Archive for the ‘Hardware’ Category

The LID and the LCD backlight

Saturday, January 22nd, 2011

So I noticed that what I close the lid on my laptop the backlight doesn’t switch off. This is pretty bad for obvious reasons, primarily that it’s a waste of power, and secondly that even though not much it does radiate some heat and in a confined space it does escalate (and not mention that it’s an easy way to save a few watts of power when running on battery and waiting for some task to finish). So something had to be done. (more…)

RadeonHD … and some dual-head trickery

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

So for a year now I’ve been using ati-drivers (fireglrx, ccc, catalyst, watever you want to call that garbage) and wishing every other day that I didn’t have (some versions simply doesn’t work, older versions won’t compile with newer kernels – which I sometimes need for other bugfixes wrt wireless and possibly due to external requirements – asterisk’s dahdi driver comes to mind). So finally during the week when the proverbial shit once more hit the fan where I wanted to upgrade my kernel to 2.6.32 for some intel wireless fixes and the newest ati-drivers simply exploded in my face and the version just down didn’t want to work … I decided it’s time. Time to try the OSS drivers that didn’t want to work slightly over a year back again. And this time the story is quite different … (more…)

Google Servers

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

After reading the article at http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html I figured that it had to be a hoax.  I mean, that just looks like it’s looking for trouble.  However, after about a 20 minute discussion around this with one of the guys working at Google I am now reasonably convinced that this may very well be for real.

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nVidia bluez

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

Those who know me will instantly tell you that I’m a nVidia fan in the whole nVidia vs ATI debacle.  So big was my surprise this morning when I couldn’t get a nVidia Quadro NVS 440 working by simply going “apt-get install nvidia-glx” on that ubuntu box …

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