- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">The life and death of a laptop battery</a></div>
- <div class="date">24th September 2015</div>
- <div class="body"><p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
-But this do not last. The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
-within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
-and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
-all the time. Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
-about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
-more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
-
-<img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
-
-<p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
-battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
-by someone else. I found
-<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
-which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
-broken. I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
-write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
-from him. Via
-<a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
-blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
-discovered
-<a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
-available in Debian.</p>
-
-<p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
-battery stats ever since. Now my
-/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
-measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
-when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity. My
-collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
-
-<pre>
-#!/bin/sh
-# Inspired by
-# http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
-# See also
-# http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
-logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
-
-files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
- energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
-
-if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
- (
- printf "timestamp,"
- for f in $files; do
- printf "%s," $f
- done
- echo
- ) > "$logfile"
-fi
-
-log_battery() {
- # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
- # when several log processes run in parallel.
- msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
- for f in $files; do \
- printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
- done)
- echo "$msg"
-}
-
-cd /sys/class/power_supply
-
-for bat in BAT*; do
- (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
-done
-</pre>
-
-<p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
-change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
-and out of hibernation and suspend. In addition, it collect a value
-every 10 minutes. This make it possible for me know when the battery
-is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
-The code for the Debian package
-<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
-available on github</a>.</p>
-
-<p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
-
-<pre>
-timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
-1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
-[...]
-1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
-1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
-</pre>
-
-<p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
-over time. This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
-battery.</p>
-
-<p>But why is this happening? Why are my laptop batteries always
-dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
-satellites keep working year after year. If we are to believe
-<a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
-University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
-chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
-all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
-I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
-<a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
-the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
-100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
-like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
-story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
-Linux too.</p>
-
-<p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
-stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
-preparation for a longer trip? I found
-<a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
-recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
-80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
-load).</p>
-
-<p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
-at the start. I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
-times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
-back to design capacity. And I wonder if the discharge and charge
-speed change over time, or if this stay the same. I did not yet try
-to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
-level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
-those.</p>
-
-<p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
-acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
-packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
-initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
-and stop. I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
-and need to be replaced. The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
-specific.</p>
+ <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html">Creepy, visualise geotagged social media information - nice free software</a></div>
+ <div class="date">24th January 2016</div>
+ <div class="body"><p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
+with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
+position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
+time (like every time a SMS is received or sent). And if their
+computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
+mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
+also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
+during installation). And when these programs send out information to
+central collection points, the location is often included, unless
+extra care is taken to not send the location. The provided
+information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
+good and bad, depend on your point of view). What is certain, is that
+the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
+perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
+when they share their whereabouts with private and public
+entities.</p>
+
+<p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
+
+<p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
+when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing. It is
+unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
+officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
+unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information. But the
+public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
+tool to do so is called
+<a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>. I
+discovered it when I read
+<a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
+article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
+November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
+The python program was in Debian, but
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
+Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained. I
+uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
+have time to fix it then. This Christmas I decided to finally try to
+get Creepy operational in Debian. Now a fixed version is available in
+Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
+are now included
+<a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
+
+<p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
+Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
+complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
+given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
+these services. Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
+least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
+days it is impossible. This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
+configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
+information to them about your search interests. This should be taken
+into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
+about yourself with the services.</p>
+
+<p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
+geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
+of Norway. One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
+information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
+information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
+I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
+twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
+Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
+making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
+things. A similar technique have been
+<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
+to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
+tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
+understand the value of the private information they provide to the
+public.</p>
+
+<p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
+it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
+least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
+python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
+
+<p>(I have uploaded
+<a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
+screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
+Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff