Useful Linkspam

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?!).

Show & Tell

(I’ve only ever participated in one “real” Show & Tell, which I just thought of at this minute. I was in kindergarten. I took a baby chick. In a coffee can, with air holes and grass. Wow.)

Moving on…

Yesterday I finally got my new computer to completely accept Compiz’s 3D goodness. Considering my lack of experience (and my blacklisted graphics card), this was no small feat. Likewise, this makes me happy to no end, and so I felt like showing off.

Screenshot number uno
- XP (virtual machine)
- Gimp (screenshot goodness)
- Amarok (music)
Various random windows. The Virtualbox is running in seamless mode but cube rotation works just as well with it as a fullscreened virtual OS.

Screenshot the second
- Same as above, plus Amarok running visualizations at full size. Jagged edges just beginning to show up in the screenshot; CPU maxed out at 50% usage.

Anyway. That was my last rainy day slow day at work project for the new toy, so now I’m not sure what to mess around with next.

Housekeeping

It’s funny how things get lost in our closets; how our stuff keeps on piling up, until it obscures all the other stuff that makes up our past.

It’s also funny how this very same thing can (will, does) occur digitally. The computer I use right now is old, ugly, and clunky — but thanks to spare-part-gankage, still does what I need her to do. Back in the day I paid for a machine with Windows 98 installed and a “free upgrade to XP in the fall,” which gives you an idea of age. At the moment she’s running Ubuntu 7.04 + Windows XP, but the drives currently inside have been wiped clean time and time again. Nothing much stays the same, and I’m constantly redecorating. I don’t even bother with fullscale backup anymore, as the only files deemed important already exist in multiple forms (papers/projects/photographs all twice-and-thrice recorded). So over the years I’ve completely forgotten about a box in my closet partition on a secondary drive that holds all sorts of old junk.

Holy crap. The dates start around 2001. I found essays that were written when I was a painfully young high schooler; I find myself going “dude. I wrote that?”, in more tones than one. I found pictures I’ve forgotten I’d taken of people I’ve forgotten I’d known. And I found a folder (”websites-old”) that actually made me laugh.

So much of that folder is “wow-that’s-so-1990s”, but there’s still a lot that surprises me. Back in the day I kept various blogs, and I’d never heard of wordpress. MovableType was still some vague, nebulous unheard-of. Greymatter was new but too much to wrap my brain around. So I did everything by hand. A lot of my laughs and groans this afternoon come from looking at that code (proof that homeschoolers really DO have too much time on their hands?), but some of it’s pretty good. A lot of the css+gimp creativity makes me happy - not zengarden worthy by any standards, but better than I could do now.

Old closets are funny, but bittersweet. College has killed whatever writing talents I used to possess. Lack of necessity, and maybe desire too, has stifled whatever creativity I used to employ. Things I used to care about have been shoved to the side, and anything left has been flattened. Oh, there’s plenty in the dust that I’m glad to have abandoned — but a lot that I kind of miss.

I think what bothers me most is that I seem to have stopped thinking and only continue to exist out of habit.