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

First I worked and payed taxes in Germany. From 2016 on, in Japan. Time to think about the differences in paying taxes, and how they are used. I dislike doing taxes, would prefer if everything would be deducted automatically.. but taxes are there to stay. The differences between both contries are interesting! Income tax in Germany In Germany, income taxes are automatically deducted from the monthly wages. One a year,

Background: I’m a German, living in Japan. Details are here. The visitor visa In March 2008, I went to Japan for the first time. For 3 month I would live and work in Tokyo. As German citizen, or being from other 1st world countries, that is easy: for business as well as holiday you can get a visa for staying up to 3 months in Japan. No application in advance

So, having seen Norbert and @codewiz mentioning Plasma frequently, I decided to give it a try. My desktop box is Fedora33, which comes with a quite current version of Plasma. Some years ago, I tried gnome - but Gnomes “let’s make it as simple as possible, leave buttons out”-strategy does not stick well with me. I don’t want a dumbed down window manager. I use WindowMaker since dozends of years. It’s nice and lean, but does not seem to have a future with Wayland.