tech poet

I ran into a rather interesting discovery regarding power consumption of my PC while in sleep mode. Using a Kill-A-Watt I measured how much power my computer uses. While under normal operation, I use around 120-170 Watts. This is reasonable for my hardware - Core 2 Duo 7200, GeForce 6800GT, 22 inch ViewSonic flat panel. Then I tested the watt usage while the machine was in a "Sleep" state. The result was a surprisingly low 13 watts. I noticed that I could not wake my computer up using my USB keyboard, only the power button. So in Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> Device Manager -> Keyboards -> Power Management I checked "Allow this device to bring the computer out of standby". I then re-ran the test with the Kill-A-Watt. With this option enabled my consumption during sleep mode went up to 66 watts! That's a 500% increase! I leave my PC on 24x7x365. Looking at my last bill I pay .16 cents for a kilowatt. Having this option turned on will cost...

Back in August I replaced my aging 15.4 inch Sony laptop with an Asus eeePC 900 . This is somewhat of a review of my experience so far; wrestling with various operating systems and my impressions of the hardware. Specs The particular eeePC 900 I purchased from Newegg has the following specs: Celeron M processor clocked @ 900Mhz 4 GB Solid State Drive for OS 16GB Solid State Drive for data Xandros Linux 1 GB DDR2 RAM 1024x600 8.9-inch screen webcam/microphone/vga out/sd reader Operating Systems First try...Egg I decided to give the pre-loaded, linux based, Xandros OS a chance. The very first impression I had of it was quite positive. It booted EXTREMELY fast. In fact, the fastest boot of any operating system I have ever seen; 20 seconds. Once I logged in I quickly found my way around the simple tab based interface. It reminded me a little bit of Geo Works (an operating system that was on my first computer; a Laser 386.) I did my best to connect in my work email, extend firefox, customiz...

I purchased two Gigaware 21-162 wireless antennas from Radio Shack in order to get a longer range wireless connection between two routers. I am going to move into an apartment across the street and from a friend who already pays for internet access and is happy to share it with me. I am going to replace the stock antennas on my 2 Linksys WRT54G routers with the ones from Gigaware in hopes to get a clear signal. The firmware on the routers I am using are open source router distros that will allow me more control of the transmitters and allow the Linksys WRT54G routers to be put into a bridged mode (which allows for one to connect to the other and bridge two networks into one wirelessly separated logical network ). The master router uses DD-WRT v24 RC6 and the slave one uses Tomato Firmware v1.19.1463 You can relatively easily achieve the router configuration portion of this with these instructions from the DD-WRT Wiki. The Tomato config is just as simple, the GUIs are very intuiti...

Alternate Attachment Syntax in MoinMoin 1.6 As of MoinMoin wiki version 1.6 (or so) attaching files to a page has changed the action that previous versions performed. When a file is attached with the format {{attachment:foo.pdf}} the file is not available for direct download. Instead, the user is sent to an intermediate page where he/she can manage the attachments, including downloading it. Sometimes I prefer the old behavior, most notably when I want to make it easier for the reader. The format to use is: [[attachment: foo.pdf | description |&do=get]] where foo.pdf is the file you want to upload and description is a short name for the file. Thanks to Tre56k in the MoinMoin IRC channel for this tip.

For use when troubleshooting email problems with telnet (or parsing email in your head) . First you must telnet to the POP3 sever, in Windows or Linux, enter a terminal and type: telnet [host [port]] Where host is the POP3 server you want to connect to and port is generally the standard POP3 port 110. Minimal POP3 Commands: USER name valid in the AUTHORIZATION state PASS string QUIT STAT valid in the TRANSACTION state LIST [msg] RETR msg DELE msg NOOP RSET QUIT valid in the UPDATE state Optional POP3 Commands: APOP name digest valid in the AUTHORIZATION state TOP msg n valid in the TRANSACTION state UIDL [msg] POP3 Replies: +OK -ERR This information gathered via various websites and this document: ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc1939.txt