[I wrote this as part of BelFOSS but I think it’s worth posting here.]

My Free Software journey starts with The Cuckoo’s Egg. Back in the early 90s a family friend suggested I might enjoy reading it. He was right; I was fascinated by the world of interconnected machines it introduced me to. That helped start my involvement in FidoNet, but it also got me interested in Unix. So when I saw a Linux book at the Queen’s University bookshop (sadly no longer with us) with a Slackware CD in the back I had to have it.

The motivation at this point was to have a low cost version of Unix I could run on the PC hardware I already owned. I had no knowledge of the GNU Project before this point, and as I wasn’t a C programmer I had no interest in looking at the source code. I spent some time futzing around with it and that partition (I was dual booting with DOS 6.22) fell into disuse. It wasn’t until I’d learnt some C and turned up to university, which provided me with an internet connection and others who were either already using Linux or interested in doing so, that I started running a Linux box full time.

Once I was doing that I became a lot more interested in the Open Source side of the equation. Rather than running a closed operating system that even the API for wasn’t properly specified (or I wouldn’t have needed my copy of Undocumented DOS) I had the complete source to both the underlying OS and all the utilities that it was using. For someone doing a computer science degree this was invaluable. Minix may have been the OS discussed in the OS Design module I studied, but Linux was a much more feature complete option that I was running on my desktop and could also peer under the hood of.

In my professional career I’ve always welcomed the opportunities to work with Open Source. A long time ago I experienced a particularly annoying issue when writing a device driver under QNX. The documentation didn’t seem to match the observed behaviour of the subsystem I was interfacing with. However due to licensing issues only a small number of people in the organisation were able to actually look at the QNX source. So I ended up wasting a much more senior engineer’s time with queries like “I think it’s actually doing x, y and z instead of a, b and c; can you confirm?”. Instances where I can look directly at the source code myself make me much more productive.

Commercial development also started to make me more understanding of the Free Software nature of the code I was running. It wasn’t just the ability to look at the code which was useful, but also the fact there was no need to reinvent the wheel. Need a base OS to build an appliance on? Debian ensures that the main component is Free for all usage. No need to worry about rolling your own compilers, base libraries etc. From a commercial perspective that allows you to concentrate on the actual product. And when you hit problems, the source is available and you can potentially fix it yourself or at least more easily find out if there’s been a fix for that issue released (being able to see code development in version control systems rather than getting a new upstream release with a whole heap on unrelated fixes in it really helps with that).

I had thus progressed from using FLOSS because it was free-as-in-beer, to appreciating the benefits of Open Source in my own learning and employment experiences, to a deeper understanding of the free-as-in-speech benefits that could be gained. However at this point I was still thinking very much from a developer mindset. Even my thoughts about how users can benefit from Free Software were in the context of businesses being able to easily switch suppliers or continue to maintain legacy software because they had the source to their systems available.

One of the major factors that has helped me to see beyond this is the expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT). With desktop or server software there is by and large a choice about what to use. This is not the case with appliances. While manufacturers will often produce a few revisions of software for their devices, usually eventually there is a newer and shiny model and the old one is abandoned. This is problematic for many reasons. For example, historically TVs have been long lived devices (I had one I bought second hand that happily lasted me 7+ years). However the “smart” capabilities of the TV I purchased in 2012 are already of limited usefulness, and LG have moved on to their current models. I have no intention of replacing the device any time soon, so have had to accept it is largely acting as a dumb display. More serious is the lack of security updates. For a TV that doesn’t require a network connection to function this is not as important, but the IoT is a trickier proposition. For example Matthew Garrett had an awful experience with some ‘intelligent’ light bulbs, which effectively circumvented any home network security you might have set up. The manufacturer’s defence? No longer manufactured or supported.

It’s cases like these that have slowly led me to a more complete understanding of the freedom that Free Software truly offers to users. It’s not just about cost free/low cost software. It’s not just about being able to learn from looking at the source to the programs you are running. It’s not even about the freedom to be able to modify the programs that we use. It’s about giving users true Freedom to use and modify their devices as they see fit. From this viewpoint it is much easier to understand the protections against Tivoization that were introduced with GPLv3, and better appreciate the argument sometimes made that the GPL offers more freedom than BSD style licenses.

I have a Brother HL-3040CN networked colour laser printer. I bought it 5 years ago and I kinda wish I hadn’t. I’d done the appropriate research to confirm it worked with Linux, but I didn’t realise it only worked via a 32-bit binary driver. It’s the only reason I have 32 bit enabled on my house server and I really wish I’d either bought a GDI printer that had an open driver (Samsung were great for this in the past) or something that did PCL or Postscript (my parents have an Xerox Phaser that Just Works). However I don’t print much (still just on my first set of toner) and once setup the driver hasn’t needed much kicking.

A more major problem comes with firmware updates. Brother only ship update software for Windows and OS X. I have a Windows VM but the updater wants the full printer driver setup installed and that seems like overkill. I did a bit of poking around and found reference in the service manual to the ability to do an update via USB and a firmware file. Further digging led me to a page on resurrecting a Brother HL-2250DN, which discusses recovering from a failed firmware flash. It provided a way of asking the Brother site for the firmware information.

First I queried my printer details:

$ snmpwalk -v 2c -c public hl3040cn.local iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.1 = STRING: "MODEL=\"HL-3040CN series\""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.2 = STRING: "SERIAL=\"G0JXXXXXX\""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.3 = STRING: "SPEC=\"0001\""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.4 = STRING: "FIRMID=\"MAIN\""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.5 = STRING: "FIRMVER=\"1.11\""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.6 = STRING: "FIRMID=\"PCLPS\""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.7 = STRING: "FIRMVER=\"1.02\""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.8 = STRING: ""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.9 = STRING: ""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.10 = STRING: ""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.11 = STRING: ""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.12 = STRING: ""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.13 = STRING: ""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.14 = STRING: ""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.15 = STRING: ""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.16 = STRING: ""

I used that to craft an update file which I sent to Brother via curl:

curl -X POST -d @hl3040cn-update.xml https://firmverup.brother.co.jp/kne_bh7_update_nt_ssl/ifax2.asmx/fileUpdate -H "Content-Type:text/xml" --sslv3

This gave me back some XML with a URL for the latest main firmware, version 1.19, filename LZ2599_N.djif. I downloaded that and took a look at it, discovering it looked like a PJL file. I figured I’d see what happened if I sent it to the printer:

cat LZ2599_N.djf | nc hl3040cn.local 9100

The LCD on the front of printer proceeded to display something like “Updating Program” and eventually the printer re-DHCPed and indicated the main firmware had gone from 1.11 to 1.19. Great! However the PCLPS firmware was still at 1.02 and I’d got the impression that 1.04 was out. I didn’t manage to figure out how to get the Brother update website to give me the 1.04 firmware, but I did manage to find a copy of LZ2600_D.djf which I was then able to send to the printer in the same way. This led to:

$ snmpwalk -v 2c -c public hl3040cn.local iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.1 = STRING: "MODEL=\"HL-3040CN series\""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.2 = STRING: "SERIAL=\"G0JXXXXXX\""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.3 = STRING: "SPEC=\"0001\""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.4 = STRING: "FIRMID=\"MAIN\""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.5 = STRING: "FIRMVER=\"1.19\""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.6 = STRING: "FIRMID=\"PCLPS\""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.7 = STRING: "FIRMVER=\"1.04\""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.8 = STRING: ""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.9 = STRING: ""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.10 = STRING: ""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.11 = STRING: ""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.12 = STRING: ""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.13 = STRING: ""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.14 = STRING: ""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.15 = STRING: ""
iso.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.4.3.99.3.1.6.1.2.16 = STRING: ""

Cool, eh?

[Disclaimer: This worked for me. I’ve no idea if it’ll work for anyone else. Don’t come running to me if you brick your printer.]

Last week Simon retweeted a link to Don’t Feed the Beast – the Great Tech Recruiter Infestation. Which reminded me I’d been meaning to comment on my own experiences from earlier in the year.

I don’t entertain the same level of bile as displayed in the post, but I do have a significant level of disappointment in the recruitment industry. I had conversations with 3 different agencies, all of whom were geographically relevant. One contacted me, the other 2 (one I’d dealt with before, one that was recommended to me) I contacted myself. All managed to fail to communicate with any level of acceptability.

The agency hat contacted me eventually went quiet, after having asked if they could put my CV forward for a role and pushing very hard about when I could interview. The contact in the agency I’d dealt with before replied to say I was being passed to someone else who would get in contact. Who of course didn’t. And the final agency, who had been recommended, passed me between 3 different people, said they were confident they could find me something, and then went dark except for signing me up to their generic jobs list which failed to have anything of relevance on it.

As it happens my availability and skill set were not conducive to results at that point in time, so my beef isn’t with the inability to find a role. Instead it’s with the poor levels of communication presented by an industry which seems, to me, to have communication as part of the core value it should be offering. If anyone had said at the start “Look, it’s going to be tricky, we’ll see what we can do” or “Look, that’s not what we really deal in, we can’t help”, that would have been fine. I’m fine with explanations. I get really miffed when I’m just left hanging.

I’d love to be able to say I’ll never deal with a recruiter again, but the fact of the matter is they do serve a purpose. There’s only so far a company can get with word of mouth recruitment; eventually that network of personal connections from existing employees who are considering moving dries up. Advertising might get you some more people, but it can also result in people who are hugely inappropriate for the role. From the company point of view recruiters nominally fulfil 2 roles. Firstly they connect the prospective employer with a potentially wider base of candidates. Secondly they should be able to do some sort of, at least basic, filtering of whether a candidate is appropriate for a role. From the candidate point of view the recruiter hopefully has a better knowledge of what roles are out there.

However the incentives to please each side are hugely unbalanced. The candidate isn’t paying the recruiter. “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” may be bandied around too often, but I believe this is one of the instances where it’s very applicable. A recruiter is paid by their ability to deliver viable candidates to prospective employers. The delivery of these candidates is the service. Whether or not the candidate is happy with the job is irrelevant beyond them staying long enough that the placement fee can be claimed. The lengthy commercial relationship is ideally between the company and the recruitment agency, not the candidate and the agency. A recruiter wants to be able to say “Look at the fine candidate I provided last time, you should always come to me first in future”. There’s a certain element of wanting the candidate to come back if/when they are looking for a new role, but it’s not a primary concern.

It is notable that the recommendations I’d received were from people who had been on the hiring side of things. The recruiter has a vested interest in keeping the employer happy, in the hope of a sustained relationship. There is little motivation for keeping the candidate happy, as long as you don’t manage to scare them off. And, in fact, if you scare some off, who cares? A recruiter doesn’t get paid for providing the best possible candidate. Or indeed a candidate who will fully engage with the role. All they’re required to provide is a hire-able candidate who takes the role.

I’m not sure what the resolution is to this. Word of mouth only scales so far for both employer and candidate. Many of the big job websites seem to be full of recruiters rather than real employers. And I’m sure there are some decent recruiters out there doing a good job, keeping both sides happy and earning their significant cut. I’m sad to say I can’t foresee any big change any time soon.

[Note I’m not currently looking for employment.]

[No recruitment agencies were harmed in the writing of this post. I have deliberately tried to avoid outing anyone in particular.]

Back in March I was given an LG G Watch R, the first Android Wear smartwatch to have a full round display (the Moto 360 was earlier, but has a bit cut off the bottom of the actual display). I’d promised I’d get round to making some comments about it once I’d had it for a while and have failed to do so until now. Note that this is very much comments on the watch from a user point of view; I haven’t got to the point of trying to do any development or other hacking of it.

Firstly, it’s important to note I already was wearing a watch and have been doing so for all of my adult life. Just a basic, unobtrusive analogue watch (I’ve had a couple since I was 18, before that it was pretty much every type of calculator watch available at some point), but I can’t remember a period where I didn’t. The G Watch R is bulkier than what I was previously wearing, but I haven’t found it obtrusive. And I love the way it looks; if you don’t look closely it doesn’t look like a smart watch (and really it’s only the screen that gives it away).

Secondly, I already would have taken my watch off at night and when I was showering. So while the fact that the battery on the G Watch R will really only last a day and a half is by far and away its most annoying problem, it’s not as bad as it could be for me. The supplied charging dock is magnetic, so it lives on my beside table and I just drop the watch in it when I go to bed.

With those details out of the way, what have I thought of it? It’s certainly a neat gadget. Being able to see my notifications without having to take my phone out of my pocket is more convenient than I expected - especially when it’s something like an unimportant email that I can then easily dismiss by swiping the watch face. My agenda being just a flick away, very convenient, particularly when I’m still at the stage of trying to remember where my next lecture is. Having walking directions from Google Maps show up on the watch (and be accompanied by a gentle vibration when I need to change direction) is pretty handy too. The ability to take pictures via the phone camera, not so much. Perhaps if it showed me roughly what I was about to photograph, but without that it’s no easier than using the phone interface. It’s mostly an interface for consuming information - I’ve tried the text to SMS interface a few times, but it’s just not reliable enough that I’d choose to use it.

I’ve also been pleased to see it get several updates from LG in the time I’ve had it. First the upgrade from Wear 4.4 to Wear 5.1 (probably via 5.0 but I forget), but also the enabling of wifi support. The hardware could always support this, but initially Android Wear didn’t and then there was some uncertainty about the FCC certification for the G Watch R. I can’t say I use it much (mostly the phone is within range) but it’s nice to see the improvements in support when they’re available.

What about the downsides? Battery life, as mentioned above, is definitely the major one. Mostly a day is fine, but the problem comes if I’m ever away. There’s no way to charge without the charging dock, so that becomes another things I have to pack. And it’s really annoying to have your watch go dead on you midday when you forget to do so. I also had a period where I’d frequently (at least once a week) find an “Android Wear isn’t responding. Wait/Restart?” error on the watch screen. Not cool, but thankfully seems to have stopped happening. Finally there’s the additional resource requirements it puts on the phone. I have a fairly basic Moto G 4G that already struggles with Ingress and Chrome at the same time, so adding yet another thing running all the time doesn’t help. I’m sure I could make use of a few more apps if I was more comfortable with loading the phone.

The notable point for me with the watch was DebConf. I’d decided not to bring it, not wanting the hassle of dealing with the daily charging. I switched back to my old analogue watch (a Timex, if you care). And proceeded to spend 3 days looking at it every time my phone vibrated before realising that I couldn’t do that. That marked the point where I accepted that I was definitely seeing benefits from having a smart watch. So when I was away for a week at the start of September, I brought the charger with me (at some point I’ll get round to a second base for travel). I was glad I’d done so. I’m not sure I’m yet at the point I’d replace it in the event it died, but on the whole I’m more of a convert that I was expecting to be.

I got home from a law lecture[1] today and took apart my TV. As you do.

I’d a couple of motivations for this. The TV is an LG 55LM8600-UC. That -UC is important - it means it’s the US model. I shipped it back to the UK along with the rest of my belongings at the start of the year. It’s a lovely TV, and I’m very happy with the picture quality. Up until now I’ve been running it through a 240v->120v transformer, because the back clearly states 120v 50/60Hz. Having had success converting my Roomba PSU to UK voltage I was wondering if it might be easy enough to do the same for the TV. So the first reason for taking it apart was to look at the PSU board and work out if I could replace it with a UK version, or fix up a handful of components myself. Turns out its rated for 100-240v 50/60Hz so it looks like it should be fine to plug into UK mains directly. And, having done so, it all seems fine. However I don’t take any responsibility if you try this yourself and it all goes up in smoke.

The other reason was to have a general poke at trying to get access to the onboard CPU - the firmware updates are signed and encrypted so I’m a bit stuck working from just those. My TV is from the US; it therefore has an ATSC tuner, and is no good for picking up the DVB-T/T2 broadcast in the UK. It also has a range of “smart” apps built in. Of course are also tailored to the US, so the Amazon Instant Video app connects to amazon.com and is no use with my Amazon UK account. Netflix is smarter about this and detects where you’re located rather than requiring logging in to the appropriate geographic site. However the Netflix app is old and doesn’t support user profiles. Which causes a problem when I spend an afternoon watching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and it screws up the recommendations for my girlfriend.

In an ideal world I’d easily be able to update the apps on my TV to recent versions appropriate for my geographic location. Instead, the current state of home entertainment software platforms is at least 10 years behind mobile phones. Some devices allow you to get hold of SDKs even as an end user, but you’re stuck with a multiple ecosystems even between different models from the same manufacturer. LG has no interest in updating my 2012-era TV. They’d rather I buy a nice new 2015 TV. Which means at present my TV is mostly a really nice monitor for my XBMC/Kodi box. I can get away with using my Blu-ray player for Netflix, as it does user profile, but it’s also a US model and again Amazon Instant Video doesn’t work with a UK account. I should point out /that/ box is from Panasonic, just in case anyone thinks I’m needlessly picking on LG. My amp is an Onkyo and it would be nice if it could stream music from Amazon/Google as well (it supports Spotify and a couple of others already), but again no joy there.

I understand there are DRM issues around video and audio content, but these problems seem to have largely been solved in the Android world while still providing a fairly standard development environment and allowing end users to install their own software. It would seem to make more sense if there was a standard “TV”/”Blu-ray” platform that the likes of Netflix and Amazon could write apps once for, reducing the effort required on both sides to get the latest and greatest services on end user equipment. I guess this is some of what Google was trying to achieve with Google TV, but it’s probably less interesting to them than mobile devices as I certainly don’t tend to do things like search on my TV; I just want to view content and would be mighty pissed off if it started advertising things at me unexpectedly.

While I’m not planning to buy a new TV any time soon, I could do with a UK spec 3D-capable Blu-ray player. Is there anything out there with some commitment to open apps / proper updates? I haven’t found anything, but I’d love to be proved wrong.

[1] It was on the duty of care and negligence, if you care.