November 17, 2008 at 8:38 am · Filed under Stuff
People often ask me “Sara, why do you use Linux? Are you just a pretentious wanna-be geek trying to play with the big kids — or do you have a good reason?”
(Really, it’s a common question.)
I try to give them good answers, personalized depending on the questioner. I try, but usually fail.
So instead of explaining why with a lot of boring words, I’m just going to start showing pictures.
Back story: I was installing software (meta: and this is exactly why I was installing it in the first place!) on all the computer lab machines, so I was using my USB drive to move the installation file from computer to computer. Simple enough, yes? There were 10 computers total. When I started, I had one file on a recently-cleaned USB drive. When I finished, this is what I had instead. I feel dirty just touching the thing. Ew.
(And yes I took a screenshot just to show a text list. Ha.)
April 14, 2008 at 12:15 am · Filed under Stuff
Because I’m taking my laptop with me to Ghana, I’ve been a bit obsessive lately about optimal performance on everything related to my computer use. I don’t know how often I’ll be using my laptop, and I’m not sure about the access I’ll have to electricity. So from endlessly tweaking the blog here to decreasing boot times to scripting things that will be done most often (copying & organizing photos, for example) - my goal is to get everything as quick, painless, and least-power-consumptive as possible.
With that in mind, the following link is seriously awesome:
http://www.lesswatts.org
Software: PowerTOP. [Linux only.]
I’ve been having trouble identifying what processes, exactly, are eating away at my battery life. Aside from knowing my graphics processing is (intentionally) FUBAR’d when I’m running Compiz, I wasn’t sure what was going on behind the scenes that could affect power consumption. I haven’t spent much time on this little utility yet, but from what I’ve read it has the potential to be my next best friend. I thought I’d share it with the few of you who have laptops running Linux 2.6.21+ kernels on Intel chipsets (that’s not really a specialized demographic at all, right?!).
