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For my ETBE-Mon [1] monitoring system I recently added a monitor for the Linux load average. The Unix load average isn’t a very good metric for monitoring system load, but it’s well known and easy to use. I’ve previously written about the Linux load average and how it’s apparently different from other Unix like OSs [2]. The monitor is still named loadavg but I’ve now made it also monitor on the usage of memory because excessive memory use and load average are often correlated.
For issues that might be transient it’s good to have a monitoring system give a reasonable amount of information about the problem so it can be diagnosed later on. So when the load average monitor gives an alert I have it display a list of D state processes (if any), a list of the top 10 processes using the most CPU time if they are using more than 5%, and a list of the top 10 processes using the most RAM if they are using more than 2% total virtual memory.
For documenting the output of the free(1) command (or /proc/meminfo when writing a program to do it) the best page I found was this StackExchange page [3]. So I compare MemAvailable+SwapFree to MemTotal+SwapTotal to determine the percentage of virtual memory used.
Any suggestions on how I could improve this?
The code is in the recent releases of etbemon, it’s in Debian/Unstable, on the project page on my site, and here’s a link to the loadave.monitor script in the Debian Salsa Git repository [4].
C is Not a Low Level Language [1] is an insightful article about the problems with C and the overall design of most current CPUs.
Interesting article about how the Boeing 737Max failure started with a takeover by MBA aparatcheks [2].
Interesting article about the risk of blood clots in space [3]. Widespread human spaceflight is further away than most people expect.
Wired has an insightful article about why rich people are so mean [4]. Also some suggestions for making them less mean.
Google published interesting information about their Titan security processor [5]. It’s currently used on the motherboards of GCP servers and internal Google servers. It would be nice if Google sold motherboards with a version of this.
Interesting research on how the alleged Supermicro motherboard backdoor [6]. It shows that while we may never know if the alleged attack took place such things are proven to be possible. In security we should assume that every attack that is possible is carried out on occasion. It might not have happen when people claim it happened, but it probably happened to someone somewhere. Also we know that TAO carried out similar attacks.
Arstechnica has an interesting article about cracking old passwords used by Unix pioneers [7]. In the old days encrypted passwords weren’t treated as secrets (/etc/passwd is world readable and used to have the encrypted passwords) and some of the encrypted passwords were included in source archives and have now been cracked.
Jim Baker (former general counsel of the FBI) wrote an insightful article titled Rethinking Encryption [8]. Lots of interesting analysis of the issues related to privacy vs the ability of the government to track criminals.
The Atlantic has an interesting article The Coalition Out to Kill Tech as We Know It [9] about the attempts to crack down on the power of big tech companies. Seems like good news.
The General Counsel of the NSA wrote an article “I Work for N.S.A. We Cannot Afford to Lose the Digital Revolution” [10].
Thoughts and Prayers by Ken Liu is an insightful story about trolling and NRA types [11].
Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful Locus article about the lack of anti-trust enforcement in the tech industry and it’s free speech implications titles “Inaction is a Form of Action” [12].
Currently there’s two things I want to do with my PC at the same time, one is watching streaming services like ABC iView (which won’t run from non-Australian IP addresses) and another is torrenting over a VPN. I had considered doing something ugly with iptables to try and get routing done on a per-UID basis but that seemed to difficult. At the time I wasn’t aware of the ip rule add uidrange [1] option. So setting up a private networking namespace with a systemd-nspawn container seemed like a good idea.
Chroot Setup
For the chroot (which I use as a slang term for a copy of a Linux installation in a subdirectory) I used a btrfs subvol that’s a snapshot of the root subvol. The idea is that when I upgrade the root system I can just recreate the chroot with a new snapshot.
To get this working I created files in the root subvol which are used for the container.
I created a script like the following named /usr/local/sbin/container-sshd to launch the container. It sets up the networking and executes sshd. The systemd-nspawn program is designed to launch init but that’s not required, I prefer to just launch sshd so there’s only one running process in a container that’s not being actively used.
#!/bin/bash
# restorecon commands only needed for SE Linux
/sbin/restorecon -R /dev
/bin/mount none -t tmpfs /run
/bin/mkdir -p /run/sshd
/sbin/restorecon -R /run /tmp
/sbin/ifconfig host0 10.3.0.2 netmask 255.255.0.0
/sbin/route add default gw 10.2.0.1
exec /usr/sbin/sshd -D -f /etc/ssh/sshd_torrent_config
How to Launch It
To setup the container I used a command like “/usr/bin/systemd-nspawn -D /subvols/torrent -M torrent –bind=/home -n /usr/local/sbin/container-sshd“.
First I had tried the --network-ipvlan option which creates a new IP address on the same MAC address. That gave me an interface iv-br0 on the container that I could use normally (br0 being the bridge used in my workstation as it’s primary network interface). The IP address I assigned to that was in the same subnet as br0, but for some reason that’s unknown to me (maybe an interaction between bridging and network namespaces) I couldn’t access it from the host, I could only access it from other hosts on the network. I then tried the --network-macvlan option (to create a new MAC address for virtual networking), but that had the same problem with accessing the IP address from the local host outside the container as well as problems with MAC redirection to the primary MAC of the host (again maybe an interaction with bridging).
Then I tried just the “-n” option which gave it a private network interface. That created an interface named ve-torrent on the host side and one named host0 in the container. Using ifconfig and route to configure the interface in the container before launching sshd is easy. I haven’t yet determined a good way of configuring the host side of the private network interface automatically.
I had to use a bind for /home because /home is a subvol and therefore doesn’t get included in the container by default.
How it Works
Now when it’s running I can just “ssh -X” to the container and then run graphical programs that use the VPN while at the same time running graphical programs on the main host that don’t use the VPN.
Things To Do
Find out why --network-ipvlan and --network-macvlan don’t work with communication from the same host.
Find out why --network-macvlan gives errors about MAC redirection when pinging.
Determine a good way of setting up the host side after the systemd-nspawn program has run.
Find out if there are better ways of solving this problem, this way works but might not be ideal. Comments welcome.
A couple of years ago a relative who uses a Linux workstation I support bought a 4K (4096*2160 resolution) monitor. That meant that I had to get 4K working, which was 2 years of pain for me and probably not enough benefit for them to justify it. Recently I had the opportunity to buy some 4K monitors at a low enough price that it didn’t make sense to refuse so I got to experience it myself.
The Need for 4K
I’m getting older and my vision is decreasing as expected. I recently got new glasses and got a pair of reading glasses as a reduced ability to change focus is common as you get older. Unfortunately I made a mistake when requesting the focus distance for the reading glasses and they work well for phones, tablets, and books but not for laptops and desktop computers. Now I have the option of either spending a moderate amount of money to buy a new pair of reading glasses or just dealing with the fact that laptop/desktop use isn’t going to be as good until the next time I need new glasses (sometime 2021).
I like having lots of terminal windows on my desktop. For common tasks I might need a few terminals open at a time and if I get interrupted in a task I like to leave the terminal windows for it open so I can easily go back to it. Having more 80*25 terminal windows on screen increases my productivity. My previous monitor was 2560*1440 which for years had allowed me to have a 4*4 array of non-overlapping terminal windows as well as another 8 or 9 overlapping ones if I needed more. 16 terminals allows me to ssh to lots of systems and edit lots of files in vi. Earlier this year I had found it difficult to read the font size that previously worked well for me so I had to use a larger font that meant that only 3*3 terminals would fit on my screen. Going from 16 non-overlapping windows and an optional 8 overlapping to 9 non-overlapping and an optional 6 overlapping is a significant difference. I could get a second monitor, and I won’t rule out doing so at some future time. But it’s not ideal.
When I got a 4K monitor working properly I found that I could go back to a smaller font that allowed 16 non overlapping windows. So I got a real benefit from a 4K monitor!
Video Hardware
Version 1.0 of HDMI released in 2002 only supports 1920*1080 (FullHD) resolution. Version 1.3 released in 2006 supported 2560*1440. Most of my collection of PCIe video cards have a maximum resolution of 1920*1080 in HDMI, so it seems that they only support HDMI 1.2 or earlier. When investigating this I wondered what version of PCIe they were using, the command “dmidecode |grep PCI” gives that information, seems that at least one PCIe video card supports PCIe 2 (released in 2007) but not HDMI 1.3 (released in 2006).
Many video cards in my collection support 2560*1440 with DVI but only 1920*1080 with HDMI. As 4K monitors don’t support DVI input that meant that when initially using a 4K monitor I was running in 1920*1080 instead of 2560*1440 with my old monitor.
I found that one of my old video cards supported 4K resolution, it has a NVidia GT630 chipset (here’s the page with specifications for that chipset [1]). It seems that because I have a video card with 2G of RAM I have the “Keplar” variant which supports 4K resolution. I got the video card in question because it uses PCIe*8 and I had a workstation that only had PCIe*8 slots and I didn’t feel like cutting a card down to size (which is apparently possible but not recommended), it is also fanless (quiet) which is handy if you don’t need a lot of GPU power.
A couple of months ago I checked the cheap video cards at my favourite computer store (MSY) and all the cheap ones didn’t support 4K resolution. Now it seems that all the video cards they sell could support 4K, by “could” I mean that a Google search of the chipset says that it’s possible but of course some surrounding chips could fail to support it.
The GT630 card is great for text, but the combination of it with a i5-2500 CPU (rating 6353 according to cpubenchmark.net [3]) doesn’t allow playing Netflix full-screen and on 1920*1080 videos scaled to full-screen sometimes gets mplayer messages about the CPU being too slow. I don’t know how much of this is due to the CPU and how much is due to the graphics hardware.
When trying the same system with an ATI Radeon R7 260X/360 graphics card (16* PCIe and draws enough power to need a separate connection to the PSU) the Netflix playback appears better but mplayer seems no better.
I guess I need a new PC to play 1920*1080 video scaled to full-screen on a 4K monitor. No idea what hardware will be needed to play actual 4K video. Comments offering suggestions in this regard will be appreciated.
Software Configuration
For GNOME apps (which you will probably run even if like me you use KDE for your desktop) you need to run commands like the following to scale menus etc:
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings overrides "[{'Gdk/WindowScalingFactor', <2>}]"
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor 2
For KDE run the System Settings app, go to Display and Monitor, then go to Displays and Scale Display to scale things.
The Arch Linux Wiki page on HiDPI [2] is good for information on how to make apps work with high DPI (or regular screens for people with poor vision).
Conclusion
4K displays are still rather painful, both in hardware and software configuration. For serious computer use it’s worth the hassle, but it doesn’t seem to be good for general use yet. 2560*1440 is pretty good and works with much more hardware and requires hardly any software configuration.
One problem I’ve had recently on two systems with NVideo video cards is KMail crashing (SEGV) while reading mail. Sometimes it goes for months without having problems, and then it gets into a state where reading a few messages (or sometimes reading one particular message) causes a crash. The crash happens somewhere in the Mesa library stack.
In an attempt to investigate this I tried running KMail via ssh (as that precludes a lot of the GL stuff), but that crashed in a different way (I filed an upstream bug report [1]).
I have discovered a workaround for this issue, I set the environment variable LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 and then things work. At this stage I can’t be sure exactly where the problems are. As it’s certain KMail operations that trigger it I think that’s evidence of problems originating in KMail, but the end result when it happens often includes a kernel error log so there’s probably a problem in the Nouveau driver. I spent quite a lot of time investigating this, including recompiling most of the library stack with debugging mode and didn’t get much of a positive result. Hopefully putting it out there will help the next person who has such issues.
Here is a list of environment variables that can be set to debug LIBGL issues (strangely I couldn’t find documentation on this when Googling it). If you are stuck with a problem related to LIBGL you can try setting each of these to “1” in turn and see if it makes a difference. That can either be for the purpose of debugging a problem or creating a workaround that allows you to run the programs you need to run. I don’t know why GL is required to read email.
LIBGL_DIAGNOSTIC
LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT
LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE
LIBGL_DRI3_DISABLE
LIBGL_NO_DRAWARRAYS
LIBGL_DEBUG
LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH
LIBGL_DRIVERS_DIR
LIBGL_SHOW_FPS
It seems to me that Android phones have recently passed the stage where hardware advances are well ahead of software bloat. This is the point that desktop PCs passed about 15 years ago and laptops passed about 8 years ago. For just over 15 years I’ve been avoiding buying desktop PCs, the hardware that organisations I work for throw out is good enough that I don’t need to. For the last 8 years I’ve been avoiding buying new laptops, instead buying refurbished or second hand ones which are more than adequate for my needs. Now it seems that Android phones have reached the same stage of development.
3 years ago I purchased my last phone, a Nexus 6P [1]. Then 18 months ago I got a Huawei Mate 9 as a warranty replacement [2] (I had swapped phones with my wife so the phone I was using which broke was less than a year old). The Nexus 6P had been working quite well for me until it stopped booting, but I was happy to have something a little newer and faster to replace it at no extra cost.
Prior to the Nexus 6P I had a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 for 1 year 9 months which was a personal record for owning a phone and not wanting to replace it. I was quite happy with the Note 3 until the day I fell on top of it and cracked the screen (it would have been ok if I had just dropped it). While the Note 3 still has my personal record for continuous phone use, the Nexus 6P/Huawei Mate 9 have the record for going without paying for a new phone.
A few days ago when browsing the Kogan web site I saw a refurbished Mate 10 Pro on sale for about $380. That’s not much money (I usually have spent $500+ on each phone) and while the Mate 9 is still going strong the Mate 10 is a little faster and has more RAM. The extra RAM is important to me as I have problems with Android killing apps when I don’t want it to. Also the IP67 protection will be a handy feature. So that phone should be delivered to me soon.
Some phones are getting ridiculously expensive nowadays (who wants to walk around with a $1000+ Pixel?) but it seems that the slightly lower end models are more than adequate and the older versions are still good.
Cost Summary
If I can buy a refurbished or old model phone every 2 years for under $400 that will make using a phone cost about $0.50 per day. The Nexus 6P cost me $704 in June 2016 which means that for the past 3 years my phone cost was about $0.62 per day.
It seems that laptops tend to last me about 4 years [3], and I don’t need high-end models (I even used one from a rubbish pile for a while). The last laptops I bought cost me $289 for a Thinkpad X1 Carbon [4] and $306 for the Thinkpad T420 [5]. That makes laptops about $0.20 per day.
In May 2014 I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 edition tablet for $579. That is still working very well for me today, apart from only having 32G of internal storage space and an OS update preventing Android apps from writing to the micro SD card (so I have to use USB to copy TV shows on to it) there’s nothing more than I need from a tablet. Strangely I even get good battery life out of it, I can use it for a couple of hours without the battery running out. Battery life isn’t nearly as good as when it was new, but it’s still OK for my needs. As Samsung stopped providing security updates I can’t use the tablet as a SSH client, but now that my primary laptop is a small and light model that’s less of an issue. Currently that tablet has cost me just over $0.30 per day and it’s still working well.
Currently it seems that my hardware expense for the forseeable future is likely to be about $1 per day. 20 cents for laptop, 30 cents for tablet, and 50 cents for phone. The overall expense is about $1.66 per month as I’m on a $20 per month pre-paid plan with Aldi Mobile.
Saving Money
A laptop is very important to me, the amounts of money that I’m spending don’t reflect that. But it seems that I don’t have any option for spending more on a laptop (the Thinkpad X1 Carbon I have now is just great and there’s no real option for getting more utility by spending more). I also don’t have any option to spend less on a tablet, 5 years is a great lifetime for a device that is practically impossible to repair (repair will cost a significant portion of the replacement cost).
I hope that the Mate 10 can last at least 2 years which will make it a new record for low cost of ownership of a phone for me. If app vendors can refrain from making their bloated software take 50% more RAM in the next 2 years that should be achievable.
The surprising thing I learned while writing this post is that my mobile phone expense is the largest of all my expenses related to mobile computing. Given that I want to get good reception in remote areas (needs to be Telstra or another company that uses their network) and that I need at least 3GB of data transfer per month it doesn’t seem that I have any options for reducing that cost.
A very famous blog post is Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is by John Scalzi [1]. In that post he clearly describes that life isn’t great for straight white men, but that there are many more opportunities for them.
Causes of Death
When this post is mentioned there are often objections, one common objection is that men have a lower life expectancy. The CIA World factbook (which I consider a very reliable source about such matters) says that the US life expectancy is 77.8 for males and 82.3 for females [2]. The country with the highest life expectancy is Monaco with 85.5 for males and 93.4 years for females [3]. The CDC in the US has a page with links to many summaries about causes of death [4]. The causes where men have higher rates in 2015 are heart disease (by 2.1%), cancer (by 1.7%), unintentional injuries (by 2.8%), and diabetes (by 0.4%). The difference in the death toll for heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, and diabetes accounts for 7% of total male deaths. The male top 10 lists of causes of death also includes suicide (2.5%) and chronic liver disease (1.9%) which aren’t even in the top 10 list for females (which means that they would each comprise less than 1.6% of the female death toll).
So the difference in life expectancy would be partly due to heart problems (which are related to stress and choices about healthy eating etc), unintentional injuries (risk seeking behaviour and work safety), cancer (the CDC reports that smoking is more popular among men than women [5] by 17.5% vs 13.5%), diabetes (linked to unhealthy food), chronic liver disease (alcohol), and suicide. Largely the difference seems to be due to psychological and sociological issues.
The American Psychological Association has for the first time published guidelines for treating men and boys [6]. It’s noteworthy that the APA states that in the past “psychology focused on men (particularly white men), to the exclusion of all others” and goes on to describe how men dominate the powerful and well paid jobs. But then states that “men commit 90 percent of homicides in the United States and represent 77 percent of homicide victims”. They then go on to say “thirteen years in the making, they draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage that echoes both inwardly and outwardly”. The article then goes on to mention use of alcohol, tobacco, and unhealthy eating as correlated with “traditional” ideas about masculinity. One significant statement is “mental health professionals must also understand how power, privilege and sexism work both by conferring benefits to men and by trapping them in narrow roles”.
The news about the new APA guidelines focuses on the conservative reaction, the NYT has an article about this [7].
I think that there is clear evidence that more flexible ideas about gender etc are good for men’s health and directly connect to some of the major factors that affect male life expectancy. Such ideas are opposed by conservatives.
Risky Jobs
Another point that is raised is the higher rate of work accidents for men than women. In Australia it was illegal for women to work in underground mines (one of the more dangerous work environments) until the late 80’s (here’s an article about this and other issues related to women in the mining industry [8]).
I believe that people should be allowed to work at any job they are qualified for. I also believe that we need more occupational health and safety legislation to reduce the injuries and deaths at work. I don’t think that the fact that a group of (mostly male) politicians created laws to exclude women from jobs that are dangerous and well-paid while also not creating laws to mitigate the danger is my fault. I’ll vote against such politicians at every opportunity.
Military Service
Another point that is often raised is that men die in wars.
In WW1 women were only allowed to serve in the battlefield as nurses. Many women died doing that. Deaths in war has never been an exclusively male thing. Women in many countries are campaigning to be allowed to serve equally in the military (including in combat roles).
As far as I am aware the last war where developed countries had conscription was the Vietnam war. Since then military technology has developed to increasingly complex and powerful weapons systems with an increasing number of civilians and non-combat military personnel supporting each soldier who is directly involved in combat. So it doesn’t seem likely that conscription will be required for any developed country in the near future.
But not being directly involved in combat doesn’t make people safe. NPR has an interesting article about the psychological problems (potentially leading up to suicide) that drone operators and intelligence staff experience [9]. As an aside the article reference two women doing that work.
Who Is Ignoring These Things?
I’ve been accused of ignoring these problems, it’s a general pattern on the right to accuse people of ignoring these straight white male problems whenever there’s a discussion of problems that are related to not being a straight white man. I don’t think that I’m ignoring anything by failing to mention death rates due to unsafe workplaces in a discussion about the treatment of trans people. I try to stay on topic.
The New York Times article I cited shows that conservatives are the ones trying to ignore these problems. When the American Psychological Association gives guidelines on how to help men who suffer psychological problems (which presumably would reduce the suicide rate and bring male life expectancy closer to female life expectancy) they are attacked by Fox etc.
My electronic communication (blog posts, mailing list messages, etc) is mostly connected to the free software community, which is mostly male. The majority of people who read what I write are male. But it seems that the majority of positive feedback when I write about such issues is from women. I don’t think there is a problem of women or left wing commentators failing men. I think there is a problem of men and conservatives failing men.
What Can We Do?
I’m sure that there are many straight white men who see these things as problems but just don’t say anything about it. If you don’t want to go to the effort of writing a blog post then please consider signing your name to someone else’s. If you are known for your work (EG by being a well known programmer in the Linux community) then you could just comment “I agree” on a post like this and that makes a difference while also being really easy to do.
Another thing that would be good is if we could change the hard drinking culture that seems connected to computer conferences etc. Kara has an insightful article on Model View Culture about drinking and the IT industry [10]. I decided that drinking at Linux conferences had got out of hand when about 1/3 of the guys at my table at a conference dinner vomited.
Linux Conf Au (the most prestigious Linux conference) often has a Depression BoF which is really good. I hope they have one this year. As an aside I have problems with depression, anyone who needs someone to talk to about such things and would rather speak to me than attend a BoF is welcome to contact me by email (please take a failure to reply immediately as a sign that I’m behind on checking my email not anything else) or social media.
If you have any other ideas on how to improve things please make a comment here, or even better write a blog post and link to it in a comment.
One thing I should have learned before (but didn’t) and hope I’ve learned now is to photograph sysadmin work.
If you work as a sysadmin you probably have a good phone, if you are going to run ssh from a phone or use a phone to read docs while in a server room with connectivity problems you need a phone with a good screen. You will also want a phone that has current security support. Such a phone will have a reasonable amount of storage space, I doubt that you can get a phone with less than 32G of storage that has a decent screen and Android security support. Admittedly Apple has longer security support for iPhones than Google does for Nexus/Pixel phones so it might be possible to get an older iPhone with a decent screen and hardly any space (but that’s not the point here).
If you have 32G of storage on your phone then there’s no real possibility of using up your storage space by photographing a day’s work. You could probably take an unreasonable number of photos of a week’s work as well as a few videos and not use up much of that.
The first time I needed photos recently was about 9 months ago when I was replacing some network gear (new DSL modem and switch for a client). The network sockets in the rack weren’t labelled and I found it unreasonably difficult to discover where everything was (the tangle of cables made tracking them impossible). What I should have done is to photograph the cables before I started and then I would have known where to connect everything. A 12MP camera allows zooming in on photos to get details, so a couple of quick shots of that rack would have saved me a lot of time – and in the case where everything goes as planned taking a couple of photos isn’t going to delay things.
Last night there was a power failure in a server room that hosts a couple of my machines. When power came back on the air-conditioner didn’t start up and the end result was a server with one of it’s disks totally dead (maybe due to heat, maybe power failures, maybe it just wore out). For unknown reasons BTRFS wouldn’t allow me to replace the disk in the RAID-1 array so I needed to copy the data to a new disk and create a new mirror (taking a lot of my time and also giving downtime). While I was working on this the filesystem would only mount read-only so no records of the kernel errors were stored. If I had taken photos of the screen I would have records of this which might allow me to reproduce the problem and file a bug report. Now I have no records, I can’t reproduce it, and I have a risk that next time a disk dies in a BTRFS RAID-1 I’ll have the same problem. Also presumably random people all over the world will suffer needless pain because of this while lacking the skills to file a good bug report because I didn’t make good enough records to reproduce it.
Hopefully next time I’m in a situation like this I’ll think to take some photos instead of just rebooting and wiping the evidence.
As an aside I’ve been finding my phone camera useful for zooming in on serial numbers that I can’t read otherwise. I’ve got new glasses on order that will hopefully address this, but in the mean time it’s the only way I can read the fine print. Another good use of a phone camera is recording error messages that scroll past too quickly to read and aren’t logged. Some phones support slow motion video capture (up to 120fps or more) and even for phones that don’t you can use slow play (my favourite Android video player MX Player works well at 5% normal speed) to capture most messages that are too quick to read.
As a follow-up to my post with Suggestions for Trump Supporters [1] I notice that many people seem to have private definitions of words that they like to use.
There are some situations where the use of a word is contentious and different groups of people have different meanings. One example that is known to most people involved with computers is “hacker”. That means “criminal” according to mainstream media and often “someone who experiments with computers” to those of us who like experimenting with computers. There is ongoing discussion about whether we should try and reclaim the word for it’s original use or whether we should just accept that’s a lost cause. But generally based on context it’s clear which meaning is intended. There is also some overlap between the definitions, some people who like to experiment with computers conduct experiments with computers they aren’t permitted to use. Some people who are career computer criminals started out experimenting with computers for fun.
But some times words are misused in ways that fail to convey any useful ideas and just obscure the real issues. One example is the people who claim to be left-wing Libertarians. Murray Rothbard (AKA “Mr Libertarian”) boasted about “stealing” the word Libertarian from the left [2]. Murray won that battle, they should get over it and move on. When anyone talks about “Libertarianism” nowadays they are talking about the extreme right. Claiming to be a left-wing Libertarian doesn’t add any value to any discussion apart from demonstrating the fact that the person who makes such a claim is one who gives hipsters a bad name. The first time penny-farthings were fashionable the word “libertarian” was associated with left-wing politics. Trying to have a sensible discussion about politics while using a word in the opposite way to almost everyone else is about as productive as trying to actually travel somewhere by penny-farthing.
Another example is the word “communist” which according to many Americans seems to mean “any person or country I don’t like”. It’s often invoked as a magical incantation that’s supposed to automatically win an argument. One recent example I saw was someone claiming that “Russia has always been communist” and rejecting any evidence to the contrary. If someone was to say “Russia has always been a shit country” then there’s plenty of evidence to support that claim (Tsarist, communist, and fascist Russia have all been shit in various ways). But no definition of “communism” seems to have any correlation with modern Russia. I never discovered what that person meant by claiming that Russia is communist, they refused to make any comment about Russian politics and just kept repeating that it’s communist. If they said “Russia has always been shit” then it would be a clear statement, people can agree or disagree with that but everyone knows what is meant.
The standard response to pointing out that someone is using a definition of a word that is either significantly different to most of the world (or simply inexplicable) is to say “that’s just semantics”. If someone’s “contribution” to a political discussion is restricted to criticising people who confuse “their” and “there” then it might be reasonable to say “that’s just semantics”. But pointing out that someone’s writing has no meaning because they choose not to use words in the way others will understand them is not just semantics. When someone claims that Russia is communist and Americans should reject the Republican party because of their Russian connection it’s not even wrong. The same applies when someone claims that Nazis are “leftist”.
Generally the aim of a political debate is to convince people that your cause is better than other causes. To achieve that aim you have to state your cause in language that can be understood by everyone in the discussion. Would the person who called Russia “communist” be more or less happy if Russia had common ownership of the means of production and an absence of social classes? I guess I’ll never know, and that’s their failure at debating politics.
In February I reviewed a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 1 [1] that I bought on Ebay.
I have just been supplied the 6th Generation of the Thinkpad X1 Carbon for work, which would have cost about $1500 more than I want to pay for my own gear. ;)
The first thing to note is that it has USB-C for charging. The charger continues the trend towards smaller and lighter chargers and also allows me to charge my phone from the same charger so it’s one less charger to carry. The X1 Carbon comes with a 65W charger, but when I got a second charger it was only 45W but was also smaller and lighter.
The laptop itself is also slightly smaller in every dimension than my Gen 1 version as well as being noticeably lighter.
One thing I noticed is that the KDE power applet disappears when battery is full – maybe due to my history of buying refurbished laptops I haven’t had a battery report itself as full before.
Disabling the touch pad in the BIOS doesn’t work. This is annoying, there are 2 devices for mouse type input so I need to configure Xorg to only read from the Trackpoint.
The labels on the lid are upside down from the perspective of the person using it (but right way up for people sitting opposite them). This looks nice for observers, but means that you tend to put your laptop the wrong way around on your desk a lot before you get used to it. It is also fancier than the older model, the red LED on the cover for the dot in the I in Thinkpad is one of the minor fancy features.
As the new case is thinner than the old one (which was thin compared to most other laptops) it’s difficult to open. You can’t easily get your fingers under the lid to lift it up.
One really annoying design choice was to have a proprietary Ethernet socket with a special dongle. If the dongle is lost or damaged it will probably be expensive to replace. An extra USB socket and a USB Ethernet device would be much more useful.
The next deficiency is that it has one USB-C/DisplayPort/Thunderbolt port and 2 USB 3.1 ports. USB-C is going to be used for everything in the near future and a laptop with only a single USB-C port will be as annoying then as one with a single USB 2/3 port would be right now. Making a small laptop requires some engineering trade-offs and I can understand them limiting the number of USB 3.1 ports to save space. But having two or more USB-C ports wouldn’t have taken much space – it would take no extra space to have a USB-C port in place of the proprietary Ethernet port. It also has only a HDMI port for display, the USB-C/Thunderbolt/DisplayPort port is likely to be used for some USB-C device when you want an external display. The Lenovo advertising says “So you get Thunderbolt, USB-C, and DisplayPort all rolled into one”, but really you get “a choice of one of Thunderbolt, USB-C, or DisplayPort at any time”. How annoying would it be to disconnect your monitor because you want to read a USB-C storage device?
As an aside this might work out OK if you can have a DisplayPort monitor that also acts as a USB-C hub on the same cable. But if so requiring a monitor that isn’t even on sale now to make my laptop work properly isn’t a good strategy.
One problem I have is that resume from suspend requires holding down power button. I’m not sure if it’s hardware or software issue. But suspend on lid close works correctly and also suspend on inactivity when running on battery power. The X1 Carbon Gen 1 that I own doesn’t suspend on lid close or inactivity (due to a Linux configuration issue). So I have one laptop that won’t suspend correctly and one that won’t resume correctly.
The CPU is an i5-8250U which rates 7,678 according to cpubenchmark.net [2]. That’s 92% faster than the i7 in my personal Thinkpad and more importantly I’m likely to actually get that performance without having the CPU overheat and slow down, that said I got a thermal warning during the Debian install process which is a bad sign. It’s also only 114% faster than the CPU in the Thinkpad T420 I bought in 2013. The model I got doesn’t have the fastest possible CPU, but I think that the T420 didn’t either. A 114% increase in CPU speed over 5 years is a long way from the factor of 4 or more that Moore’s law would have predicted.
The keyboard has the stupid positions for the PgUp and PgDn keys I noted on my last review. It’s still annoying and slows me down, but I am starting to get used to it.
The display is FullHD, it’s nice to have a laptop with the same resolution as my phone. It also has a slider to cover the built in camera which MIGHT also cause the microphone to be disconnected. It’s nice that hardware manufacturers are noticing that some customers care about privacy.
The storage is NVMe. That’s a nice feature, although being only 240G may be a problem for some uses.
Conclusion
Definitely a nice laptop if someone else is paying.
The fact that it had cooling issues from the first install is a concern. Laptops have always had problems with cooling and when a laptop has cooling problems before getting any dust inside it’s probably going to perform poorly in a few years.
Lenovo has gone too far trying to make it thin and light. I’d rather have the same laptop but slightly thicker, with a built-in Ethernet port, more USB ports, and a larger battery.
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