Late Night Linux – Episode 309
32:43 Share

Hello, welcome to episode three or nine of late nights, inures reported on the eighteen thousand november twenty twenty four i'm drive and with me I .

finding evening grame .

hello from york sha lo. Let's get straight on with our discoveries then will pop.

Pop is a very old tool and I really am amazed. I've never heard of IT until recently. It's get home page has got updates from ten years ago and yeah I only discovered IT.

I don't know, couple of weeks. Expect the most recent update to IT was about two years ago. So IT hasn't been very well maintained. But perhaps IT just works fine.

The purpose of pop is a bit like jq, which maybe people don't know about, but J, Q is a tool for passing Jason files. You feed the address on file, and then you use its kind of selector language to pull out bits of information you want from that file. Pup does that for HTML.

So you can piper website into IT, and you can then select via css, various elements of that page. And using IT selector language, you can output just the things that you care about. And this is incredibly useful if you want to scrape a web page and pick out a particular word or failed or you know heading or all the headaches or or whatever is you're looking for.

It's just a really useful tool to quickly and easily pick out the information you want from more page. Incredibly useful. And I Frankly embarrassed that i've only just .

found out about IT. So you could, for example, use this to scrape the website and just get the content of the posts, for example, to maybe fade into your large language model.

当然。

I wonder how many people have actually used IT for that?

The more I learn about companies is the more chunky scripts that exist that do all the donkey work for everybody.

So what do you use IT for them?

I was trying to scrape some pages of the octopus website to pull out information that I wanted. Now they have got an API, but not all the information was in the API. So I thought I just trying scraped off the web page.

This is occupy your energy supplier.

That's right. yeah. And did he worked in eight? Worked enough. I going to gave up on the project, really. But I think next time I need to scrape a where page, this is definitely where i'll go.

It's got a bit of a nicer, like faster results and using beautiful soup .

put back and or whatever. Yes, and that's exactly how I came to be here. Beautiful soup is like the my Normal go to way of doing these things.

But every time I use IT, I hate IT a little bit more. And I still have to read the manual for IT over and over over again just to trying get IT to do what I want. I found pop to be a little bit faster yeah for me to use not to query but you know to interact .

with IT does look pretty, Jason. And that's yeah a good way to the segments of off like you like and .

IT looks like he's writing and go.

So I must easy to install them. Yeah, absolutely. Go get. And then they get your page and you're done. H not roast .

is even really a good project.

Then lets see if there is one in rush. hy.

Rop, there is .

already a .

pop application written rest, but it's a task automation system. Not interested.

I'm sure rop must exist somewhere gram a bit workshop. This is another .

well established project and I can't quite believe i've not heard of IT. It's a web based I D E, A development environment for old style platforms, eight bit platforms. They include all home computers like the comment sixty four of the atari twenty six hundred also are kate machines.

And it's a unified use interface where you've kind of got a list of functions on the left, you've got the code in the middle column and then an integrated emulator on the right, the whole things open source. So while IT is through a web U, R, you can also run IT locally if you want to. And it's obviously harness, sing, many different projects to pull this into a single place.

But it's mind blowing. The incredible if you're into this kind of thing, choose like the atti twenty six hundred example and they include template assembly code or really well commented you to just immediately go in and change your own high school name. Or what if you want to do, you'll see the output of the build binary running on an ambulatory or on the right, and you can step interrupts.

And to all those kind of things you can do in an idea on the left, and you can export the binary to run on the real hardware or on another emulator. But let me just open IT up, because there's so many things that in now supports this. The early games goes outside the twenty six and rip also the sake master system, the color vision and PC engine loads of our kid game platforms, computers like the comment to sixty four, the apple two spectrum.

And every one of these environments has been built to develop software on those things. It's really difficult to describe because they do IT so well. You can't believe you. You understand the effort that must have got behind the scenes to integrate all this, but IT just begs you to want to try and write some suffer r for those old.

old systems. I can see myself losing a lot of time in this. Just the the variety of stuff is in. There is great fun and there's even a red machine set up so you could write good old info comedy tues as well. amazing.

Not only that, there's very log as well. And that was part of my university course to define like, I think we divine A U R. Chip at the time, but they're here and the telly have you build your own a bit game platforms to scratch and the IDE is insane.

The quality of IT like it's got even showing you like the clocks to the right outside of your code on left. And of us is amazing. We had this twenty five hundred years ago .

yeah the ita twenty six hundred years, for example, actually has the raw compiled decembers on the left. Then IT has, I don't know what you'd call IT. I can't remember now this the precompiling assembly language with the comments in the middle column, so you can see exactly what every commanders doing, and then the emulator on the right.

But then also you get a window with, I don't know what you'd call IT, the stack, the registers on the CPU. And you can also introspect the memory in real time, the video, and you can do all those kind of things you could like with an action replay in the eighties. And it's brilliant.

It's open source and also funded in an interesting way. And that the main a has written books on developing software for many these platforms. And you can buy the books through an integrated link, which is a pretty cool way of doing IT.

If you're interested in spending Christmas, you know, writing assembly language for communal sixty four, which I can do, I just wanted to do with that. It's great. I also have to say a lot of troubles gone into selecting the examples, as lots of ten plates are really well documented.

Radio well commented. So even if you just have a passing interest in fifteen minutes, you can go in and change the value. And then seeing IT running in the Emily on the right hand side does kind of bring back similar old memories of pressing a switch on an action replay in finding with high school is in changing that body.

And to be able stood all of this in a browser is just extraordinary .

fAiling twenty year and a versy of half life .

too yeah so a bit of an admission to make the only half life two i've ever played has been is mother live, where you get all the steam and valve what they called artifacts. Texas, whatever we can message at amona different levels, acts, assets. Thank you. Yeah, that's the only half life too.

I ve never played much to my embarrassment, but there's a really cool documentary boyville themselves and it's quite cool to go through and look at I having watched all that, yeah I had a chance about two hours long and it's the first i've seen a modern bit of footage of gay. But he looks very different than the picture I have in my head of what he looks like. So that was so interesting. It's nice to see they got him in a White shirt over his red polo shirt, which I thought was going funny as like, you need to be more formal quick, but this, what are are you?

And something about lights as well.

Then this is a couple years old, but just popped up the other day on either lobsters are hacking new camera, and somebody discover that the same languages used for blinking lights in half life, and somebody older things like quake, and there's actually a alphabet of the strength of the life. And then a string that you pass to the same function that exist both games.

And that tells you a wear, something is like essentially on full, on a full or in graduate stage as a brightness. And then how they pulse IT would be going A, B, C, D or desert and then back down to a again. And that's IT going up and then going back down. And it's quite funny to see something as simple as a yeah light flickering language in place. So thought was not fun.

That is amazing. I can see that there's social media post saying that valve reads the coat of flickering lights in half life, alex, twenty two years after the release of the ritual of life.

Is that the VR one that's terrifying.

Yeah, yeah. It's an amazing game. I mean, half life itself as one of those you a bit like playing eric IT.

IT may seem not so original now, but invented a lot of the things that so many other games have built upon since then. Really amazing game. The company has been twenty years.

okay? This episode is sponsored by tail scale. Go to tail scale dot com slash L N L.

Tail scale is the easiest way to connect devices and services to each other, wherever they are. Everyone these days has a VPN a sponsor. But tail sale isn't like those. This isn't about hiding your browsing habits from coffee shop owners and its not about watching netflix in another country. Tail scale is a proper V P, N.

For connecting your device is security is great for companies and it's great for self host's loads of the late night linux family host use tail scale because IT gives you the power of wire guard with a simple and quick set up. I got IT up and running in a few minutes without having to open any ports. Tail scale lets you connect anything, anywhere, provide connectivity to any resource for your organization, from dashboards to a snooty nars or windows file server, from self bench D N S.

Service to software as a service up. If you want IT off the public internet, tail scale will provide secure access. Tae scales personal plan will always be free, so support the show and try tail scale out for free.

Today you'll get up to one hundred devices and three users for free at tail scale up comment flash l and l with no critical required. That's tail scale dot com slash L N L. Something i've seen flocking around recently is european in dash alternative stop E U.

And this says european alternatives for digital products. We help you find european alternatives for digital services and products like cloud services and software as a service products. And they've ve got all sorts of stuff from V, P, S providers to the main name registers up, time monitoring services, file hosting services, browse as even.

And they give firefox the honourable mention as being open source. And for each category, they they give you various ones to telling where they are in the eu, whether is germany, poland, for whatever, and tells you if they don't have an english website, which is handy. I come up for the life.

Me think why this is doing the round lately. But here we are. If you just happen to want some stuff that space in europe rather than anywhere else, this is a sight for you.

I've been try to search for crushing I of sar on observers, but I am not not finding that anywhere.

嗯， you realized that we have not mentioned IT yet.

I think we get away with that. With that what you talking about.

I know my crushing despair, sense of dread and sort of thing.

I think i've broken through to the other side. Actually, i'm still like fucking what IT open just because you're name .

in the york che deals, which is not a nuclear target. Your financial .

are pretty close .

to fighting deals.

Gram wise, block, smart cube, come ion.

So I kind of into rubik's cubes are not very good at IT, but I can do IT paul huts and taught me, have to do the big cube back in the next four more days. And I still do. I've got a little cube, and it's quite a nice distraction.

So one thing that happened over last few years, there are lot of smart cubes. And gan, one of the biggest makers of really nice cubes, makes the smart cube. But they all have the most horrendous apps that go along with them.

So you have to create count, and you you typically use an APP to random ze C Q, but mostly that kind of time, and train your performance, so you can time yourself solving the cup, but also learn new moves and repeat them over and over and over again. It's quite useful. But the horrendous.

hey, you tell tell me that these things are motoring, zed, that I let I go. And Randy ze IT, no.

although there are some nice three print projects that you can motorised IT with the note, they simply know what state the cubes in, right? So via blue tooth, i'll connect to the APP and the apple know the state, the cube. So little time you solving IT, IT and at all, they are typically update to show the state of .

the cube on the screens.

IT shows you the moves to make, to give up like a truly random set up so that you can test. Because when you play the the cube quite a lot, you basically fall into the same old routine of random zing IT. So it's great to have something else. Tell you what the random it's usually only six or seven moves is enough to random ze the cute.

but it'll tell you which moves to make. The only way i've managed the review was to peel the stickers off. Even I, an out of energy went for, I just don't care.

So can you take like the spade caves with this then like you say, those people done.

Yeah exactly. So people take very much. I'm barely in the minute fresh hold. So i'm really not fast at .

all in these .

things you do in A I very good .

by like .

competitive standards, but it's goodby Normal person standards.

I haven't any of the complex permutations that you need to learn to be iled to really get fast. So the protocol that these cubes communicate with is closed that the recent standard, there's a few smart cube manufacturers, including movie in the same, and they all talk their own horrible propriety apps. They are terrible.

I can't say how bad they are because they are all four laps. So i've been locky for ages for an open source specification or reverse engineer of these things. A few, there's a few weird put APP projects online that have reverse engineer those protocols.

And this project is one reverse engineer the protocols, but put IT into embedded device that you IT actually in R A K. Thousand nine hundred, one hundred and seven, which is kind of small IoT bought of the screen. This is an open source project that speaks to your smart cube.

IT has a screen on IT does everything that the APP does. But it's so much Better than the you can just put IT on the side and then you can play your cuban. You don't need to use lock .

into anything. The ensure is a real 3 printed vibe in this photo yeah .

so i've not made IT。 I'm actually more interested in having a look at the code and trying to create an APP out of this because I just I just wanted have something that set up in times my cube solving and sets up the right thing and also keeps her saves my school because that's all i'm interested in.

It's like both of you and wills wives got together and to try to design a Christmas present for the boat of you, that one of you could solve the cube by the other one, decoded the blue tube low energy protocol. ridiculous.

And it's a lot of I don't say, I say you could pretend to concentrating in meetings while secretly try to stop the.

More importantly, is an equivalent for this for the rebels magic to remember that yeah.

I do remember that probably not. But IT does support lots of its supports like the pami sports, like the mega ics, the huge ones, the two by two ones, and many of them. I've got a lot of them. So i'm going, i'll share our photos so you can see just how said my collection is.

I think I could still solve the room magic. And under .

twenty seconds, I still don't understand how that worked. How how is that possible for the squares to move both? I just don't understand that .

I just far too lazy. I think this is why how I know i'm not like skilled and especial ways that well.

i'm told that rose cubes, it's not just logical or anything. You just learn how to do IT. There's a certain technical it's like cyndi c cross words, you look at the times cryptic crossword and IT just seems like fucking gibi h but then someone explains how to do IT and then you can learn the skill of IT. And then it's just relatively straight forward.

basically, algorithms. Yes, you see the state of the cube and you know that there's there's a certain set of move you can do to get yourself to a more ordered state from that. And the more algorithms, you know, the more shortcuts you can take.

So at the beginning, I think you need to learn like four or five, and you can learn the cube by just learning four or five different sequences of moves. And then if you get more and more advanced, you can learn more. And then this kind of conditions, then according to you, could branch off and do something some one way of if there's a certain pattern in one place or going to in another way. So IT is a set sequence moves. But then the interesting part is getting faster because then you can vote ment your knowledge of algorithms with more advanced algorithms .

and more conditions. Well, I put this on the, not only does IT show the rose cubes and everything, but in the background you've a really fancy joystick, which looks exactly you like, one that my neighbor had, who knows a kid? I could never afford anything .

that fans as a competition part of me.

Yeah and this was for the mayor as well. Yeah.

you've got rescues that don't have like cubic pieces of them. Yeah.

they're really interesting. They they really bend your brain because in fact, the solution, the algorithms are identical. But the pieces in each place, instead of being different colors and different shapes. So you just have to try bend your brain around thinking that that shape is blue, or whatever you happen to do is, I don't know, as you get older, you try, I don't know.

okay? This episode, sponsored by antro wear go to intro wear dot com intro war sells computers with a bunin, a bunch martyr int. stold.

There a range of desktops, laptops and servers, and most parts are configure. So you can pick the C, P, U, RAM and storage that's right for you. If you can't find exactly what you want, then do contact them and they'll work with you on A A spokesman.

Luke, that's perfect for your needs. The ship to the U. K. Republican, ireland, france, germany, italy in spain.

And if you do buy one of their machines, there's a little drop down at check out and you can select late nigh linux so they'll know that we sent you. So go to intra wait outcome for all your linux computing needs onto a bit of admin. Then first will thank you everyone who supports us with paypal and patron.

We would appreciate that if you want to join those people, we can go to late nights inc. Stock com slash support and remember that for various amounts on patron, you can get an advert free or asset suit of either just this show or all the shows in the light night, the next family and you, you can get some episodes. Ly, and if you want, get in, contact your e mail show at late night linux com, when I talked about the framework laptop, I mentioned some battery testing that are done and how X, F, C.

Had performed really badly, and how i've been threatening to do more extensive testing. Well, I have done some more testing. I have not completed my testing yet, but i've got some initial results and not quite conclusions, but interesting things i've seen, let's say.

Now let me just start by saying testing the shit is really, really hard. It's really hard. I'm not really sure the best way to do this.

So what i've been doing is just my youtube test. So I try to laptop up completely. I set up a cron job to log the battle level.

Every minute. I make sure it's full brightness. I start a youtube twenty four, our live stream tea T. P. And then I unplugged the laptop and let IT run all the way down.

And then once i'll tch IT back up again and turn IT on, I look at that text file and work out how many minutes from unlock ging IT to IT turning off, and then I write down the number of minutes. I don't think this is necessary. The best test that you can do because really you kind of want to be testing more productivity stuff. Like how often are you just watching full Green video, full brighter.

quite often watching full screen video til .

the fall of sleep? yeah. Well, I first Green video and full brighter when i'm cooking in stuff. So maybe it's not that bad test, but I feel like there must be some sort of productivity test or not.

You can get properties often are for windows that will do this, like opening up spray ets and more documents and editor learn stuff in scripted way. There's got to be a way to do that. Linux, so if anyone knows, please let us know. Show at late nightmare stock com. But for now, all i've done is just this youtube test.

At the bund summit, there was an open source project called what wise. I've not had a chance to look into IT properly, but what they were doing with developing software to calculate the energy consumption of processes, and maybe that's something that could help in .

these situations. Yeah.

what wise? It's called that? Yeah, yes.

yeah. I ve heard of that. Probably needs to go into some scripts.

Something yeah, yeah.

But anyway, I decided to test exec a marti plasma and genome for now, and to cut the chase gome with wayland generally performs .

the best on your framework? yes. Did IT though I like your .

numbers right on the framework, plasma performed slightly Better than gone .

with violence, saying, again, sorry, I didn't hear yes.

and that I only tested pleasure with x eleven because there was no wAiling session and that formed slightly Better. However, I think IT cheated. I think despite me telling IT don't dim the screen when you start to get long battery. I think I did that and that's why aced out a few more minutes.

Well, it's obviously more intelligent than the others, which is you're being silly. And then fixed IT.

I tried to replicate that. I don't know. This is part of what it's really hard because you try and tell linux, don't turn your screen off, especially when getting low on battery, don't give me warnings and dim the screen and start going into super performance modern ship like that.

But then that's kind of part of IT. Maybe I don't know that, that makes IT difficult, but one thing that became very clear to me is the old of the hardware you have, the less the test top matters. Because I tried this with various machines, right?

I tried IT with a vivo book, which is a third gene, I. three. I tried IT with the next two seventy, which is a seventh gen. I.

Five, just before the windows eleven cut off, I tried IT with A T four eighty, which is the eighth gen I five, which is just about able to run in windows eleven. And then I tried IT with the framework, which is arise in seventy eight four to you, and with the shy old viva book. The results didn't differ in a sort of statistically significant way. I don't think exactly slightly worse. I think plasm just about one, but otherwise that IT was pretty much all the same.

I wonder if that was down to processors having hardware decoding of the video stream, if that was the same test that you ran. Like I wonder if we fans a way to automate june, say, office productivity would have change or you know how I will go on a different test that wasn't as intensive? Maybe yeah it's yeah, but I know I mean, it's bloody hard to try and work these things out. I certainly wouldn't be volunteer yeah.

And also video decoding in full screen probably has very little to do in with the window management in the end.

Yeah, I bet there's all sorts of optimization for zero copy and IT coming straight out of the network card and straight onto video RAM with very little CPU involved at all.

But I think the one thing you could draw from this is the fact that if you do have on the same system, you've tried the multiple days of interfaces than IT IT. That probably is a valid comparison locally for that one machine.

Well, one thing that became clear to me is that the newer the version of a bunch, the more battery got. So with the t four eighty, I tried with twenty two or four, which was just installed already, and then I tried to with twenty four ten, the very latest to one two, and with except I got like twenty five thirty cent more, slightly less with the others.

But there was a significant improvement in battery life, which tells me well, which suggests to me that the new event of a bunny who can just take advantage of the hardware in a more efficient way. And what was interesting was that the newer you got, the more differences they were between the desktops. So with the framework, which is a really modern rising, the differences were really quite dark exercise really badly, and the difference between the norm x eleven and willand was also quite marked as well.

Do you have any clue why mint and is a bon, to which I imagine what the other one was, why they were so different?

Yeah, that's what I was going to get to. So my initial conclusion was that excessive was shit. But i'm starting to think that I might be zab unto that is a not quite brilliant, not going to go that shit. I will never call that shit. But compared to the other ones, because I thought, let's just try max F, C, A.

Is that using the same F, C.

I think so. Yes.

it's not. Still use next eleven, I presume.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. definitely. yes. And that performed Better is the bottom line IT IT performed like roughly equivalent to martian paasma.

Where's the bund lagged behind in almost every other test I did, which kind of reinforce is what I said about min xx c in the first place. That is just getting more love. Then subunit is these days. But it's interesting that plasma R I did a couple of test with wayland on twenty four or and twenty four ten and IT didn't do any Better at the next eleven plasma a IT seems that they've not really done much optimization there versus gome, where they clearly have done a lot more optimization for the way session S C X eleven.

That's interesting. It'll be interesting to see that if they do a whole load.

that if it's already slightly beating.

no would IT be five thousand hours of party life.

Well, it's not always being gone. It's it's kind of a hit and mess.

We, we, we see how much crucifies by.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I was quite impressed with marti. Marti seemed to really hold its own much Better than the bund I did.

at least from these results. And a slightly disappointed that we land isn't doing Better in some cases, that is. But considering how old EXO eleven is and how much we all know it's actually doing.

I guess is how to about twenty years of thash ing the life out of every single bit of IT to make .

sure that works, I suppose. So I mean, IT was never engineered to be this thing that way, and supposedly should be, well.

take the t 4， which has got a really shit battery. IT. cancel.

Eleven was last in forty four minutes verses fifty three minutes with island. Mean, that is a significant improvement. I'm not good at mess on the fly. That's about like fifty, twenty percent or something yeah.

And I can see that it's in in other results as what is been marginally Better, but something it's not very it's not very clear. I think it's a good test. I think these are really interesting results, and I think we should aggregate them with something else as more window manager. Y.

i'd be also very interested to see how windows ten or eleven or and eleven do in these some tests.

Fuck that quite. I'm not because .

you embarrass linux.

No, I just think it's so much easier to install lean. And the first is fucking and around at all. The windows updates and everything reboot in IT five times and all that.

I don't disagree, but I think IT would be quite telling to see how far behind or not the linux on parameters.

windows. I should do that really. yeah. I mean, I should approach this more scientifically really.

But this has taken me just testing with five laptops, took me about a week because you have to wait for you to charge up. You have to set IT all up. Let IT do its thing, charge IT back up again.

And, you know, I just was constantly, yeah, I just had laptops going in all the time. I was like a telly shop, just was like the the youtube video are playing on like five laptops at once. IT was IT was really confusing at times.

I don't know if you remember. But when I used to work from magazines, we sometimes to feature where IT be destroy was, yes. And we do all of these kind of performance metrics for like the top tunnel fifteen and basically, IT was all four or five of us running tests for three weeks and IT just yeah, it's really, really hard and then it's it's quite hard to draw proper conclusions from IT because they're also different and this never radio clear winner.

Well, something I was thinking about was that would be great to get people to volunteer to help us with this. If you've got a machine that you can dedicate to this and the time to do IT, then do get in touch with us. As I said, show IT like nightingale com, if you are willing to help.

And I will devise, or maybe we could all together devise, some more scientific way of doing this. And because I really am curious about this, like what is the best? Is there a clear winner? Does IT depend on the hardware. I mean, it's my initial conclusion is, yes, if you've got cross, the old hardware IT makes no difference. The new year hardware ais, the more difference IT makes and can with violence is generally going to give you the best results as to risk unless he wanna believe that plasmas Better.

which will be correct.

So I get touch with us if you're interested in helping with this, right? Well, we're going to get out of here. Then we will be back next week when I probably be news and stuff. But we have to say, until then, i've been there.

i've been fed, i've been .

grain and I been 水 来晨。