Disclaimer: This article isn’t useful, it’s just interesting!

Did the title leave you bewildered?

Mahesh’s recent email started with a similar disclaimer: “This email isn’t useful; it’s just interesting.” The next thing I know, I am gulping down every word of it even though I wasn’t aware of terms like __MACOSX, RAN WG1, etc. Why? It was interesting, and you don’t have to believe me. Read his email here, and you’ll find an interesting MacBook fact that no one has ever noticed.

SUB: Which laptops do 3GPP delegates use?

(This email isn’t useful, it’s just interesting.)

Last week I was updating our 3GPP database and for that I was processing files submitted in recent 3GPP meetings.

I saw that while processing some of the 3GPP zip files, my code was throwing an error.

I investigated and found that the zip files which were causing the error all had a special folder in them named __MACOSX.

I searched about this folder and found that it is automatically included in every zip file that is created on a Macbook. This folder contains some metadata which we don’t need. So I updated the script to ignore this folder.

But I thought it would be interesting to see what fraction of 3GPP proposals are created on Macbooks, as opposed to Windows that used to be the default until a few years back. And I found an interesting MacBook fact!

Here is the trend in RAN WG1 meetings: the fraction of 3GPP delegates using MacBook have increased 10x in last 5 years.

Best regards,

Mahesh

Interesting figures, right!

I have always known these files as supporting documents, so I researched to see what else could be extracted from these files. To my surprise, document metadata contains a wealth of information about the document’s life. Including the file path, original author, the original creation date, the date it was last printed, the date it was last saved and who saved it, the editing time, and even the computer on which the document was created. It’s crazy how we can find so much information from something we often find unuseful. After all, no knowledge is ever wasted; at GreyB, it always enriches our lives. 🙂