ago when that XKCD was first published.

The following code compiles in gcc and runs in the way that anyone who wants to write such code would want it to run. The hover text in the XKCD comic is correct. You could have a style guide for such programming, store error messages in the doctor and nurse emoji for example.

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
  int 😇 = 1, 😈 = 2;
  printf("😇=%d, 😈=%d\n", 😇, 😈);
  return 0;
}

To get this to display correctly in Debian you need to install the fonts-noto-color-emoji package (used by the KDE emoji picker that runs when you press Windows-. among other things) and restart programs that use emoji. The Konsole terminal emulator will probably need it’s profile settings changed to work with this if you ran Konsole before installing fonts-noto-color-emoji. The Kitty terminal emulator works if you restart it after installing fonts-noto-color-emoji.

This web page gives a list of HTML codes for emoji [2]. If I start writing real code with emoji variable names then I’ll have to update my source to HTML conversion script (which handles <>" and repeated spaces) to convert emoji.

I spent a couple of hours on this and I think it’s worth it. I have filed several Debian bug reports about improvements needed to issues related to emoji.

• [1] https://xkcd.com/1513/
• [2] https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_emojis.asp

Introduction

There have been many experiments with the sizes of computers, some of which have stayed around and some have gone away. The trend has been to make computers smaller, the early computers had buildings for them. Recently for come classes computers have started becoming as small as could be reasonably desired. For example phones are thin enough that they can blow away in a strong breeze, smart watches are much the same size as the old fashioned watches they replace, and NUC type computers are as small as they need to be given the size of monitors etc that they connect to.

This means that further development in the size and shape of computers will largely be determined by human factors.

I think we need to consider how computers might be developed to better suit humans and how to write free software to make such computers usable without being constrained by corporate interests.

Those of us who are involved in developing OSs and applications need to consider how to adjust to the changes and ideally anticipate changes. While we can’t anticipate the details of future devices we can easily predict general trends such as being smaller, higher resolution, etc.

Desktop/Laptop PCs

When home computers first came out it was standard to have the keyboard in the main box, the Apple ][ being the most well known example. This has lost popularity due to the demand to have multiple options for a light keyboard that can be moved for convenience combined with multiple options for the box part. But it still pops up occasionally such as the Raspberry Pi 400 [1] which succeeds due to having the computer part being small and light. I think this type of computer will remain a niche product. It could be used in a “add a screen to make a laptop” as opposed to the “add a keyboard to a tablet to make a laptop” model – but a tablet without a keyboard is more useful than a non-server PC without a display.

The PC as “box with connections for keyboard, display, etc” has a long future ahead of it. But the sizes will probably decrease (they should have stopped making PC cases to fit CD/DVD drives at least 10 years ago). The NUC size is a useful option and I think that DVD drives will stop being used for software soon which will allow a range of smaller form factors.

The regular laptop is something that will remain useful, but the tablet with detachable keyboard devices could take a lot of that market. Full functionality for all tasks requires a keyboard because at the moment text editing with a touch screen is an unsolved problem in computer science [2].

The Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Fold [3] and related Lenovo products are very interesting. Advances in materials allow laptops to be thinner and lighter which leaves the screen size as a major limitation to portability. There is a conflict between desiring a large screen to see lots of content and wanting a small size to carry and making a device foldable is an obvious solution that has recently become possible. Making a foldable laptop drives a desire for not having a permanently attached keyboard which then makes a touch screen keyboard a requirement. So this means that user interfaces for PCs have to be adapted to work well on touch screens. The Think line seems to be continuing the history of innovation that it had when owned by IBM. There are also a range of other laptops that have two regular screens so they are essentially the same as the Thinkpad X1 Fold but with two separate screens instead of one folding one, prices are as low as $600US.

I think that the typical interfaces for desktop PCs (EG MS-Windows and KDE) don’t work well for small devices and touch devices and the Android interface generally isn’t a good match for desktop systems. We need to invent more options for this. This is not a criticism of KDE, I use it every day and it works well. But it’s designed for use cases that don’t match new hardware that is on sale. As an aside it would be nice if Lenovo gave samples of their newest gear to people who make significant contributions to GUIs. Give a few Thinkpad Fold devices to KDE people, a few to GNOME people, and a few others to people involved in Wayland development and see how that promotes software development and future sales.

We also need to adopt features from laptops and phones into desktop PCs. When voice recognition software was first released in the 90s it was for desktop PCs, it didn’t take off largely because it wasn’t very accurate (none of them recognised my voice). Now voice recognition in phones is very accurate and it’s very common for desktop PCs to have a webcam or headset with a microphone so it’s time for this to be re-visited. GPS support in laptops is obviously useful and can work via Wifi location, via a USB GPS device, or via wwan mobile phone hardware (even if not used for wwan networking). Another possibility is using the same software interfaces as used for GPS on laptops for a static definition of location for a desktop PC or server.

The Interesting New Things

Watch Like

The wrist-watch [4] has been a standard format for easy access to data when on the go since it’s military use at the end of the 19th century when the practical benefits beat the supposed femininity of the watch. So it seems most likely that they will continue to be in widespread use in computerised form for the forseeable future. For comparison smart phones have been in widespread use as “pocket watches” for about 10 years.

The question is how will watch computers end up? Will we have Dick Tracy style watch phones that you speak into? Will it be the current smart watch functionality of using the watch to answer a call which goes to a bluetooth headset? Will smart watches end up taking over the functionality of the calculator watch [5] which was popular in the 80’s? With today’s technology you could easily have a fully capable PC strapped to your forearm, would that be useful?

Phone Like

Folding phones (originally popularised as Star Trek Tricorders) seem likely to have a long future ahead of them. Engineering technology has only recently developed to the stage of allowing them to work the way people would hope them to work (a folding screen with no gaps). Phones and tablets with multiple folds are coming out now [6]. This will allow phones to take much of the market share that tablets used to have while tablets and laptops merge at the high end. I’ve previously written about Convergence between phones and desktop computers [7], the increased capabilities of phones adds to the case for Convergence.

Folding phones also provide new possibilities for the OS. The Oppo OnePlus Open and the Google Pixel Fold both have a UI based around using the two halves of the folding screen for separate data at some times. I think that the current user interfaces for desktop PCs don’t properly take advantage of multiple monitors and the possibilities raised by folding phones only adds to the lack. My pet peeve with multiple monitor setups is when they don’t make it obvious which monitor has keyboard focus so you send a CTRL-W or ALT-F4 to the wrong screen by mistake, it’s a problem that also happens on a single screen but is worse with multiple screens. There are rumours of phones described as “three fold” (where three means the number of segments – with two folds between them), it will be interesting to see how that goes.

Will phones go the same way as PCs in terms of having a separation between the compute bit and the input device? It’s quite possible to have a compute device in the phone form factor inside a secure pocket which talks via Bluetooth to another device with a display and speakers. Then you could change your phone between a phone-size display and a tablet sized display easily and when using your phone a thief would not be able to easily steal the compute bit (which has passwords etc). Could the “watch” part of the phone (strapped to your wrist and difficult to steal) be the active part and have a tablet size device as an external display? There are already announcements of smart watches with up to 1GB of RAM (same as the Samsung Galaxy S3), that’s enough for a lot of phone functionality.

The Rabbit R1 [8] and the Humane AI Pin [9] have some interesting possibilities for AI speech interfaces. Could that take over some of the current phone use? It seems that visually impaired people have been doing badly in the trend towards touch screen phones so an option of a voice interface phone would be a good option for them. As an aside I hope some people are working on AI stuff for FOSS devices.

Laptop Like

One interesting PC variant I just discovered is the Higole 2 Pro portable battery operated Windows PC with 5.5″ touch screen [10]. It looks too thick to fit in the same pockets as current phones but is still very portable. The version with built in battery is $AU423 which is in the usual price range for low end laptops and tablets. I don’t think this is the future of computing, but it is something that is usable today while we wait for foldable devices to take over.

The recent release of the Apple Vision Pro [11] has driven interest in 3D and head mounted computers. I think this could be a useful peripheral for a laptop or phone but it won’t be part of a primary computing environment. In 2011 I wrote about the possibility of using augmented reality technology for providing a desktop computing environment [12]. I wonder how a Vision Pro would work for that on a train or passenger jet.

Another interesting thing that’s on offer is a laptop with 7″ touch screen beside the keyboard [13]. It seems that someone just looked at what parts are available cheaply in China (due to being parts of more popular devices) and what could fit together. I think a keyboard should be central to the monitor for serious typing, but there may be useful corner cases where typing isn’t that common and a touch-screen display is of use. Developing a range of strange hardware and then seeing which ones get adopted is a good thing and an advantage of Ali Express and Temu.

Useful Hardware for Developing These Things

I recently bought a second hand Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen3 for $359 which has stylus support [14], and it’s generally a great little laptop in every other way. There’s a common failure case of that model where touch support for fingers breaks but the stylus still works which allows it to be used for testing touch screen functionality while making it cheap.

The PineTime is a nice smart watch from Pine64 which is designed to be open [15]. I am quite happy with it but haven’t done much with it yet (apart from wearing it every day and getting alerts etc from Android). At $50 when delivered to Australia it’s significantly more expensive than most smart watches with similar features but still a lot cheaper than the high end ones. Also the Raspberry Pi Watch [16] is interesting too.

The PinePhonePro is an OK phone made to open standards but it’s hardware isn’t as good as Android phones released in the same year [17]. I’ve got some useful stuff done on mine, but the battery life is a major issue and the screen resolution is low. The Librem 5 phone from Purism has a better hardware design for security with switches to disable functionality [18], but it’s even slower than the PinePhonePro. These are good devices for test and development but not ones that many people would be excited to use every day.

Wwan hardware (for accessing the phone network) in M.2 form factor can be obtained for free if you have access to old/broken laptops. Such devices start at about $35 if you want to buy one. USB GPS devices also start at about $35 so probably not worth getting if you can get a wwan device that does GPS as well.

What We Must Do

Debian appears to have some voice input software in the pocketsphinx package but no documentation on how it’s to be used. This would be a good thing to document, I spent 15 mins looking at it and couldn’t get it going.

To take advantage of the hardware features in phones we need software support and we ideally don’t want free software to lag too far behind proprietary software – which IMHO means the typical Android setup for phones/tablets.

Support for changing screen resolution is already there as is support for touch screens. Support for adapting the GUI to changed screen size is something that needs to be done – even today’s hardware of connecting a small laptop to an external monitor doesn’t have the ideal functionality for changing the UI. There also seem to be some limitations in touch screen support with multiple screens, I haven’t investigated this properly yet, it definitely doesn’t work in an expected manner in Ubuntu 22.04 and I haven’t yet tested the combinations on Debian/Unstable.

ML is becoming a big thing and it has some interesting use cases for small devices where a smart device can compensate for limited input options. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done in this area and we are limited by the fact that we can’t just rip off the work of other people for use as training data in the way that corporations do.

Security is more important for devices that are at high risk of theft. The vast majority of free software installations are way behind Android in terms of security and we need to address that. I have some ideas for improvement but there is always a conflict between security and usability and while Android is usable for it’s own special apps it’s not usable in a “I want to run applications that use any files from any other applicationsin any way I want” sense. My post about Sandboxing Phone apps is relevant for people who are interested in this [19]. We also need to extend security models to cope with things like “ok google” type functionality which has the potential to be a bug and the emerging class of LLM based attacks.

I will write more posts about these thing.

Please write comments mentioning FOSS hardware and software projects that address these issues and also documentation for such things.

• [1] https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/
• [2] https://jenson.org/text/
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/27lrakl6
• [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch
• [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculator_watch
• [6] http://tinyurl.com/27gb7zrq
• [7] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/05/29/considering-convergence/
• [8] http://tinyurl.com/yuurhkvm
• [9] http://tinyurl.com/ytmw42bt
• [10] https://www.aliexpress.com/store/1103322555
• [11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Vision_Pro
• [12] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/10/28/desktop-augmented-reality/
• [13] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005999353358.html
• [14] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/01/29/thinkpad-x1-yoga-gen3/
• [15] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/10/21/more-about-pinetime/
• [16] http://tinyurl.com/24myjjqn
• [17] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/10/11/pinephone-status/
• [18] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/03/19/more-librem5/
• [19] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/07/08/sandboxing-phone-apps/

In 2008 I wrote about the idea of having a scheduled release for Debian and other distributions as Mark Shuttleworth had proposed [1]. I still believe that Mark’s original idea for synchronised release dates of Linux distributions (or at least synchronised feature sets) is a good one but unfortunately it didn’t take off.

Having been using Ubuntu a bit recently I’ve found the version numbering system to be really good. Ubuntu version 16.04 was release in April 2016, it’s support ended 5 years later in about April 2021, so any commonly available computers from 2020 should run it well and versions of applications released in about 2017 should run on it. If I have to support a Debian 10 (Buster) system I need to start with a web search to discover when it was released (July 2019). That suggests that applications packaged for Ubuntu 18.04 are likely to run on it.

If we had the same numbering system for Debian and Ubuntu then it would be easier to compare versions. Debian 19.06 would be obviously similar to Ubuntu 18.04, or we could plan for the future and call it Debian 2019.

Then it would be ideal if hardware vendors did the same thing (as car manufacturers have been doing for a long time). Which versions of Ubuntu and Debian would run well on a Dell PowerEdge R750? It takes a little searching to discover that the R750 was released in 2021, but if they called it a PowerEdge 2021R70 then it would be quite obvious that Ubuntu 2022.04 would run well on it and that Ubuntu 2020.04 probably has a kernel update with all the hardware supported.

One of the benefits for the car industry in naming model years is that it drives the purchase of a new car. A 2015 car probably isn’t going to impress anyone and you will know that it is missing some of the features in more recent models. It would be easier to get management to sign off on replacing old computers if they had 2015 on the front, trying to estimate hidden costs of support and lost productivity of using old computers is hard but saying “it’s a 2015 model and way out of date” is easy.

There is a history of using dates as software versions. The “Reference Policy” for SE Linux [2] (which is used for Debian) has releases based on date. During the Debian development process I upload policy to Debian based on the upstream Git and use the same version numbering scheme which is more convenient than the “append git date to last full release” system that some maintainers are forced to use. The users can get an idea of how much the Debian/Unstable policy has diverged from the last full release by looking at the dates. Also an observer might see the short difference between release dates of SE Linux policy and Debian release freeze dates as an indication that I beg the upstream maintainers to make a new release just before each Debian freeze – which is expactly what I do.

When I took over the Portslave [3] program I made releases based on date because there were several forks with different version numbering schemes so my options were to just choose a higher number (which is OK initially but doesn’t scale if there are more forks) or use a date and have people know that the recent date is the most recent version. The fact that the latest release of Portslave is version 2010.04.19 shows that I have not been maintaining it in recent years (due to lack of hardware as well as lack of interest), so if someone wants to take over the project I would be happy to help them do so!

I don’t expect people at Dell and other hardware vendors to take much notice of my ideas (I have tweeted them photographic evidence of a problem with no good response). But hopefully this will start a discussion in the free software community.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/05/13/release-dates-for-debian/
• [2] https://github.com/SELinuxProject/refpolicy/releases
• [3] https://doc.coker.com.au/projects/portslave/

SAS and SATA are electrically compatible to a degree that allows connecting a SATA storage device to a SAS controller. The SAS controller understands the SATA protocol so this works. A SAS device can’t be physically connected to a SATA controller and if you did manage to connect it then it wouldn’t work.

Some SAS RAID controllers don’t permit mixing SAS and SATA devices in the same array, this is a software issue and could be changed. I know that the PERC controllers used by Dell (at least the older versions) do this and it might affect many/most MegaRAID controllers (which is what PERC is).

If you have a hardware RAID array of SAS disks and one fails then you need a spare SAS disk and as the local computer store won’t have any you need some on hand.

The Linux kernel has support for the MegaRAID/PERC superblocks so for at least some of the RAID types supported by MegaRAID/PERC you can just connect the disks to a Linux system and have it work (I’ve only tested on JBOD AKA a single-disk RAID-0). So if you have a server from Dell or IBM or any other company that uses MegaRAID which fails you can probably just put the disks into a non-RAID SAS controller and have them work. As Linux doesn’t care about the difference between SAS and SATA at the RAID level you could then add a SATA disk to an array of SAS disks. If you want to move an array from a dead Dell to a working IBM server or the other way around then you need it to be all SATA or all SAS. You can use a Linux system to mount an array used by Windows or any other OS and then migrate the data to a different array.

If you have an old array of SAS disks and one fails then it might be a reasonable option to just migrate the data to a new array of SATA SSDs. EG if you had 6*600G SAS disks you could move to 2*4TB SATA SSDs and get more storage, much higher performance, less power use, and less noise for a cost of $800 or so (you can spend more to get better performance) and some migration time.

Having a spare SAS controller for data recovery is convenient. Having a spare SAS disk for any RAID-5/RAID-6 is a good thing. Having lots of spare SAS disks probably isn’t useful as migrating to SATA is a better choice. SATA SSDs are bigger and faster than most SAS disks that are in production. I’m sure that someone uses SAS SSDs but I haven’t yet seen them in production, if you have a SAS system and need the performance that SSDs can give then a new server with U.2 (the SAS equivalent of NVMe) is the way to go). SATA hard drives are also the solution for seriously large storage, 16TB SATA hard drives are cheap and work in all the 3.5″ SAS systems.

It’s hard to sell old SAS disks as there isn’t much use for them.

Alpaca

I’ve just done some experiments running ChatGPT type programs. The first one I tried was Alpaca [1] (because I saw an alphabetical list of such systems). Here’s the 4GB data file [2]. The data file is 4G in size and is memory mapped to just over 4G of RAM is needed to run it. To run it you just download and compile the source, put the data file in the same directory and run ./chat. I run it with the Bubblewrap container via the following command line:

exec bwrap --ro-bind $(pwd) $(pwd) --ro-bind /usr /usr --symlink usr/lib64 /lib64 --symlink usr/lib /lib --proc /proc --dev /dev --unshare-pid --unshare-net --die-with-parent ./chat

Here are some examples of it’s work. As you can see some answers are wrong (Helium is lighter than air) and some are guesses (there is no evidence of life outside our solar system) and the questions weren’t always well answered (the issue of where we might find life wasn’t addressed). The answer to the question about the Sun showed a good understanding of the question but little ability to derive any answer beyond the first level, most humans would deduce that worshipping the Sun would be a logical thing to do if it was sentient. Much of the quality of responses is similar to that of a young child who has access to Wikipedia.

> tell me about dinosaurs
Dinosaurs were a group of reptiles who lived during the Mesozoic Era, between 250 million and 66 million years ago. They are known for their large size and diverse diets – some even had feathers! Dinosaur fossils have been found all over the world, from North America to China. Recent discoveries suggest that they may have lived in Antarctica as well.
> are hydrogen or helium balloons better?
Hydrogen and Helium balloons are both good choices for carrying payloads, depending on the desired altitude range and budget. Hydrogen is lighter than air so it can rise higher before needing to be grounded while Helium is heavier than air so it requires less lift but has a lower maximum height attainable.
> is a 486 a good cpu?
Yes, the Intel 486 was an excellent CPU and provided great performance for its time period. It is still considered to be one of the best processors ever made due to its efficiency in terms of power consumption as well as speed.
> where will we find life outside the Earth?
Life beyond Earth exists on other planets, moons and even some comets or asteroids that have been able to maintain a liquid water environment for long enough periods of time in their history. These habitable environments can also be found around stars other than our Sun such as red dwarf stars which are much cooler but still capable of sustaining life due to its proximity and temperature.
> how do I write a good blog post?
Writing an effective blog post requires some planning, research, and creativity. Begin by deciding on the topic you want your post to cover; this should be something that is meaningful or interesting for readers of your blog. Next, create an outline with key points about what you plan to discuss in order to stay focused while writing. Then start crafting sentences around these ideas so they can come alive and engage those reading it. Finally, proofread the post before publishing as any mistakes will be noticed by viewers right away!
> if the sun was a sentient being how would that change life on earth?
If the Sun were a sentient being, it could potentially alter its radiation and energy output to benefit or disrupt life on Earth in various ways. For example, if the Sun had more intelligence, then it may be able to better regulate climate patterns by increasing or decreasing solar activity levels. Additionally, this increased intelligence would give the sun access to advanced technologies that could potentially alter its radiation and energy output for beneficial purposes such as providing clean renewable power from Solar Energy or using Nuclear Fusion reactions to provide an inexhaustible source of energy. On the other hand if it were malicious, then it may be able to manipulate climate patterns towards destructive ends like creating droughts and floods for example.

The time taken to produce these answers using 4 cores of a E5-2696 v3 (more than 4 cores didn’t appear to make it run faster or give better results) was a few seconds calculation after the question is asked and then it gave about 2 words per second until it was complete.

Falcon-40b-instruct

The next one I tried was Falcon-40b-instruct [3], the current best on the Hugging Face leaderboard [4]. It has a 90G set of data files. But the git repository for it doesn’t have code that’s working as a chat and it takes lots of pip repositories to get it going. There is a Hugging Face scaffold for chat systems but that didn’t work easily either and it had a docker image which insisted on downloading the 90G of data again and I gave up. I guess Falcon is not for people who have little Python experience.

Conclusion

The quality of the responses from a system with 4G of data is quite amazing, but it’s still barely enough to be more than a curiosity. It’s a long way from the quality of ChatGPT [5] or the phind.com service described as “The AI search engine for developers” [6]. I have found phind.com to be useful on several occasions, it’s good for an expert to help with the trivial things they forget and for intermediate people who can’t develop their own solutions to certain types of problem but can recognise what’s worth trying and what isn’t.

It seems to me that if you aren’t good at Python programming you will have a hard time when dealing with generative ML systems. Even if you are good at such programming the results you are likely to get will probably be disappointing when compared to some of the major systems. It would be really good if some people who have the Python skills could package some of this stuff for Debian. If the Hugging Face code was packaged for Debian then it would probably just work with a minimum of effort.

• [1] https://github.com/antimatter15/alpaca.cpp
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/2lwbfprv
• [3] https://huggingface.co/tiiuae/falcon-40b-instruct
• [4] https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceH4/open_llm_leaderboard
• [5] https://platform.openai.com/apps
• [6] https://www.phind.com/

A problem with a lot of the purchase of peripherals is that they don’t match the needs of the users and often get thrown away long before they wear out.

At many companies when a new employee starts they are given a laptop (expensive corporate asset), a cheap headset for video calls, and optionally a keyboard and mouse for people who don’t like the laptop keyboard and/or touchpad.

When an employee leaves the company their laptop can be assigned to someone else if it isn’t too old. Headsets and mice often show signs of wear if they have been used for a year or two and while keyboards often have a long service life they will be dirty after a couple of years and they are cheap to replace. So every time someone leaves and returns all company hardware there will be a headset and mouse owned by the company that ends up as e-waste and sometimes a keyboard too. Often people leave and just keep the headset, mouse, and keyboard expecting that no-one at their former employer will demand them back – this is a reward for dishonesty.

Buying the keyboards, mice, and headsets in bulk allegedly makes it easy to support them, but supporting such devices isn’t difficult and the IT staff end up fielding complaints because the devices they issue don’t match the preferences of the workers. These devices have the worst ratio of value to complaints of anything a typical company supports.

I believe that the best solution to all these problems is to not buy those items for employees but to instead give them a sum of money sufficient to buy cheap items in each category (EG $60 for keyboard, mouse, and headset) and let them buy whichever they choose. If they want something more expensive (Bose headset, split keyboard, or gamer mouse) them they can spend their own money to do so (and claim a tax deduction). Then when people leave the company they can take those items with them and save the company the expense of waste disposal while also not rewarding dishonesty. An additional benefit for the company is that it can reduce the issues of complying with disability legislation, anyone who already owns such hardware can just keep the money.

The current situation is bad for morale, a waste of time for IT workers, and contributes to the waste problem.

When I connect my Desklab USB-C monitor [1] (which has been vastly underused for the last 3 years) into a Linux system the display type is listed as “DO NOT USE – RTK“.

One of the more informative discussions of this was on Linux Mint forums [2] which revealed that it’s a mapping for an code that shouldn’t be used. So it’s not saying “don’t use this monitor” it’s saying “don’t use this code”. So the Desklab people when they implemented a display with an RTK chipset should have changed the ID field from “RTK” to something representing their use. On Debian the file /usr/share/hwdata/pnp.ids has the IDs and you can grep for RTK in that.

Also for programmers, please use more descriptive strings than “do not use”, when I was trying to find this on Debian code search [3] it turned up hundreds of pages of results which was more than a human can read through. If the text had been something that would make sense to a user such as “OEM please replace with company name” it would have made it very clear to me (and all the other people searching for this) what it meant and the fact that Desklab had stuffed up. So instead of wondering about this for years before eventually finding the right Google search to find the answer I could have worked it out immediately if the text had been clearer.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2020/07/02/desklab-portable-usb-c-monitor/
• [2] https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=319726
• [3] https://codesearch.debian.net/

In 2008 I joined SAGE (the System Administrators’ Guild of Australia). It was a professional society for people doing sysadmin work (running computer servers). I quit when I found that the level of clue was lower than hoped and that members used the code of ethics as nothing but a way to score points in online debates. After quitting SAGE kept emailing me and wouldn’t respect my request to be removed from all lists so I had to block their mail server.

SAGE has in recent times changed it’s name to ITPA (Information Technology Professionals Association) and is still sending me email. I’ve just sent yet another unsubscribe request.

How many years of sending unwanted email can be caused by incompetence and when should we assume it’s malice? They have been doing this for over a decade now. Even if it’s incompetence, that’s still damning given that it’s incompetence in the main topic of the organisation.

Here is the ITPA Code of Ethics [1], as you can see there is no reference to spam. The nearest seems to be “I will continue to enlarge my understanding of the social and legal issues that arise in computing environments, and I will communicate that understanding to others when appropriate“. So it’s great that they aren’t breaking their own code of ethics :-# but I’d still like them to stop emailing me.

• [1] https://www.itpa.org.au/code-of-ethics/

I had a problem with my mouse. The slippery plastic bits on the bottom weren’t glued on well and came off, which then gave more friction when moving on the desk. After asking advice on a mailing list the best suggestion was Teflon sticky tape. I bought a few meters of such tape (a lifetime supply for mouse repair) and used an 8cm strip on each side of the bottom of my mouse which made it slippery enough.

Ebay seems like a good place to buy that, most of the offers are well below $20 for a reel of tape including postage. One thing to note is that they also sell non-adhesive teflon tape. I made the mistake of investigating the capabilities of teflon tape then buying the cheapest one on offer which turned out to be “plumber’s tape” which doesn’t have adhesive, fortunately it was well below $10. I now have a lifetime supply of plumber’s tape if I can ever find a use for it.