Why would one learn foreign languages? Over my journey of learning Japanese until now, I had various stages of motivation. All started with a ‘I like the country, I want to go there again for holiday, and learn the language a bit’. Right after starting to learn, progress is quick, that motivates very much. To me, the big achievements so far were these: ability to give a self introduction ability

Christmas in Europe and Japan Before Corona, flights from Japan to Europe in the middle of December were full of couples with one partner from Europe, and the other partner from Japan. Often such couples spend Christmas in Europe: it’s the time to meet family, to enjoy a quiet Christmas. With many Christians in Europe, most countries also have national holidays then. On the 24th, Christmas eve, presents are given

I was asked to share my experiences about the System76 launch keyboard, and a Mastodon post would not provide enough space - so a blog article it is. My setting and needs What’s my environment like, making me consider a 285$ keyboard? Since forever, I did not pay much attention to the keyboards I use. In the last 5 years, I mostly used the keyboard build into Thinkpads, with German

What’s here? The Linux unplugged 437 podcast announces the software pieces which were most important for the listeners this year. After listening to that, I wondered: how changed for me in 2021 regarding software? Podcasts I listen to podcasts when going for lunch or hiking in the mountains around Tokyo, and a big share of the podcasts is tech related. The ones which I discovered and started to listen to

How are society and the low Corona infection numbers in Japan related? I was looking forward to quite some things when moving to Japan, to the food, bathing culture and more. I was also signing up to other aspects, like a society where people are watching each other, more than in Germany. A first flavour of that is in TV series about Japanese life: older woman with a worried face

..but why? My employer asked us TAM’s in Japan to fetch our belongings from the office, so I got home with the keyboard I bought in Korea, with Korean Hangul - and 3 big places of rust. I made a weekend project to remove the rust and repaint, worked ok. Then: hooking it up to my Thinkpad, currently running KDE Plasma. Basic configuration worked ok, Plasma was coping with the Thinkpad having German layout and the Koran one having English layout, plus extra keys.

Japan online lesson experience and online learning I was recently talking for 1 hour with a Japanese class and teachers, about the internet, Open Source, and what online lessons can look like. State when Corona started When Corona started, I heard from various people about the state of online lessons at schoole: it was really bad. In Germany as well as in Japan. Knowledge on how to do lessons via Internet instead of teaching in front of students and children Internet connectivity, devices for access I was worried about that.

My view so far So.. my view on Linux containers, managed with i.e. podman or docker so far were this: complicated, and for servers. I run Linux for myself on desktops, and on servers, where I host things like DNS/bind, webserver, Wikis, Tiny tiny RSS for collecting RSS feeds, and so on. I run these services on a virtual system in Germany. So far, almost all of these services were running natively: that makes it easy for me to update them as I trust the Linux distro maintainers of the distro to fix security issues when they get known.

What is this about? Rockbox is an OpenSource operating system for mp3 players. I had many mp3 players which were lacking functions which I would really have liked. Trivial things like allowing playback without pause between tracks, or loudness normalization. It does not stop there: Doom has been ported, one can play mod and sid files from the Commodore Amiga/C64 era, and much more. Rockbox is a replacement firmware for various mp3 players.

In the previous article I talked about external meters and pmda-denki. Now lets see how much power certain hardware components need. Pmda-denki usage pmda-denki is now in PCP upstream. One can use the code from there, via packages build regularly, or wait for the next PCP release to make it into the Linux distros. With that done, and pmda-denki being installed, metrics regarding electrical power are available. On laptops where pmda-denki can access both sources: As per ‘pmrep .

TL’DR With a Linux laptop, you can quite accurately measure the systems current overall power consumption while on battery. This allows to compare if the new version of your software uses more power than the old one. On Intel/AMD systems, power consumption of cpu’s can be measured with RAPL - good enough to compare cpu workloads. You can read these metrics directly from sysfs and do some simple computations, or

What I can compare.. Disclaimer: I have just experienced 2 employers in Germany, and 2 employers in Japan. Also, not only the location/country you work in is relevant for ‘what work feels like’, but also the company. My first German employer was a big IT service provider, with many customers in Germany, some more spread over Europe and just few in the rest of the world. My second employer in