Couchsurfing, or: of Lollipop, Marshmallow, and Nougat

Yesterday I was sitting on one of our sofas and asked Zuleikha if I could use her Nexus 10 tablet to look up something in the internet. And if you use such a device and make an own account for yourself, you have to identify yourself with Google (or in the case of something “i”, with Apple). Which is what I did, and after returning to my own machine later, I saw that I received an email from Google with a link to this (removed the IP address in this crop of a screenshot):

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After I acknowledged that yes, that was me, I saw a short list of recently used devices, like this:

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Cool stuff – they keep book about your account with them, and check if it’s really you or someone who saw you typing in a password and who was now trying to impersonate you.

About the device itself: it’s the oldest of all Android devices we have, at least software-wise, and it still runs Android 5.1 “Lollipop”:

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You can read about this on the Android developers’ pages if you are interested.

The other devices we have – Mitchie’s Nexus 7 tablet and Nexus 5 phone – all run Android 6.0.1 “Marshmallow”. None of the devices will get “Nougat”, the newest version. And Zuleikha’s Nexus 10 won’t even update to Marshmallow.

What does that mean? Well for a tablet which you use at home (on your couch), not that much. You’re within your own wireless network, and the browser and other applications have all the latest security updates – you shouldn’t visit questionable sites and/or services anyway. Plus the Marshmallow version of Android will still receive security updates for at least another year, and for Lollipop you can download fixes if you want to – more on that later.

The problem is with phones – which is what more than 50% of all internet browsing devices are running on until now. For these, you’d better have the latest and greatest, which means: the latest OS and all patches (which come automatically when using Google’s own Nexus/Pixel or Apples “i” devices).

So I was thinking about a replacement for Mitchie’s phone which won’t get the upgrade to “Nougat”. The new Google phones named “Pixel” are nice, just like “i” phones, but they also cost that much. So the probably best replacement at this moment and in the same size and price range would be the Nexus 5X. Read more here in that 3-page review if you don’t know or think you’d need a Google device anyway – you probably do if you care for security. The reasoning starts towards the end of page 2, read on…

Oh, and if you wondered why you saw me connecting from the UK in one of those screenshots: that’s from work, where we’re routed out and connected to the interweb via some router which happens to be located there (so Google and its own Youtube and other sites detect me/us as UK residents, which I can live with). And the reason for connecting to Google from there was that I downloaded and installed their SDK. That also gives you emulators for their Nexus phones and tablets, so you can try out your own apps (if you write some) before rolling them out to the public. As just a phone or tablet emulator it’s probably a bit of overkill, tho these emulated devices sure look good:

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Which brings me back to the Nexus 5X. In my standard price comparison site, it’s the top 1 searched for article when looking for a phone:

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And that could have a reason. The Samsung devices tend to explode and burn (and made it to the no-fly list in the US because of that already), anything else isn’t that up-to-date and/or affordable.

So if you can afford it, the new “Pixel” is a sure recommendation – you can bet that all the Android devs will get them as soon as they’re out. For us mere mortals tho, these slightly older but still very nice ones would be the interim solution of choice – after all, in 2 years from now, even your latest & greatest “Pixel” (or “i”) phone will look a bit older – and will be a lot cheaper than right now.

Me? I still don’t own a mobile phone, and I’m not sure why I would need one. Sure, couch surfing is nice, but for that – or as a nice remote control for my OM-D E-M10 camera – any Android tablet would do. Even an older one.

Thanks for reading.

Arno

During today’s lunch break I was out with the camera, the normal (25mm) lens, and my circular polarizer in front of it. I wanted to get a bit more contrast into the half blue half cloudy day. And when I returned from my walk, my colleague Arno was in front of the building, speaking to someone on his mobile phone. So I walked right up to him and took his picture:

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Arno, September 2016 (with circular polarizer)

He laughed and told whoever was on the other side that he just got photographed. And upstairs, later, he said “cool image” – he liked it because of the reflections which give the illusion that there’s lots of background, while in fact he was sitting right in front of a window.

Thanks for viewing.

Update, from October 8th:

Here’s another one which I took yesterday, and which just got “explored” in Flickr:

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Arno, October 2016

The colour version of this one had a few elements which were too distracting, and it’s also taken with both natural *and* artificial light (the bad ones from the office ceiling), so I converted it to black & white using Silver Efex, simulating a Kodak Tri-X (400TX) film. But it was taken with my E-M10 and the Zuiko Digital 50mm/2 macro lens from the Four Thirds system, used wide open. Only the left eye is sharp, you can see the different sizes of this photo on Flickr (as always, when making prints, take the original size).

Thanks again for viewing. Or thanks for viewing again (and sorry about not posting that much lately).

Flower(s)

Since we’re back from Malaysia – where I mostly took family photos – I’m much more selective with what I photograph. It’s either documentary, like in the previous computer-related posts, or it’s things (or people) I just *want to* photograph right in that moment. So I’m taking less photos than before, but hopefully better ones.

One of the subjects I liked was a plant which Mitchie has in a pot here, so I took a closeup with natural light:

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Flower (50mm)

And later, I also photographed it using flash:

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Flowers (45mm)

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Flowers (25mm)

It’s near its end of life as it seems – doesn’t look that good anymore. That would also be something to document, but no – it *used to* look like this…

Thanks for viewing.

“Natural” scrolling

I’m back to some kind of developers’ setup at home, installing several virtual machines over the weekend. So in addition to the stable Debian 8, codename “Jessie” which is my working machine at home, it now also hosts Windows 7 and 10, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (“Xenial Xerus”), and Debian testing (“Stretch”, which will become the next stable version) and “Sid” (which will always be the developers’ version, and of which Ubuntu is built each half year).

And I was in for a few surprises.

First issue was/is/has something to do with the interaction between VirtualBox (which I upgraded to version 5 with Debian’s backports and testing repositories) and gdm3, the Display Manager of Gnome3. To make it short: you can’t boot the graphical environment of the newer versions of Debian using gdm inside of a VirtualBox environment; you have to use lightdm instead like Ubuntu does.

The second one caught me even more.

My first thought about this was something like “Ohmygod, they’ve done it again, why did they have to…?”. Turns out that the mouse wheel is reversed in Gnome3, so to scroll down a page, you actually have to move the mouse wheel up instead of down. There’s a setting inside Gnome to switch that behaviour off, but it doesn’t work…

So I started reading about it. And it’s nothing which Gnome invented; in fact it was Apple, and they did so in 2011 with the invention of Mac OS-X “Lion”. A search on “natural scrolling“, or a consultation of Wikipedia on the term “Scrollbar” should get you going.

So now the Gnome people. I haven’t found out whether this is a bug in Debian or in upstream Gnome development, or simply another issue on emulating hardware within a virtualized environment, but it’s not easy to get used to this one – 20 years of physical conditioning cannot be forgotten in a few hours. Thankfully, on Linux there are always other choices until those bugs are fixed, and I tried Mate, XFCE, and Cinnamon which all work great regarding the mouse wheel.

Yeah, I can understand those who grew up using smartphones and tablets and the like – you move the content, not the frame which is displaying it. Nonetheless, this doesn’t feel “natural” for someone whose first action is to attach a mouse to a notebook instead of using its trackpad. I’ve never used a Mac computer, so this feels very strange to me.

About that switch which doesn’t work: until now I searched for bugs of the Gnome Control Center in Debian; haven’t seen it. I should also look at the Gnome developers’ pages, maybe they know about it and/or have it fixed in newer versions than 3.20 already. Either way, this will be fixed. Until then I can try to get used to this new way, or simply use another desktop environment – there’s plenty of very good choice.

As always, thanks for reading.

A point release to the rescue…

As it turned out yesterday, I had spent more or less the whole weekend for nothing – the IBM ‘Open Client’ layers didn’t accept my preinstalled and preconfigured version 16.04 LTS of Ubuntu. Too new, not yet supported.

So what to do? I asked the few colleagues which run Linux on their older notebooks – at least older than mine. Andreas was/is using Red Hat 7, which comes with a Linux 3.10 kernel – even older than my Debian Jessie, which had/has 3.16, so I knew that some things wouldn’t work. Daniel has Ubuntu 14.04, and when I asked him which kernel that one brings, he told me: 4.4…

Hmmm, same like 16.04? How could that be? Turns out that Ubuntu has introduced something they call the “LTS Hardware Enablement Stack”, with so-called “point releases”. He has 14.04.5, and the official IBM Open Client Live image with which he started has 14.04.1. So his recommendation was to install that official Open Client, and upgrade it to 14.04.5 like he did.

Which I tried at home yesterday evening, and which failed miserably – 14.04.1 couldn’t even initialize the graphics, with no way out except a hard reset (cold boot). No terminal window(s), no nothing.

Slowly I got frustrated. Compiling a kernel myself? Bah; haven’t done that since years. But what if…

I downloaded 14.04.5 which has the same 4.4 Xenial kernel like 16.04, and that installed like a breeze. So from first try and frustration to a readily installed machine it took me less than an hour. Plus it’s “Trusty Tahr”, and today the Open Client scripts at work didn’t complain and installed mostly everything I need (I manually installed some things like conky and VirtualBox before that).

Read more about that point release here if you’re interested.

So starting tomorrow I’ll go on and install the not-so-common stuff which we need for work, like the ICSW frontend for IBM’s Retain system to handle our calls. That’s built on Eclipse, and integrated into Notes, which sometimes makes updates more complicated than necessary – integrated all-in-one tools and Linux are quite contrary in their whole philosophy, and in their design. But ok; these Java-based tools have to run on everything including Macs and Windows boxes, so I can’t really complain.

I also ordered a HDMI cable to connect the machine to the 24″ 16:9 monitor I have at work; should arrive soon. Guess I’ll have a working environment until the end of this week, and then my W520 goes to a colleague who’ll give it to his father.

So I’m looking forward to tomorrow, and to using that shiny new machine.

Oh, and before I forget it: Mathias, one of my colleagues today asked me to take a few photos of him, which he needed for some forum or so. And when I asked him if I could use and show one of these here, he said sure. So here’s Mathias from today:

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As always, thanks for reading.

A new machine for work

Three days ago at work, I received an email with the ‘final approval’ for a new notebook/laptop computer (everyone around here calls them ‘laptops’, but they’re sometimes too hot and/or too heavy to keep them on your lap for long). And yesterday, I got another mail telling me that the item was ‘shipped’, plus one from our local post office in Frankfurt – it had arrived.

Of course it didn’t arrive with what I had ordered – the IBM Open Client, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3. Instead, it had an image based on Windows 7 on it – which I wiped, and until the end of our office hours I had Debian GNU/Linux (the stable version 8, codename “Jessie”) running on it. But nevertheless, I wasn’t finished trying out the hardware, so I took it home. Here are some detail shots of it:

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It’s a Lenovo Thinkpad P50, and I had to wait for it – all the colleagues who wanted a new machine right away got an older one. But my W520 was and is still doing a great job, so I had the time anyway.

It’s good tho that I took it home – newer hardware and Linux is still something which could cause you headaches. Turned out that the 3.16 kernel in the stable Debian wouldn’t recognize and detect a few items which are much younger than itself, such as the wireless card, or the sound. Some of the installed hardware required a kernel 4.x or higher, so instead of upgrading Debian to “testing” or “unstable”, I decided to put Ubuntu onto it – which is also Debian “unstable”, together with a bit of polish. With that – it has a kernel 4.4 – everything worked out of the proverbial box. Here’s a screenshot I made for my brother yesterday, while typing an email for him on that new machine:

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The machine has HDMI, Mini-Display-Port, and Thunderbolt outputs, so today I tried it on our 42″ Panasonic TV, which also worked. Good; my monitor at work has VGA and HDMI inputs, so I only need to order a cable for HDMI. And after adding the IBM ‘Open Client’ layer and copying some files from the old machine to this new one, I’ll be done.

This is a nice one. Should be fun to use it.

Thanks for reading and for viewing, as always.

Update, from Sunday morning:

I finished pre-configuring that new machine. At work, I will have to install the Open Client layer on top of it all, but for now I have 3 operating systems running on it: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and virtualized Windows 7 and 10 environments (both using 2 CPU cores and 8GB of RAM; this machine is powerful enough to even run them all at once – it has 8 cores and 32GB of RAM). Here are a few screenshots plus one I made using my camera:

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Ubuntu 16.04 LTS running on Lenovo Thinkpad P50

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Windows 7 (on Oracle VirtualBox 5) running on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS running on Lenovo Thinkpad P50

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Windows 10 (on Oracle VirtualBox 5) running on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS running on Lenovo Thinkpad P50

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Lenovo Thinkpad P50 (running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS) in front of my 24″ monitor (showing Debian 8 “Jessie”)

Again, thanks for viewing/reading.

Happy birthday

Today is not only my sister Silvia’s birthday. It’s also Linux which was announced on a mailing list 25 years ago. And so, the “article of the day” on the German Wikipedia start page is about Linux:

Screenshot-Wikipedia – Die freie Enzyklopädie - Mozilla Firefox: IBM Edition

Screenshot-Linux – Wikipedia - Mozilla Firefox: IBM Edition

Working with and using it each day – so thanks, Linus (and Richard and all the others). And congrats again to my sister.

P.S.: Two links in German which show the importance of Linux today:
25 Jahre Linux: Das Jedermann-Betriebssystem and
25 Jahre Linux: vom Nerd-Spielzeug zum Allround-Betriebssystem

35:15

If you want to lose yourself for about a good half hour, listen to these guys:

Emile and Vincent are marvelous. Extraordinaire! Merçi…