FediMan

My digestion used to be awful: venomous wind, uncontrollable diarrhoea, and cramps that felt like someone squeezing my balls. I often had to cancel social engagements at the last minute, or couldn't leave the house at all.

Over the years, I've found some things that help. I'm not a doctor and can't give medical advice, but perhaps some of what I've learnt can help you.

Caffeine

For me, caffeine is a gut stimulant. I now avoid caffeinated tea and coffee, cola and chocolate. (Decaf green tea seems to be safe.) There must be something bad in chocolate besides caffeine, because it used to cause worse symptoms than coffee.

As anyone who's given up coffee will tell you: don't go cold turkey.

Alcohol

If I drink in the evening, I'll be on the loo the following morning. Ale and Belgian beer seem to be worse than wine, but wine will still do it. I do still drink, but in moderation, and not if I have to go out early the next day.

Animal fat

If I went into Burger King or McDonalds, I'd be rushing to the toilet within minutes. I now cut the fat off meat and avoid commercial hamburgers and other processed meat, and we always buy skimmed milk.

Home-made burgers made from low-fat pork mince are fine.

I can't comment on cheese, because I hate the taste of it.

Stress

Most people's guts are more troublesome when they're seriously stressed. I'm no exception. There are lots of online resources about combating stress. A few of them are even worth reading, though most don't quite hit the spot for me.

Vitamin D

I'm low in vitamin D. (That's not guesswork: I've been tested.) Supplements make a noticeable, but not revolutionary, improvement to my digestion.

It's easy to overdose on vitamin D, because it's fat-soluble: unlike (say) vitamin C, the bodyh doesn't just excrete what it doesn't need. More is not always better. Read up from trusted sources, and remember that 90% of the health information on the Web is tendentious tosh written by snake-oil sellers.

Probiotics

I've tried several brands over the years, and I've now settled on one that really helps. Everyone's gut is different, and what works best for me might not be best for you, which is why I'm not naming it here. The only way to find out is to try several brands, one at a time, for a month each. If you stop taking them and, within a week or two, things get worse again, you know you've found one that works for you.

Probiotics are expensive — typically 50p to £1 a day — and so they're not within reach of everyone. AFAIK, they're not available on the NHS: you have to go to the health food shop or the usual online retailers.

Prebiotics

I didn't get any benefit from prebiotics, but I've always eaten plenty of fruit, vegetables and wholemeal, so I'm probably not the target market. Some people say prebiotics help.

Exercise

I've seen exercise touted as a digestion aid. It has all sorts of benefits, and you should definitely do it, but it doesn't help my digestion at all.

CBD

CBD really helps with stress and anxiety, and I still take it, but it doesn't help my digestion as much as I'd hoped.

Curcumin (from turmeric)

I find curcumin not only reduces joint pain but helps me tolerate wholemeal bread.

If you try it, you'll want to take one of the modern curcumin preparations, such as Meriva or NovaSOL, because whole turmeric is often contaminated with lead and is very hard for the body to absorb.

Some people, including those who take blood thinners, shouldn't take curcumin. Do your reading before you buy.

Again, AFAIK, Curcumin isn't available on the NHS, but you can get it from the same places that sell probiotics. Again, you'll be paying 50p to £1 a day, which isn't affordable for everyone.

Sleep

My digestion seems better when I've slept semi-decently. Sleep is a struggle for lots of people, including me, but better sleep seems to mean better digestion. (Or maybe bad sleep and bad digestion are both consequences and causes of stress.)

Loperamide

Loperamide is useful when nothing else works. I find it more useful for cramps and diarrhoea than for wind. I get it on prescription, but I hardly ever need it nowadays. It's a drug of abuse, so take as little as you can. I rarely take it, even as a precaution, because:

The big one: junk food

Some people reading this will have Arfid. I'm not judging anyone. I understand that food is difficult for many people. Everyone has to eat on a budget, everyone has time constraints, some people have children who are picky eaters, and some don't have cooking facilities. I get it.

Nevertheless, I got huge benefits from cutting junk food out of my diet. In a normal week, I'll have no crisps, biscuits, cakes, sweets, chocolate, takeaways, ready meals, pizza, fish and chips, curry, commercial hamburgers, sausage, bacon, ham, white bread, fruit juice or fizzy drinks. And you know what? My digestion is hugely better — close to normal now. I'm free of painful cramps, I can leave the house whenever I want to, and I can go to dinner with friends without having to walk out during the main course. Not only that, but I'm more relaxed and buoyant, I weigh less, and I have less joint pain. (Still a significant amount, but meaningfully less.)

Who'd have thought that my body and mind would work better when I stopped feeding them junk and gave them healthy, home-cooked food instead?

I didn't just cut out all this stuff in one big bang. That would have been unsustainable. Instead, I stopped eating one or two types of junk food at a time, waited until I no longer seriously missed them, and then moved on to the next one. It took years.

You don't have to go as far as I did. Just cutting down on junk food, rather than cutting it out altogether, is still helpful. Crisps and chocolate were the biggest culprits for me, so you could go for one month, replacing crisps with unsalted nuts and replacing chocolate with fruit. Don't replace crisps with salted nuts, because those often use the same cooking oil as crisps and you won't learn anything from the experiment.

Ten years ago, living without crisps and chocolate would have sounded miserable and unsustainable. That stuff is addictive, and I used to crave it. If I go to a party and start eating it, I'll inevitably binge, because junk food is engineered to make you crave more junk food. But, now that I no longer eat it routinely, I'm happier, healthier and calmer, and pretty well in control of my digestion.

Here are some songs that tend to go on repeat whenever I hear them. I hope you enjoy some of them.

I've sorted them roughly from quietest to loudest.

Marcin Wasilewsky Trio: The First Touch Tierney Sutton: Court And Spark Tierney Sutton: Woodstock Evanescence: Hello (CW: childhood bereavement) Chieli Minucci: Cause We've Ended As Lovers Lizz Wright: River Man (CW: veiled discussion of suicide) Zero7, Tina Dico: The Space Between Blackfield: 1,000 People (CW: suicide) Blackfield: This Killer (CW: depression) Stella Starlight Trio: Black Hole Sun David Crosby: I Won't Stay For Long (CW: death) The Alan Parsons Project: Old And Wise Sharon Robinson: Invisible Tattoo Jon & Vangelis: I Hear You Now (Song is lovely, but tuning is pretty rough) Diana Krall: Black Crow Moonrise: Unravel Your Soul Genesis: Many Too Many Pink Floyd: Mother Pat Benatar: Painted Desert Moonrise: Feeling Like I Lost My Mind Ozric Tentacles: It's a Hup Ho World Dave Weckl, Jay Oliver: Carousel Jeff Beck: Behind The Veil Yes: The More We Live Clannad, Bono: In A Lifetime Richard Marx: Keep Coming Back Donald Fagen: Morph The Cat Tears for Fears, Oleta Adams: Woman In Chains Bad Lip Reading: Beard With Glue Steely Dan: Doctor Wu (CW: drug abuse and addiction) Fleetwood Mac: Sara Alanis Morissette: The Couch Roxette: You Don't Understand Me George Michael: Shoot the Dog Lee Ritenour, Zamajobe, Tal Winkenfeld, Vinnnie Colaiuta: Maybe Tomorrow Steely Dan: Don't Take Me Alive Supertramp: Dreamer Diana Krall: Black Crow Brian Culbertson, Lee Ritenour: City Lights Moonrise: I Call My Soul Pink Floyd: What Do You Want From Me? Work Of Art: Let Me Dream (Solid 90s soft rock from 2019 :–)) Dave Weckl, Jay Oliver: Apocalypso Pretenders: I'll Stand By You (She can't sing a note and still, somehow, sounds fantastic) Coldplay: Trouble Jennifer Warnes, Stevie Ray Vaughan: First We Take Manhattan Alan Parsons: There Must Be More (CW: suicide) Lonely Robot: In Floral Green (CW: Death) Level 42: She Can't Help Herself (CW: multiple adverse childhood events) Koinonia: Gazoot Phil Collins: Against All Odds Roxette: I Wish I Could Fly Genesis: Duchess The Alan Parsons Project: The Gold Bug Stevie Wonder: Another Star RPWL: Reach For The Sun Brian Culbertson, Eric Marienthal, Steve Lukather: Beautiful Liar Riverside: Conceiving You Peter Gabriel: Waiting For The Big One (CW: alcohol) Travis: Sing Lonely Robot: The Silent Life Tears For Fears: Shout Garbage: Push It Riverside: We Got Used To Us Nik Kershaw: Running Scared Delerium, Kirsty Hawkshaw: Inner Sanctum Lonely Robot: How Bright Is The Sun? Mostly Autumn: The Night Sky Garbage: Hammering In My Head Rush: Between The Wheels Lonely Robot: The Divine Art of Being Steve Lukather: Journey Through Heart: Alone Vixen: Hard 16 (CW: runaway child) Mostly Autumn: The Night Sky (Give it time to warm up) Collage, Steve Rothery: Man In The Middle Pat Metheny Group: First Circle (live) Yes: Rhythm of Love Simon Philips: The Long Road Home Rush: Turn The Page Melissa Etheridge: Secret Agent Aurora, Naimee Coleman: Ordinary World Alanis Morissette: You Oughta Know (CW: Where do I begin? It's Alanis) Steve Lukather: Brody's Joe Bonamassa: Evil Mama Barock Project: The Silence Of Our Wake Melissa Etheridge: Secret Agent Porcupine Tree: Deadwing (CW: loneliness, suicide) Garbage: Sleep Together (CW: sex) Barock Project: Nostradamus Rush: Alien Shore Lonely Robot: Recalibrating Frost*: Numbers (CW: War) Black Star Riders: Charlie I Gotta Go Dream Theater: Space Dye Vest Thunder: It Happened In This Town (CW: Child Abduction) Thunder: Until My Dying Day Frost*: Nice Day For It, cued up with Hypoventilate RPWL: Home Again (CW: death) Dream Theater: Home (CW: multiple dark themes) Porcupine Tree: Arriving Somewhere But Not Here (CW: fratricide) Dream Theater: Line In The Sand Flight 619: Dying Daze (CW: child death) Dream Theater: 6:00 Dream Theater: Erotomania Dream Theater: Caught In A Web

The hard drive in our Panasonic PVR had been failing for a while. Recently, the symptoms had become too bad to ignore. I replaced the hard drive but managed to keep all the programmes. This is what I learnt.

Symptoms of a failing hard drive in a PVR

The symptoms changed every time I used the machine: the machine wouldn't boot; or it booted, but couldn't bring up the programme list; or it brought up the programme list, but couldn't play the chosen programme; or it could play a programme, but playback paused, glitched, halted or looped, especially when I jumped over the adverts.

Familiar hardware

The machine was long out of warranty, so I took a screwdriver to it. When I opened it up, I found a standard Seagate 1TB 3.5” Sata disk. That gave me hope. If the disk had had some weird proprietary interface to resist repair, I'd probably have given up. I whipped out the disk and connected it to a Linux PC via a USB disk cradle, because that was easier than opening up the PC and plumbing the disk in. I could have installed the disk in the machine: that would have worked, and disk I/O would have been a faster.

Verifying the problem

I first needed to verify that the disk was really failing, and that the problem wasn't caused by a software bug in the PVR. I used dd to read and discard all the data off the disk. It failed with a read error after about 200GB. That told me the disk was really in trouble.

The exact dd command I used was

sudo dd if=/dev/sdc of=/dev/null status=progress bs=16M

The phrase if=/dev/sdc told dd where to read from /dev/sdc is the device name that Linux had assigned to the disk when I plugged it in. of=/dev/null told dd to discard the data after reading it; status=progress told dd to report its progress as it went; bs=16M told dd to read and write in big chunks, which generally makes things faster; and sudo ran the command as root, which was necessary because I was reading directly from a disk device.

Reading the data off the old drive

The disk had neither a partition table nor any filesystem that Linux recognised. That prevented me from mounting it and having a look around, which would have been interesting. I assume that Panasonic engineers didn't bother with a conventional filesystem, and just wrote to the disk directly. That would let them use disk space as efficiently as possible, let them control fragmentation, and avoid problems when the disk got really full. (Conventional filesystems slow down when they get too full, and they don't speed up again when you delete files.) That means it wouldn't have been practical to copy raw video files from the disk, even if I'd wanted to (which I didn't).

Instead, I used ddrescue to copy as much data as possible off the disk into a 1TB file on my PC. It took almost three days, but ddrescue managed to retrieve over 99.99% of the data.

The exact ddrescue command I used was

sudo ddrescue -S -d /dev/sdc hd map

The -S switch avoided wasting disk space on any data that ddrescue couldn't salvage. (I didn't know, at that stage, how successful it would be.) -d requested direct reads from the disk, which prevented Linux from amalgamating several consecutive read requests; that might have made ddrescue's clever algorithms less effective. /dev/sdc was the disk device to read from, hd was the name of the 1TB file to write to, and map was the name of the map file, which would have enabled me to restart where I'd left off if I'd had to (let's say) reboot the PC.

The ddrescue manual says:

As ddrescue uses standard library functions to read data from the device being rescued, only mountable device formats can be rescued with ddrescue.

That does not mean that Linux needs to be able to mount the filesystem. It doesn't. That was just as well for me.

More about disk failure

While I waited for ddrescue to run, I had time to notice the way the disk had failed.

Bad blocks weren't distributed evenly across the disk: there were good regions and bad regions. Large parts of the disk were so degraded that they couldn't read more than a few megabytes per second, but they were still readable. Many regions could return only a few KB or tens of KB per second — too slow for video playback — but ddrescue still managed to retrieve the data by persevering.

That had two consequences:

  • My PVR spools data at about 100kb/sec for high-definition programmes, and a fraction of that for standard-definition programmes. So, as you'd expect, SD programmes remained playable more often than HD programmes, because the disk was still (just about) fast enough to play them.
  • Once I'd got the data copied to a new disk, programmes that had been unplayable became playable, because the new disk works at full speed.

Ddrescue's progress is not linear. It assumes that the disk drive is degrading all the time, and so it tries to salvage as much data as possible from the fast regions of the disk and then go back progressively to slower and slower regions, getting less and less return on greater and greater investments of time. You can abort ddrescue at any time and just use what it's managed to retrieve so far, but you get the best results from letting it run to completion.

Picking a replacement disk

Not all 1TB disks have the same capacity (and that's not only because disk manufacturers use a stingy definition of a terabyte). I ran sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc to find the precise number of sectors on the old disk, and then bought a replacement disk with exactly the same number of sectors. It seems likely that a slightly larger disk would have worked, but who knows what goes on in Panasonic's closed-source software? I don't. So I played it as safe as I could. That meant reading spec sheets and getting out a calculator. The new disk cost £21 in early 2024, which was cheaper than I'd dared to hope.

I unplugged the old disk from the USB cradle and plugged in the new one. Once again, Linux named it /dev/sdc. One review claimed that the customer had been sent a used, failing disk rather than a new one, and so I ran sudo smartctl -x /dev/sdc to make sure that the new disk really was new and wasn't riddled with errors. In particular, Power_On_Hours and Reallocated_Sector_Ct were both zero, which was a strong indication that the disk was new.

Copying the data to the new disk

I used dd to write the 1TB file to the new disk:

sudo dd if=hd of=/dev/sdc status=progress bs=16M

The phrase if=hd tells dd to read from the disk file called “hd”; of=/dev/sdc tells it to write to the disk presented at /dev/sdc; status=progress requests regular progress updates; and bs=16M just reads and writes large amounts of data at a time, which makes the process a bit faster. Even so, on my cheap USB cradle, it took about seven hours.

You want to think three times and check everything carefully before pressing Enter on a command like that, because it writes directly to a disk: choose the wrong disk and it'll immediately wipe out the partition table and the first filesystem on the disk. Do not just copy and paste commands from the Internet; make sure you know what they mean, and adjust them as necessary.

I then read the data back from the new disk to make sure it was readable. It was. (I used sudo strings -n 5 /dev/sdc > strings, just out of curiosity, but I could have used diff instead. Strings showed me the names of programs that were on the disk, but also the names of programs we'd watched and deleted — in some cases, years ago. Panasonic, are you leaking metadata?)

Tidying up

I disconnected the new disk from the PC and installed it into the PVR. Everything worked: I got all my programs back, now on a disk that's healthy enough to play them.

I won't just put the old disk in the Weee pile, just in case some crook sells it on as new. I'll either smash it up with a sledgehammer first, so that it can't be read or resold, or give it to a friend who works in QA and might find it useful.

Like many autistic people, I struggle with my digestion. I thought I'd jot down some things that I've found helpful. I'm not a medical professional and I can't give medical advice; before making big changes, please talk to someone who is, and who can. If you're worried, see a doctor. If the behaviour of your digestion changes or you lose weight unexpectedly, you should definitely see a doctor. If a doctor has given you instructions, follow those and ignore me.

My symptoms are diarrhoea, urgency, cramps (which, to me, feel like being squeezed in the nuts), and venomous farting. Even if your symptoms are different, there may be something below that will help you.

Keep a diet and symptom diary

Everyone's triggers will be different. (Mine include chocolate, ginger, tea and coffee (even decaffeinated), mushrooms, beans, leeks, and numerous other fruits and vegatables.) Work out what yours are. One good way that doesn't involve living on melon for a month is to keep a food and symptom diary: jot down what you ate, how much you had, and how your digestion reacted. After a few weeks, go back over it and see if you can spot any patterns. It helps if you have a healthy, varied diet.

Interpreting a food and symptom diary is hard, because * Symptoms can be delayed: for example, chocolate affects me within minutes, but beer doesn't cause problems until the next morning. * Different foods can affect you in different ways, but they can overlap. * There's a dose–response curve. * We don't eat individual ingredients: we eat meals. * Two or three foods that you might have tolerated in moderate quantities can gang up to cause problems if you eat them together. * You don't always know what's in a meal if you didn't prepare it yourself or if you used lots of processed ingredients. * Your digestion can be affected by other factors, such as stress, sleep and hormones. * Your triggers can change over time as your health changes

It's a long, time-consuming, frustrating process, but it's worthwhile.

When trying new foods, try to pick a time when you're alone in the house, or at least alone with a sympathetic partner. It takes the stress out of things.

Manage stress and sleep

Books have been written and courses of therapy given on these points, so I won't belabour this point, except to say that I find small doses of CBD (cannabidiol), taken at night, make life easier. If you shy away from CBD because it's derived from cannabis, or if you can't get it where you are, I've found brewer's yeast or a good B-vitamin complex to be helpful.

As always with supplements, don't overdo it. More is not always better. If you don't see an obvious improvement, stop taking them.

Fibre

Learn the difference between soluble and insoluble fibre, because they have very different effects on your gut. At least in the UK, nutrition labelling is inadequate in that it doesn't distinguish between the two. Spend time with a search engine (I can't find one good page that has all the information you need), and then use trial and error. You will make mistakes, but every one is a learning opportunity.

Loperamide

I've been prescribed Loperamide for my diarrhoea. It doesn't solve everything, but it certainly helps. Loperamide is a drug of abuse, and so, to avoid dependence, I don't usually take it when I'm staying at home.

At the doses I take, Loperamide doesn't cause euphoria or stop me from thinking clearly enough to do my job as a software engineer.

It shouldn't be used for IBS without a doctor's prescription, so don't self-medicate: see a doctor if you think it might help.

Probiotics

I find that probiotics help, especially with farting. Everyone's gut is different, so the brand I take may not help you. If you want to explore this option, you'll want to try several brands, one at a time, for a month or two each, until you find one that helps you. You may need to take the maximum dose for a while in order to get the colony established in your gut, and then find you can cut down a bit to save money, because probiotics aren't cheap.

Curcumin

I find that taking curcumin daily not only eases my sore joints but also helps my digestion. If you want to try it, choose a modern preparation, such as Meriva, BCM-95, CircuWin or Theracumin. Not only will your body absorb these products much better than whole turmeric, but, unlike whole turmeric, they're not contaminated with lead. (I've deliberately linked to a page that contradicts me on this point, because I want you to make up your own mind. I'm not your doctor. I'm not anyone's doctor.)

Curcumin lengthens clotting time (“thins the blood”), so talk to a doctor before trying it, and then take as little as you can get away with. Never take curcumin or turmeric if you're on blood-thinning medication.

Fasting

I use the 5:2 diet to control my weight. For me, that means 24 hours without food, twice a week. When I don't eat, I don't have digestive problems. (Ta-daa!) I'd rather not have to fast to be healthy, but having a day off my IBS is a nice compensation for doing it.

Fasting is natural: for millions of years, we've fasted at night and whenever food was scarce. Constant availability of high-calorie food via electrical refrigeration and jet aircraft is unnatural, and contributes to the obesity epidemic. We evolved to feast in summer and fast in winter; now, for most people in the West, winter never comes.

Nevertheless, there are some people who shouldn't fast: * Children * Women of childbearing age * Anyone who's ever had an eating disorder * Anyone who's been told by a doctor not to fast, or who has a medical condition that could make fasting dangerous

Vitamin D

Like many autists, I'm short of vitamin D. I find that topping it up with supplements takes the edge off my bad digestion. However, I'm in the minority: a study run by Sheffield University found that most IBS sufferers don't benefit from Vitamin D.

If you try it, don't overdose. If you're considering large doses, get your vitamin D levels checked first, maybe at the end of the summer (when they should be high) and again at the end of the winter (when they'll be lower).

My employer has given me a new laptop to plug into my home network. Here's what I know is running on it (so far). These are rough notes, not a polished essay.

Arctic Wolf

Scans all sorts:

  • Geo-location of the machine, meaning that it tries to snoop on your location whenever the machine is turned on (though, as I write this, GeoIP places me 185 miles' drive away, so the company would be well advised to ignore it)
  • Installed software
  • Wi-Fi networks both available and in use (so it knows where you are and who else is there with you, if other people have the same spyware installed)
  • ARP table (so it sees every machine on the network, including those belonging to your spouse, under-aged children and any visitors who use your Wi-Fi)
  • Windows event logs
  • Process table (so it sees every program you run)
  • SSL certificates
  • Network configuration
  • Installed patches
  • System configurations (too vague to be informative)

https://www.vlcm.com/arctic-wolf https://arcticwolf.com/uk/solutions/agent/

SentinelOne

  • Process Creation, termination and exit (so it sees every program you run, and when it starts and stops)
  • File Creation (it sees every document you write, even if you delete it afterwards, but also every temporary file created by every program you run, such as your browser)
  • File Modification (it watches you work on documents)
  • File Deletion
  • File Rename
  • DNS (it sees the name of every Internet host you connect to and every Web site you visit)
  • TCPv4 Connection (it sees every Web page you visit, but also every time you download email from your ISP or connect to a machine on your home network)
  • TCPv4 Listen (you shouldn't run any kind of server on a work machine. If you do, though, and if your home PC connects to it, SentinelOne will know. Who knows what Windows does in the background?)
  • HTTP Request (again, every Web page you visit, every picture on every page, and every advertising and tracking request if you've not got round to blocking those yet)
  • Login and logout (beware the person who believes that you're not working when you're not logged on)
  • Registry Key Creation (every time any software touches the registry, SentinelOne will see what it does)
  • Registry Key Rename
  • Registry Key Delete
  • Registry Key Export
  • Registry Key Security Changed
  • Registry Value Creation
  • Registry Value Modified
  • Registry Value Delete
  • Registry Key Import
  • Scheduled Task Register
  • Scheduled Task Update
  • Scheduled Task Delete
  • Scheduled Task Start
  • Scheduled Task Trigger

SentinelOne conducts man-in-the-middle attacks against encryption by, for example, installing browser plugins that the user can't disable or remove. If you log into any server on a system running SentinelOne, you should assume that the company has the password. If you type in a credit card number or home banking credentials, you should assume the company has them.

https://www.sentinelone.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/SentinelOne_Deep_Visibility_Overview.pdf

S1 also logs vaguely-named things such as “behavioural indicators”, “cross process” (is this another name for IPC?) and command scripts, and can do a full disk scan. It claims to be able to detect malware that attackers have masked.

https://johntuckner.me/posts/sentinelone-deep-visibility-export https://www.sentinelone.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/SentinelOne-IR-Handbook.pdf (page 12)

A facility called Singularity Ranger (on page 36 of the manual) crawls all over your network and reports on every device it finds, whether it belongs to work, you, or anyone else. It can run either actively (by sending packets and seeing who responds) or passively (by just watching packets as they flow across your network), so its activity may not show up on a packet capture.

https://www.sentinelone.com/platform/singularity-ranger/

There's a script library that can gather even more information and perform remote code execution on a computer: see page 36 of the manual. Remote code execution is an obvious risk in the wrong hands, or if a compromised machine sends instructions to your laptop.

SentinelOne is planning to add the ability to retrieve a memory dump (again, see p.36 of the manual). This will enable it to see documents you've typed but never saved, text you've entered into Web forms but not submitted, and perhaps passwords saved in memory by poorly written programs.

SentinelOne is so intrusive that, when I build code, SentinelOne uses up the entire house's outgoing bandwidth, just reporting back on what I'm doing. In fact, it keeps sending data at line rate for several minutes after I stop building, because my domestic Internet connection can't keep up with the volume of data that SentinelOne sends.

FortiClient

This is the client to the work VPN, but it does a lot of surveillance as well.

Code42

Code42 offers a backup product and also a surveillance product called Incydr. I believe my laptop has only the backup product, but presumably some computers in other companies are running Incydr. (Someone must be buying it.)

Incydr is clearly designed to protect the company from its own employees. It seems to be mostly file-based: creation, modification, deletion, movement of files, as well as copying to removable media or transferring to email or the cloud.

https://www.code42.com/resources/white-papers/how-incydr-works-a-technical-overview-of-the-incydr-product-architecture

I've just bought a PineTime smartwatch to use with my Fairphone 4. This is my first smartwatch, for reasons that will become clear, so I can't compare it with other watches. Nevertheless, here are my early impressions.

Buying PineTime in the UK

PineTime comes in two forms: sealed is the form you wear every day, and unsealed gives you access to the internals, which is useful if you want to write software for it. You can also buy a kit containing both.

There's no UK store: you have to order from China. To keep costs down, I chose standard delivery, and the watch took about four weeks to get here. Bear that in mind if you're buying one as a present. On the bright side, the cost was easily below the £135 threshold at which I'd have had to pay import duty.

Unboxing

The box is sturdy, but not flashy, exactly as you'd hope.

There's a leaflet that seems to be some kind of user manual, but the print is far too small to read, so I don't know what it says. Really, why do companies do this? Just put the user manual on the Web and print the address, nice and large, on the box.

There's a second leaflet, printed in a more reasonable font, advising the user to upgrade the software on the watch. The link given in the leaflet was out of date but, after a few minutes' searching, and in a move to irk mathematicians everywhere, I used Gadgetbridge to upgrade from 1.6 to 1.11.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Linking to a smartphone

The reason I bought a PineTime — and the reason you should consider one, too — is that it works with Gadgetbridge on Android. (For Apple users, there's also InfiniLink.) Most smart watches come with apps that upload your location and health data to the cloud (i.e. someone else's computer), and then you completely lose control over it. Gadgetbridge is open source and cloudless: your data stays on the phone.

Gadgetbridge works with some other watches, too, but PineTime is designed for it. Most other smartwatches use protocols that the Gadgetbridge team has had to reverse-engineer. Maliciously or accidentally, future software updates may break compatibility with Gadgetbridge at any time, forcing you to upload your intimate data to the manufacturer's server or go without; with PineTime, that won't happen.

Gadgetbridge has the following uses:

  • It automatically sets the time and date on the watch and keeps them accurate.
  • You can use it to download updated firmware to the watch. The operating system, modestly called InfiniTime, is under active development, and each release brings new goodies, so it's worth keeping up-to-date.
  • It can show you your last few days' step counts, whereas the watch keeps the data for only one day.
  • It sends Android notifications to the watch, which vibrates and displays them on the screen. (You can't interact with them other than by reading and dismissing them on the watch. You can't, for example, reply to a text message or a Signal message.) You can easily disable this feature with a few taps on the watch screen when you need to focus.
  • You can use the watch to control music playing on the phone: previous track, play/pause, next track. If you're using Spotify, that means you can use the watch to control music playing on your computer, even though there's no direct link between them.

Unfortunately, it's hard to pair up the watch to the phone and, when the two devices lose contact, they often don't reconnect automatically. When that happens, getting them to talk again takes several minutes of random smartphone prodding and swiping until suddenly, and without explanation, everything starts working again.

Although Gadgetbridge can display sleep graphs, it seems not to work with PineTime. It just tells me I was constantly active and never slept. Sleep As Android claims limited integration with PineTime, but I've not tried it. Sleep Cycle, which I do use, won't integrate with PineTime or any other watch.

Display

There's a choice of four watch faces (six, once a future release of Gadgetbridge gains the ability to download a new kind of resource file to the watch).

The watch display always comes on when you press the button. You can configure it also to come on in response to a single or double tap on the screen and/or when you raise your wrist to look at the watch (which works well, and is useful when your hands are dirty or wet). There are three brightness levels, which are, respectively, well judged for indoors at night, indoors during the day, and outdoors in the sun. There's also a quick-access night-mode setting that disables all notifications and prevents the screen from waking up unless you press the button.

Swiping right on the watch face takes you to four icons: display brightness, watch, notification toggle/night mode, and other settings.

Swiping up on the watch face takes you to a couple of pages of apps: various stopwatch and timer apps; footstep count; heart rate monitor; music controls; a simple scribble app; a couple of games (pong and 2048); an app for watching the accelerometer; a haptic metronome; and a navigation app that I've not worked out yet.

Swiping down on the watch face displays notifications mirrored from your phone, which you can dismiss from the watch (though not the phone) by swiping them right.

Step-counting

If you're walking purposefully, step-counting is very accurate, even if you're carrying a large, heavy object in both arms. If you're doing chores around the house — laying the table, emptying the bins — then it's not. If the watch detects fewer than 20 steps per minute, it doesn't record them at all. (You can change this threshold in Gadgetbridge.) If you're taking a few steps, stopping, taking a few more, and so on, then the watch can easily record twice as many steps as you actually take.

Putting on a tee-shirt and collared shirt adds about 35 steps to the tally. That's the easiest exercise I've ever done. :–)

But none of this matters to me. I bought this watch just as a reminder to keep active as autumn set in. That doesn't require a step-count accurate to four significant figures.

Only one of the four available watch faces is readable and displays step count, so that's the one I use.

Heart rate

PineTime has a heart rate monitor, which uses a bright green LED on the bottom of the watch. Unless you're in the heart rate app, the monitor doesn't run all the time, and Gadgetbridge can't display a graph of your HR throughout the day. However, if the HR monitor is enabled, the watch measures and displays your HR every time the screen comes on. This process takes a few seconds.

Battery life

I have the display set to the lower brightness levels, mostly, and to power off after 15 seconds, but I've also configured it to come on with a wrist-raise, which means it often comes on when I don't need it to. I leave the HR monitor disabled.

With these settings, it looks as if one charge will last about a week. Of course, using the HR monitor and making the screen brighter would shorten battery life. I don't believe the battery is changeable, so, after a certain number of charge/discharge cycles, you'll be in the market for a new watch.

Charging uses a cup that clips magnetically to the base of the watch and has a USB-A connector. Don't lose it. The watch doesn't come with a charger, but yet another USB charger is not high on most people's list of needs.

Strap

I'm averagely hairy for a man in late middle age (ugh, sorry, you didn't need to know that), and the strap often tugs at my wrist hairs. I'll replace it if I keep using the watch.

All electrical energy eventually gets converted to heat. To economise effectively, you need to find appliances that make lots of heat and either turn them down or use them less. Everything else flows from this.

This is why old-fashioned halogen and tungsten lamps were more expensive to use than modern LED bulbs: they made more waste heat and they therefore ran hotter. You paid for that heat, even if you didn't want it.

Watts, kilowatts, watt-hours — what?

The rate at which an appliance uses electricity is measured in watts (abbreviated as 'W'). You might, for example, have a 7W LED bulb. From 1000W onwards, we use kilowatts (kW), where 1kW = 1000W.

The total amount of energy used is measured in watt-hours (abbreviated as 'Wh'). Turn on your 7W bulb for two hours and you'll use 14Wh. For larger amounts, we use kilowatt-hours (kWh), where 1kWh = 1000Wh.

Kilowatt-hours are the unit of energy that your electricity company bills you for. In the UK, as of October 2022, 1kWh of electricity costs about £0.34. If you use 10kWh of electricity on a given day, you'll pay £3.40 for it. (There'll also be a standing charge, which is often about 40p a day.)

Some examples

With that out of the way, we can talk about typical household appliances.

Let's start with kettles. A kettle runs at high power (typically 2kW or 3kW), but it doesn't run for long, especially if you only boil one mug of water. Suppose it runs at 2kW but switches off after 3 minutes, which is 0.05 hours. The amount of energy it uses is 2kW * 0.05 hours = 0.1kWh, which will cost about 3p. So you can enjoy a cup of tea without guilt, as long as you don't boil more water than you need.

An electric iron runs at a slightly lower power than a kettle — typically 1kW to 2kW — but it runs for longer, and so it costs you more. A 1.2kW iron used for 1½ hours uses 1.2kW x 1.5h = 1.8kWh, and (at October 2022 prices) that'll cost you about 60p. Actually, it's less bad than that, because irons are thermostatically controlled — the heating element comes on when iron is too cool and throws off when it's warm enough. Running it as cool as possible (without reducing its effectiveness) will save money.

A computer uses more energy when it's working harder. Turn it off or suspend it when you're not using it, close programs you're not using, and use uBlock Origin and/or Pi-Hole to avoid wasting processor power on adverts and trackers. (You'll also save Internet bandwidth and improve privacy.)

Laptops use less power than desktops, because laptops have to be able to run on batteries. You pay in other ways — initial price, longevity, performance, keyboard, mouse, screen, repairability, upgradability — but they do at least use less electricity.

Washing machines use more power than you think: they heat water, but they pour it down the drain, so you aren't aware of the heat. Mine draws more than 2kW while it's heating water, much like a kettle. To save money, wash at the lowest temperature that gets your clothes clean, don't run a half-empty machine, and try to wash on warm days, when the water coming into your house is warmer and needs less heating.

(For some off-topic savings, experiment with using less detergent, see if supermarket own brands are as effective as the big names, use limescale remover to keep the heating element efficient, and don't use fabric conditioner. Some people find it helpful to replace fabric conditioner with vinegar, but I don't even use that.)

Tumble dryers and ovens warm up the whole room. They obviously draw a lot of power. Use them as little as possible. (I tumble-dry towels for 20 minutes before hanging them, because Mrs Wife insists on it. Everything else gets air-dried.)

TVs and Hi-Fi use a medium amount of energy. The bigger the screen, the more power-hungry a TV is. Turn these things off when you're not using them. If you have the option of watching the programme you want via an app on the TV rather than powering up a set-top box, that may save a few watts. (Or possibly not, if it means powering up more circuitry inside the TV.)

Older TVs drew a lot of power if you turned them off using the remote control, but modern ones don't. Advice to turn the TV off at the wall is outdated unless your TV is ancient.

When in doubt, measure.

Fridges and freezers run at a reasonably low power, but they're always on, and so they use a fair amount of energy each day. To save money, move them away from heat sources (such as cookers), keep them defrosted, and keep the radiator at the back of the unit clean and unobstructed. This way, the compressor will be able to shift heat efficiently, and won't need to run for so many hours every day. Anyone who stands with the freezer door open while holding a long conversation deserves to be shouted at.

Your boiler and central heating system both use electrical power, even if their main source of power is gas or oil. (Your central heating system pushes water round the house using an electric pump, which typically draws several hundred watts.) Insulate the house where it's practical, don't heat rooms you're not using, and turn off the heating altogether whenever you can. It is not more efficient to leave the heating on when you leave the house: a warm house loses more heat per minute than a cool house, so let it cool down while you're out and then warm it up again when you come in.

A surprising number of appliances draw energy even when they're apparently turned off. I understand why our hi-fi does it — it's waiting for me to wake it up it using Spotify — but why does the washing machine use 3W, all day, every day? I have no idea. 3W doesn't sound like much, but it works out at 1kWh every fortnight, or 25kWh a year. That's real money. Consider borrowing a power-measurement plug and turning things off at the wall if they waste electricity like this.

We've already talked about lighting. Use LEDs or (at a pinch) compact fluorescents, not tungsten or halogen bulbs. People think halogen bulbs don't take much power because they run at low voltage, but that's a myth. Voltage and power are not the same thing.

If you have an electric or induction cooker, try to boil water in the kettle rather than on the cooker: it's more efficient. When using the hob, put lids on your saucepans and turn them down a bit. Where possible, use a pressure cooker. People think you have to boil pasta with lashings of water at a rolling boil and with no lid, but you don't. (Mind, I wouldn't cook it in a pressure cooker, either. :–)) You can just bring it to the boil, cut the power, perhaps cover the pan with an old cloth, and wait for it to cook.

You can tell that charging a phone doesn't take much electricity, because the phone and the charger are small and they don't get very hot. (When you're looking at battery chargers, you need to include the heat that the device makes when you're using it, not just when you're charging it, but phones don't make much heat when you use them, either. If they did, they'd burn your hand.) Do unplug idle chargers for safety reasons and to prolong the life of the phone the battery, but don't expect to save much money.

Similarly, an ADSL router doesn't make much heat, and so you know it's cheap to run. You should leave it powered on all the time: if you keep turning it off, your ISP will think that the line is bad, and will fall back to a lower speed. (Don't panic if you've been doing this: just leave the router turned on, and it'll fall forward again within a few days.)

A UPS can be surprisingly inefficient. Does it get warm and stay warm, even when all the devices it powers are turned off? Measure it, work out what it's costing you each year, and consider replacing it with a more efficient model next time its battery fails. (A simple worked example: there are just under 9,000 hours in a year. So a UPS that draws 10W on idle, even when the battery is charged, wastes 90kWh per year. That costs about £30 per year at October 2022 prices. I have one cheap UPS that does even worse than this. It's on its second battery now, but that'll be its last.) Oh — when buying a UPS, as well as looking at idle power, check that the battery can be replaced: they don't last as long as you'd hope. If you already have a failed UPS battery and the manufacturer says it can't be replaced, check YouTube: it can often be done.

Other thoughts

People say great things about smart meters with in-house displays (IHDs), but I don't think they're that useful. So many things come on and off automatically — fridge, freezer, central heating, security lights — that using an IHD for accurate measurements is impossible, even if you're the only person in the house. I would resort to an IHD to measure a hard-wired high-power appliance such as an oven or hob, where there was no 13-amp socket and I couldn't use a power-measurement plug.

Generally, when buying new stuff, look at energy efficiency ratings and be prepared to pay a bit more for frugal appliances if you think it'll save money in the long run.

The UK's National Grid has promised a rebate scheme, starting on 1st November 2022, for households that shift energy use away from peak hours. You probably need a smart meter to benefit. If you can, make the most of it.

I have limited bandwidth at home: one ADSL connection, shared among several computers, phones, tablets and other devices. Here's the FreeRDP command I use to connect my Linux PC at home to my Windows box at work:

xfreerdp /u:UUU /d:DDD /v:MMM /clipboard /workarea /bpp:8 /dynamic-resolution -wallpaper +fonts -themes +bitmap-cache +glyph-cache +offscreen-cache /rfx /compression /compression-level:2 /codec-cache:rfx /codec-cache:nsc /codec-cache:jpeg -decorations /gfx:RFX /gfx-progressive

Replace – UUU with your username – DDD with your Windows domain name – MMM with the name or IP address of the remote machine

I find that this gives me a display that looks good enough for coding or email, but my session is responsive and doesn't use much bandwidth, even with two 2560x1440 monitors.

In my experience, you don't need much bandwidth to use RDP like this: what you need is low latency (low ping times). You can achieve that by placing a little Linux box between your router and your network, and using Linux's excellent network traffic shaping. (I get excellent results from the Cake sheduler, but you can get really fancy and prioritise some traffic over other traffic if you use another scheduler and configure it carefully enough.)

It's also important to use Pi-Hole, uBlock Origin, Blokada and perhaps other content filters to ensure that your scarce bandwidth is being used for your RDP session and not for creepy surveillance and advertising.

A guide for people who don't understand electricity

Theory

This section is the hardest. If you can understand this, the rest is easy.

An electrical device uses electricity at a rate that's measured in watts (abbreviated as W). Watts are one of those odd units — like the nautical unit, the knot — which express a rate, but don't have per in their names. The higher the number of watts, the faster the device burns electricity. For example, an 8W LED bulb uses less energy than the 60W incandescent bulb it replaces.

For high-power devices, we use kilowatts (kW). One kilowatt is the same as a thousand watts. A 3kW kettle is the same as a 3000W kettle.

The total amount of energy used by a device is measured in watt-hours (Wh) or kilowatt-hours (kWh). Unsurprisingly, one kilowatt-hour equals a thousand watt-hours. Typically, your electricity company will bill you by the kilowatt-hour: each kWh will cost you a certain amount of money. You should be able to find the price by looking at your electricity bill, your electricity meter, or your supplier's Web site.

To calculate the total amount of energy used, you multiply the power of the device (in watts or kilowatts) by the length of time for which it was switched on (in hours). For example, an 8W LED bulb switched on for three hours burns 24Wh. A 1.2kWh fan heater that runs constantly for two hours burns 2.4kWh.

Should I replace my freezer?

Modern freezers use less electricity than older ones. If your freezer is very old, it may use so much electricity that you'd save money (over time) by replacing it. To make this decision, you need to know four things:

  • How many kilowatt-hours your current freezer uses in a year
  • How many kilowatt-hours a new freezer would use over the same period
  • How much you pay for a kilowatt-hour of electricity
  • What a new freezer would cost to buy

How much electricity does my current freezer use?

There are fairly cheap plugs that measure electricity consumption (both instantaneous consumpsion, in kilowatts, and total consumption, in kilowatt-hours). They sit between the mains socket and the device you want to measure. If you can get hold of a power-measurement plug, it's easy. Plug it in, make a note of the exact time and date, wait a few days, see how many kWh have been used, and then scale up to a year. (For example, if you measured for exactly a week, multiply the weekly figure by 52 to get an annual figure, because there are 52 weeks in a year.)

If you don't have access to a power-measurement plug, you'll need to do a little more work. Look in the freezer's instruction manual, on the Web, or perhaps on a little plate on the freezer itself, to see how much power it draws (in watts). Then estimate the proportion of the time for which the motor is running. One way to do this is to plan 20 times at which you'll go to the freezer over the course of a week (at different times of the day and evening) and see whether the motor is running or not. Write down the times and dates beforehand in a notebook, and put a tick or a cross by each entry when the time comes. If the motor is running 7 times out of 20 then that's about 35% of the time, so the average power consumption is 35% of the number in the instruction manual. For example, if the freezer has a 250W motor that's running 35% of the time, its average power is about 88W. Multiply that by the number of hours in a year (which is about 8760) and you'll see how many kilowatt-hours the freezer burns in a year (in our example, about 771kWh per year). You may want to reduce this figure slightly if the house is substantially warmer when you're at home than when you're out, since you won't be checking the motor when you're out.

If possible, make your measurements in the spring or autumn. If you do it in the summer, you'll slightly over-estimate the amount of energy used; if you do it in the winter, you'll slightly under-estimate.

How much does my freezer cost me to run?

This is where you need to know the price you're paying for electricity in pounds (or dollars or whatever) per kWh. Multiply this price by the number of kWh you found in the previous section and you'll know the cost of running the freezer for a year. For example, if you estimate that your freezer uses 771kWh per year and you're paying £0.52/kWh, you'll discover (sit down, please) that your freezer costs about £400 per year to run.

What would a new freezer cost to buy and to run?

Visit any white-goods shop on the Web. Find some freezers of the same size as yours. Look at the spec sheets. They should tell you how many kWh per year each freezer uses. Being cynical, I'd add 50% to the quoted values because they're bound to have been measured in ideal conditions that don't reflect real life. (You know — because marketing.)

Suppose the new freezer quotes 250kWh per year, and you're paying £0.52 per kWh. The cost of running it for a year is 250 * 1.5 * £0.52 = £195. Increase or decrease that 1.5 figure if you're more or less cynical than I am.

The purchase cost of a new freezer is right there on the Web site. Remember to add tax and the cost of delivery of the new freezer and disposal of the old one.

So should I or shouldn't I?

That depends on how fast a new freezer would pay for itself, whether you think electricity prices are likely to rise or fall in that time, whether you have the money for a replacement, and how much life you think is left in your old freezer. I can't give you a yes or no answer, but at least you now have enough information to make the decision.