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thinkpad back from repair

On Tuesday my Thinkpad was taken for service to fix the problem described in this post.

The problems I described were overheating, wear on the keyboard (from a minimum of 8 hours a day 7 days a week use) and a missing rubber foot on the base. The statement of work includes a replaced system-board, […]

Spanish wind power

The latest news is that Spain has wind power as it’s main source of electricity. The second largest source is nuclear and the third is coal. This is due to some particularly windy weather recently, but Spain is also a world leader in both manufacture and installation of wind power systems.

Other countries should follow […]

mixing CPUs

Recently I bought a HP DL385 Opteron server at auction. It has an Opteron 265 1.8GHz dual-core CPU and is designed for SFF (Small Form Factor) SAS disks.

A friend told me that S-ATA disks would work in it and so would a faster Opteron CPU. I bought 3 S-ATA disks which work fine in […]

Debian and Google Summer (Winter) Of Code

Debian is participating in the Google Summer Of Code (or Winter if you are in the southern hemisphere).

It would be good if we could get a SE Linux related project in. If you are interested in doing some SE Linux work (or other security related work) in this regard then please let me know. […]

BLUG

This weekend I went to the Ballarat install-fest, mini-conf, and inaugural meeting of the Ballarat Linux Users’ Group (BLUG).

This was the second install-fest, the first one was quite successful so it was decided that there was demand for a second. I suggested that what we should do is get some of the more experience […]

fluorescent lights and why it’s worth saving resources

A common criticism of fluorescent lights is the inability to use dimmers, as mentioned in Julien Goodwin’s blog.

However with some thought at the time the lights are installed this problem can be solved. The first thing to keep in mind is that an infinite number of levels of illumination (analogue scale) is not really […]

are Thinkpads meant to run 24*7?

My Thinkpad has started to run hot recently. If I do anything CPU intensive then it will heat up to >80C and then turn itself off. When idling it seems to stay at about 60C when the ambient temperature is about 24C.

It used to not be like this, a couple of years ago I […]

worse than fossil fuel?

I just read an interesting blog post from December 2005 about the environmental impact of bio-fuels. It makes some really good points that should be studied by everyone who is interested in protecting the environment.

However this doesn’t mean that bio-fuels are inherently bad, just that some methods of production are bad.

The blog claims […]

SE Linux on /.

The book SE Linux by Example has been reviewed on Slashdot.

The issue of Perl scripts was raised for discussion. It is of course true that a domain which is permitted to run the Perl interpreter can perform arbitrary system calls – it can therefore do anything that SE Linux permits that domain to do. […]

things to do for the environment

I got the idea for this from Ben Hutchings. A. Copy the list below to your own journal and

Bold the actions you are already taking Underline the actions you plan to start taking Italicize the actions that don’t apply to you

B. Add one (or more) suggested action(s) of your own

C. Leave a […]