April 9th, 2008 admin
We’re getting into summer in the Philippines, and I was just worrying how hot my Thinkpad R51e was running. Its 32 degrees in the room, and my CPU is running at a consistent 73 degrees, according to
cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/temperature
which seems a bit unhealthy. My motherboard fried itself twice last year, and I figure that might have had something to do with it.
Anyway, I started casting around for things to reduce the power consumption, and found this powertop utility, apparently developed by Intel. (http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/) You can download it and install it from the site, but I just did a quick
sudo apt-get install powertop
and that seemed to work pretty well. When you run it (with sudo powertop), it reports all the things that are keeping your CPU awake and suggests a few things you can do to consume less power. Even better it will make these changes for you, if you press the appropriate letter on the keyboard.
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April 4th, 2008 admin
There are some tasks which are just right for Friday afternoon. I’ve got a to-do list with a number of urgent items on it, but none of them seem very appealing on a Friday afternoon. Especially when there’s a holiday Monday coming up. So of course I not only chose a non-essential item to spend my energies on this afternoon; I chose one which wasn’t even on my to-do list.
My calendar in Thunderbird has been bothering me lately. I like to keep all my appointments in it from when I first started using an electronic diary, which is now quite a few years’ worth. This makes Thunderbird very unhappy, as it struggles to index and display all the events every time you use the Add-in Calendar (Lightning). Chug chug chug.
And there’s another problem. I have an online synchronising service, the excellent Scheduleworld (http://www.scheduleworld.com/) with which I synchronise regularly. While it normally only syncs the events which have changed, Thunderbird will occasionally decide that it really must sync Everything, which it subsequently does. This takes it about 15 minutes, during which time I can’t do much with my computer. Read the rest of this entry »
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