ave you ever wondered how to extend the lifetime of your battery? Or perhaps reduce the electricity consumption at your home? Shutting off the machine is not the only option, as the remainder of this item explains with particular emphasis on state-preserving energy-saving schemes.

Most idle computers enter the screen saver mode after a certain, pre-defined period of time (some readers will prefer “screensaver” as one word, like “screenshot”) . Screen savers are by large the default and most common scheme, but it does not preserve much energy. As a matter of fact, with some of today’s screen savers, even more power is consumed when they are run. Resource-hogging screen savers, which make use of hardware acceleration, are among the most poplar too. Call it office vanity if you like, but that is an issue for another day.

At the end of the previous decade we began to see monitors that were more energy-efficient and environmentally-friendly. They supported auto-shutoff schemes and consumed less electricity than predecessors even though their size grew. With today’s TFT screens, things continue to improve.

Laptop sales in the States exceeded sales of desktop last year, so they are definitely here to stay (and expand). Due to the nature of laptops and their pricy batteries, energy saving in laptops is worth greater attention.

Stand-by mode is a popular energy saving scheme, which results in an idle system state, but the user would be killing off expensive batteries by opting for stand-by. The big pro is the quick wake-up time. You will frequently be advised not to use stand-by mode unless you leave your laptop connected to the socket or return shortly. With stand-by as standard, you will opt for data retention on RAM, which uses up power. Come back after a few days, and your battery might be flat. Sources I can recall claim that a battery in the body of the laptop never benefits, even if the laptop is bound to a source of electricity. Then fluctuation between 90% and 100% battery capacity also appears to be unhealthy.

As opposed to stand-by, another scheme exists which is called hibernation. Hibernation will mirror the memory and place it on non-volatile magnetic storage device — the hard drive. Maintenance of laptop batteries sums up as a whole ‘bible’ on its own and will not be discussed further for the time being. Overall, battery drainage depends on memory, laptop’s architecture, O/S and battery’s capacity (or type). The user can experiment to determine the battery’s lifetime. However, such a curious user often assumes that the battery meter shows depletion linearly, which is rare.

Also worth mentioning are mechanisms by which hard-drive rotation stops whenever operations involving the disk appear unnecessary. Moreover, there are schemes such as the lowering brightness (laptops and PDA‘s in particular), which is also a phase that is invoked automatically. When the user presses no key (or taps the screen) for some period of time, brightness (or backlight) is significantly lowered.

Lower consumption of power in desktop computer does not just cut the bill, but also has positive effects on our environment. This argument is boosted particularly today as we hear about global warming and its impact in Siberia. In terms of security, switching off of our computers has often been advised to Windows users, who are exposed to more attacking attempts (last critical patch two days ago). Likewise, in large computer clusters, switching off is an issue that extends beyond energy savings. It prevents accumulation of zombies across computer clusters worldwide.

or those who have not followed the headlines, Apple ditched their IBM processors and made a decision to sidle next to Intel. Since Intel represent a Microsoft monopoly to most (most latterly the DRM outrage), the move resulted in flames, as well as isolated loud voices of support.

Quickly after the move, Michael Dell showed interest in shipping Dell boxes with Mac OS X. Steve Jobs (Apple co-founder, CEO) declined any such requests, probably since Apple wish to cash in on overpriced hardware. Yet, quite inevitably, hackers have successfully taken the Intel (x86 architecture) version of Mac OS X and made it possible to install Mac OS X on any box. Consequently, there are many Mac OS bit torrents on the Net at the moment. Some say it is exactly what Apple had at the back of their minds, but Apple strongly deny it, as do other skeptics including myself.

icrosoft have announced that Windows 2000 users are exposed to hijacking. According to the BBC, “A vulnerability was also found in the Print Spooler service and the Plug and Play (PnP) hardware detection feature in Windows, both of which could leave systems open to attack and vulnerable to remote control.” XP Service Pack 2 is said to have simplified the process of patching up the operating system. The remainder of Windows users are advised to “sit up, listen and take action.”

oogle have recently revealed that they had used Linux from day one. Looking further into the past, why have they not openly expressed their passion for Linux? Perhaps they realised that over 90% of their target audience were Windows users. No user will be inclined to use the service of one that is different, one whose preferences are in ‘disharmony’ with the clients. Under such circumstances, there emerges an inner-conflict, whereby a Google user admits making a mistake, making a poorer O/S choice.

In this article from Computer Business, Google’s open source programs manager lists arguments as to why proprietary software can never offer what Open Source does. There is a long-standing myth that Linux people are incapable and have reached out for so-called ‘abnormal’ sides due to failure in a world that is largely dominated by Windows. I believe that Google have shown, with quadrupling revenues and an enormous rapid growth, that Linux is all it takes to gain advantage.

From the article:

While showing a slide show of Google’s hardware evolution, which began humbly with an odds-and-ends collection of “spare computers that were lying around Stanford” (hobbled together, literally, with pieces of Lego and duct tape) and ended with a present-day photo of Google’s current server room (darkened to the point of being indistinguishable, for competitive reasons), DiBona said Google has used Linux all the way.

There is still a great deal of secrecy when it comes to Google’s hardware, yet some information is now out. The server rooms have been kept in the dark intentionally. This entire revelation did not come as a total surprise to me as Brin‘s (Google co-founder) Stanford home page showed he had been a Linux user (plenty of Python) in his early days.

Machines by the dozens. Just toss a Linux distro on them.

ollowing rumours and an official announcement in the Google Blog, feeds are available for news items over at Google. Perhaps this takes us one step closer to full support for SERP RSS feeds (top 10 search results delivered to your feeds aggregator). Google News results can currently be delivered as RSS or Atom feeds. They are composed of items from a specific section (topic) or news returned for a given search term/s.

This move can certainly make Google Alerts for news obsolete, yet such alerts for non-news searches remain practical, albeit difficult to handle (periodical HTML-formatted E-mails).

Ben Hammersley (c/f: Keeping Track of Google, Google Results as RSS Feeds) has devised a workaround which enables you to get results as RSS feeds for standard Web searches at Google. Be warned that scraping is possibly involved, so the technique is questionable.

Yahoo have been offering news RSS feeds for quite some time. This has been very useful when tracking particular terms, so I am convinced Google will benefit from their recent decision (or implementation).

enjoy listening to music, but yet again who doesn’t? There is always catch though — a pitfall if you like: records and files get ‘used up’ after a period of time. Obtaining new music is a time-consuming process whether it involves walking, browsing or loading CD‘s.

Since peer-to-peer (P2P)) downloads are illegal, I have been downloading a lot music from small bands’ Web pages en masse. What I do not like, I can immediately dispose of. Using the command line, I am able to download music in the background without any manual intervention, simply by spidering the Internet.

I have come to realise that I do not know the names of songs that I listen to. I rarely bother to look at the filenames or tags because it is the same time-consuming ‘luxury’ mentioned above. In most cases, I fail to remember the names of bands too. To use an extreme example, a song which I must have listened to 50+ times in past few days has been completely obscure to me up until now. To repeatedly play it, I would typically use the “jump” function followed by the string “be” (for the word “belief” contained in the song’s title). This plays the song merely at the power of will, taking no more than a second to find and play it. It all leaves song titles and artists’ names in the dark unfortunately.

While on this issue of ‘music productivity’, XMMS accelerators, for instance, are used to control the music player without changing application focus. In other words, key combinations involving SHIFT, CTRL and/or ALT work universally and affect the player’s state at any time. You can change tracks, adjust volume etc. while in the midst of writing a sentence. The mechanism which enables this is described (also visually) towards the end of an old item about Music Log Files.

I have reached what I consider to be a Utopian situation. This is analogous to have a radio station with infinite supply of music. I have the ability to skip tracks, repeat tracks and organise the music supply at great ease. Moreover, the music supply can be handled purely by robots (cron jobs), as described in an old item on music mass-downloading.

SD is the Berkeley System / Software Distribution, which is a popular variant/branch of UNIX. It has already reached the average home computer several times in the past, as opposed to being used in machine rooms (e.g. data centres, computational servers). DesktopBSD 1.0 is a new endeavour (yet another distribution), currently at a release candidate phase. It was brought to many people’s attention via Slashdot.

Screenshot of DesktopBSD, on top of which sits KDE 3.4

All screenshots come from the Open Source Directory (feed: ), which is an entertaining site at best and informative at the least. It provides a clear and extensive previews of Linux distributions, thereby helping people select the right one. Screenshots are taken from the very early installation stages (BIOS level) until a running state is reached. There are also many ‘Grand Tours’ of a variety of *NIX distributions.