Last summer I wrote up Octopus Agile Prices For Linux, a small GTK app to show the current Octopus Agile electricity price and the next day of half-hourly rates. It did one thing, which is a good number of things for a desktop utility to do.

Since then the app has become a bit less narrow. But it now does enough more that the launch post undersells it, and in a couple of places sends people looking for the wrong name.

USB-C is excellent, provided you don’t look too closely.

I’ve been seeing a drum beat of interest in the internals of USB-C. Darryl Morley’s macOS WhatCable, Chromebooks exposing lots of lovely info about emarkers, USB cable testers and a bit more. Very infrastructure club topics. So I made a small GTK app also called WhatCable which is intended to show what Linux knows about your USB ports, cables, chargers and devices, but written as a GNOME/libadwaita app and using the interfaces Linux exposes through sysfs.

I’m on the Octopus Agile electricity tariff, where the price changes every half hour based on wholesale costs. This is great for saving money and using less carbon intensive energy, provided you can shift your heavy usage to cheaper times. With a family that insists on eating at a normal hour, that mostly means scheduling the dishwasher and washing machine.

The snag was not having an easy way to see upcoming prices on my Linux laptop. To scratch that itch, I built a small GTK app: Octopus Agile Energy. You can use it yourself if you’re in the UK and have this electricity tarriff. Either install it directly from Flathub or download the source code and ‘press play’ in GNOME Builder. The app is heavily inspired by the excellent Octopus Compare for mobile but I stripped the concept back to a single job: what’s the price now and for the next 24 hours? This felt right for a simple desktop utility and was achievable with a bit of JSON parsing and some hand waving.

Endless have recently released the first beta of the 3.8 series for their Linux based operating system. As someone who used to work there in product, and is still friends with a number of Endless-ers I upgraded my personal machine and checked it out. This is a “trip report” of my notes and may be a little bitty but I hope it’s useful feedback for the developers and designers and maybe encourages a few other people to give Endless a go.

I was lucky enough to be sponsored by the GNOME Foundation to attend the 2019 Linux Application Summit, hosted in Barcelona between November 12th and 15th 2019.

It was a great conference with a diverse crew of people who all care about making apps on Linux better. I particularly enjoyed Frank’s keynote on Linux apps from the perspective of Nextcloud, an Actual ISV. Also worth your time is Rob’s talk on how Flathub would like to help more developers earn money from their work; Adrien on GTK and scalable UIs for phones; Robin on tone of voice and copywriting; Emel on Product Management in the context of GNOME Recipes and Paul Brown on direct language and better communication. There were also great lightning talks including a starring turn by one of my former colleagues Martin Abente Lahaye who showed off the work he’s been doing to make the Sugar educational applications more widely available with Flatpak. After a bit of review and some polish in the cafe they’re now starting to appear on Flathub. All of these videos are available to watch in the YouTube livestream playback, and I’m sure individually soon when appropriately processed.