The latest artificial intelligence systems start from zero knowledge of a game and grow to world-beating in a matter of hours. But researchers are struggling to apply these systems beyond the arcade.
As I have 20 GB of data per 30 day period or an average of 682 MB/day of data to use with my hotspot device I use at home for Internet during the winter months for work and play, I have to be careful on how much data I use. While I only used about 11 GB during the December 24 – January 23 period, it’s important that I be measured with my data use.
I wrote a short script to output my connection strength, 5-minute / 1 hour / 1 day data use and current top application using data that I display in the XFCE panel using gen-monitor. For example, this is the display:
LDL314DL_7014: 70/-22 4.29 KB / 72.50 KB / 118.28 MB /usr/lib/firefox/firefox/
Here is the PHP script I use to generate it — it’s a mix of PHP and BASH. I could have done it all in BASH but truth be known I’m lazy and I’m better at PHP coding.
$net = exec("iwlist scan 2>/dev/null | egrep -i 'Signal level='|cut -b 29-31,49-51|sed -n '1p'");
$ssid = exec("iwgetid wlo1 -r");
$dataTtl = str_replace('i','',preg_replace('/^( *)/', '',exec("vnstat | sed -n '19p'|cut -d\| -f 3")));
$dataHr = preg_replace('/^( *)/', '', exec("vnstat -h | tac | sed -n '2p' | cut -d\: -f 1"));
$dataHrAmt = str_replace('i','',preg_replace('/^( *)/', '', exec("vnstat -h | tac | sed -n '2p' | cut -d\| -f 3")));
$dataMinAmt = str_replace('i','',preg_replace('/^( *)/', '', exec("vnstat -5 | tac | sed -n '2p' | cut -d\| -f 3")));
$nethogs = preg_replace('/(\d.*)$/', '', exec("nethogs -t -c2 2>/dev/null|tac|sed -n '2p'"));
if ($ssid != '') echo "$ssid: $net\n";
else echo "Offline\n";
echo "$dataMinAmt / $dataHrAmt / $dataTtl\n";
echo "$nethogs";
I actually enjoy watching the meter and being careful with my usage. It forces me to be deliberate, and make sure I’m careful with the data I’m consuming, using my smartphone for video meetings and watching video. I am actually surprised how little data ordinary web surfing uses – it’s really the video and downloads that eats a lot of data – especially the big GIS files. But I can go to the library for such purposes.
While I don’t have a good count based on SSID, it looks like I used about 11.2 GB on the hotspot and 19.2 GB on wired networks, mostly at the library and some at my parents house, downloading videos for later watching, updating or installing Linux apps, and downloading large GIS files. Downloading Youtube videos for later consumption really is a big bandwidth suck.
I like the challenging of being aware of my internet consumption and being responsible about the amount of data I use each day.
I have been following the right-to-repair movement a bit. It seems silly that companies shouldn't be required to provide repair manuals and documentation for machines they release on the world.
I grew up in the era of Napster and Macintosh System 7, I never liked the changes when they dropped support for classic Macintosh. Instead, I readily embraced Linux, which is more stable and rarely changes, at least if you don’t want to upgrade to the fancy window managers and desktop environments.
Linux does everything that I could ever need. Maybe because I don’t play games or have very specialized needs, I find that Linux really offers everything I could use for my needs. Maybe occassionally a MS Word document gets a bit mangled in translation but even that’s rare these days.
I don’t like commercial programs. Why pay for something you can get for free, plus have access to the source code and ability to modify the programs as need be through editing source code, or even just the configuration files and plugins? It’s also great that if you are curious how something works you can try to study the methods in the program via the source code.
I don’t like change. One of the great things about Linux is you can keep running the same Window Manager and programs forever, as old programs are usually ported forward as new to versions of Linux. Old programs often are often fast loading and if they did the task in the past, they can still do it today. For example, the XFCE Desktop Environment I use remains virtually unchanged from 25 years ago and is pretty similiar to Mac OS 8 or Winders 95.
I’ve never really wanted to learn gee-gaw Winders 10 or Mac OS X. It just seems like those operating systems have so much unnecessary clutter and window effects that provide no benefit to me. They seem to change their interfaces every two years, while Linux remains largely the same with the same stable roots of half a century ago, and the XFCE window manager being very similar for a quarter century.
I don’t mind not really knowing how to use Mac OS X or Winders. I think the last good version of Mac OS was System 7.5.3, after that things got too complicated and slow. Shortly after then I switched over to Linux in recent years I’ve been pretty much using the same basic software, with few changes. QGIS has gotten a lot more powerful and I’ve learned a lot about mapping, but that’s probably far out of the mainstream of computing today with all this smart crap I don’t use.
I like simple programs you can chain together. The classic Unix philosophy is that all programs should be small and modular. While that isn’t always true these days — QGIS and LibreOffice are rather big monolithic programs — you can chain those big berthas to smaller Unix commands. When you look at those big berthas up close they tend to be more reliant on smaller parts of Unix that might not always be apparent.
I like to tinker but I don’t consider myself a computer geek. I find a lot of the “high” technology things like Winders 10 and Mac OS X to be foreign, I don’t have a Firestik unless you consider the radio antenna on my truck to be Firestik. I don’t ever use Amazon and it’s been months since I’ve ordered anything from EBay.
I like electronics and building things with microprocessors, but you’ll never see me with one of those smart home devices. If I can program something with an Arduino or ESP32 microprocessor, that’s neat, but I can’t imagine ever owning one of Amazon Echos or smart light bulbs. I don’t have a permanent Internet connection at any rate.
To this day I refuse to have a wired internet connection at my apartment, although this winter I do have hotspot data through my phone which turns out to be kind of nice for light web-surfing and working on my blog — mainly because I need a reliable internet connection for work and the library is not open for in-person use during the cold of winter. Once the panademic is over, it’s back to walking down to park or library when I want to get on the web on my laptop.
I don’t mind having the Internet on my Smartphone, although I do worry about spending too much time scrolling through Facebook and Instagram. I have sworn off any kind of political comment on Facebook, and generally try to refrain from any comments on social media.
While I wouldn’t want to give up the Internet, I like keeping things simple and my use of it controlled and limited. It’s great for sharing ideas and photos, but I’d rather stay away from confrontational places like social media.
For work I need to get access to the VPN for files on server and to access internal websites. Unfortunately, at least initially things need to be configured through Microsoft Windows 10, which I fortunately still have on my laptop but I have almost never used it. I always found MS Winders to be obnoxious – it’s always trying to sell you commercial software and is incredibly slow.
I had been resisting getting the VPN set up on my personal laptop, but it looks like it I will need it sooner then later. Unfortunately when I tried to boot windows, it had somehow gotten messed up in the grub bootloader, so I it wouldn’t boot. Apparently it couldn’t find bootmgfw.efi, which is the Winders BIOS bootloader. Which I know nothing about, but browsing various bootloaders in the EFI I was able to finally find a bootloader that fired up the ol’ Winders 10.
Then I found my version of Winders 10 is too out of date to install Cisco AnyConnect for the VPN access until I run the various security updates from the past 6 years. Which I am in the process of doing, but I’ll have to go down to the library so I don’t use too much bandwidth at home over the hotspot. It seems like the updating had stopped due to a lack of disk space, but I’ve been in the process of removing all the trial-ware and spamware to free up a lot of space in Windows.
I got rid of Office360, which I have never used. I will just use LibreOffice on the Linux side of things when I need office software. Or just Google Sheets. I got rid of dozens of trial-ware and commercial programs and games that came bundled with the laptop but I never plan to use. I don’t know what half of the programs do but I can’t imagine I will need an add on media player or games for a side of computer I have booted once or twice.
One of the worse programs to remove is McAfee Anti-Virus, which is entirely worthless spamware in the era of Windows Defender and the freeware AVR Anti-Virus. You can remove the program, but the McAfee ads continue to pop up on your screen until you manually purge the McAfee directories from your hard drive. It really is spamware if they continue to advertise their garbage program after you delete it using the built-in Winders program removal software.
For anti-virus, I will probably just stick with the built-in Windows Defender and make sure I have the latest patches, because outside of work sessions where I need something over the VPN I will just run Linux. I don’t plan to ever install any other Microsoft Winders software on the computer, so the risk is relatively low. It’s easy enough to just reboot into the Linux environment I have been using for decades and are comfortable with. Why the hell do you need anti-virus software when in Linux they just automatically apply the latest security patches with apt-get?
I stripped down everything I could find in Windows to strip down. No special or graphics effects, a simple blue background. I got all that crap tiles out of the Start Menu and restored the Start bar to it’s most basic list of programs to switch between. Then I rebooted the machine. No more advertisements for McAfee or Office 360 and the Winders environment is quite fast. Winders is now only 52 GB big at this point, meaning my Winders partition is 66% free and it is sane enough for me to use it without clutter while I have to use it.
So while I will be happier as a pig in shit when I reboot my laptop back into Linux with simple, old-fashioned XFCE window manager, I will survive when I absolutely have to use the Winders.