Idle by design
Reading about this old issue followed by something related on the ThinkPad I was curious to check the value on my R61… and the value retrieved was way too high: 450585. After just a few minute it increased to 450620 with a rate of about 3 cycles /minute! All these with the laptop on AC power and maximal performance settings. The S.M.A.R.T. reports 2718 power on hours and 347 power cycles. The laptop was bought end of March (more or less 200 days ago). If the drive is rated for 600k load cycles then (with the current settings) it will fail in at most 100 days. WOW! Less than a year lifetime! (the laptop has a 3 years warranty but this is just stupid).
For moment I applied the dirty workaround (running hdparm -B 254 at each startup should be enough as I’m not using suspend/hibernate - the KDE session resume features are enough for what I’m doing) and the count(down) has stopped. I’m not sure if this is related to Linux or to BIOS settings (had to reboot to check) but the settings are just normal for a computer used more as a desktop than a laptop (more performance vs. battery life). Is this a Lenovo default setting? I don’t know for moment but I’ll have to check the SMART on two other identical laptops bought at the same time but which run Windows not Linux. For more details please check also:
http://spicifer.blogspot.com/2007/12/about-loadcyclecount-issue.html
http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/10/27/laptop-hardrive-killer-bug-is-worse-than-i-thought/
UPDATE: On a second R61 running Windows XP the counter is 40747 for an uptime of 1683 hours. That gives around 1 cycle / 3 minutes (vs. 3 cycles / minute for Linux!). The BIOS does not have any setting to change the HDD power management (the only power management adjustable from there is the CPU and PCI). Next step is to check if the Linux just use the default BIOS settings or it sets a very specific (and bad) value.
Does anybody knows a good NLE video editor for Linux? The basic features I’m looking for are:
- multi track support (video and audio)
- clip cutting from the main recording without creating new files (virtual clips)
- a few transitions between the clips and effects on them (just basic processing)
- support for 16:9 processing
- slideshows from pictures with basic processing (panning, zooming, rotations)
- stable for real projects so it does not crash each 3-4 minutes while trying to handle a 10 minute DV clip (full resolution)
Each and every tool I’ve tried (kino, cinelerra, lives, kdenlive) miss at least two of the features. One of them is the stability: none have resisted more than 5 minutes on real work so they cannot be used for my work. I just wish for a real NLE video editor for Linux please… (open source or free)
In the winter holidays I’ve got a brand new Sony PSP. It has a big screen for a portable device and it’s designed for playing games but I’m using it mainly for book reading. The primary reader is Bookr for pdf files (and, in the future, lit files after I’ll finish a plugin for it but this will take other 3-4 months at least). The main disadvantage reading on the screen is that you’ll have to do a lot of scrolling as the normal page height is two or three times the height of the visible screen. But there is a very simple solution if you can generate your own files.
If you set the pdf’s page size to a specific value then it will fit on the PSP’s screen. By seeing one full page at a time all you have to do is to flip through them (much simpler than using the stick to scroll while reading). This specific page size can be computed by taking into account that the PSP screen has 130 dpi and that OpenOffice (yes, I’m using it for office work and pdf saving) is using 72 dpi to render to PDF. As the psp screen is 3.69” width and 2.09” height the page size has to be set to 6.67” width and 3.78” height. Optionally you can adjust the font size to obtain a nice looking book for your device… Just check the document, export as PDF and upload on PSP.
Happy reading!
I’m alive… but I don’t feel like writing anything, on any subject, anywhere, anytime soon 
18 years ago I was in Paltinis in a 7 days physics preparation camp. At that time I was interested more in physics, chemistry and electronics than computers because they were more accessible to common children. I had computer classes twice a week for the last 2 years at “casa pionierilor” (no good translation comes in mind,it was something like a children club with specific activities on various domains, including automation/computers) but no access to a home computer. So I had far more time for physics and I was part of the enlarged team from Sibiu in preparation for regional and national physics contests.
During 16 - 22 December 1989 there was one of the training camps in physics in Paltinis and the 22nd was the test day. I remember we were gathered in the dining room (the only one big enough to have all of us) from 10am and were writing for the test. A radio was playing patriotic songs in the background and, at one moment, I’ve realized something was different. The song stopped and the speaker announced the Ceausescu has run from Bucharest and the revolution has won (these were not the exact words but this was the idea). We all stop, looked each other and start chatting. Nobody paid attention to the test. And here it comes one of my first thoughts: “now we will have easy access to electronics components”. It was not of freedom (I don’t think I KNEW what freedom was as nobody has tough us about it) but it was about one of my biggest restrictions: the possibility to do something (electronics) as I saw fitted. (Before ‘89 it was hard to find components and to buy what you needed - in the electronics club they told each time to pay attention what we were doing, not to broke/burn components as they are in a very limited supply, expensive and very hard to find - the problem was not in money but in what you could do with them… nearly nothing).
That was 18 years ago… Now I’m away from electronics and I’m working nearly 100% in software with only limited hardware work but I still can’t forgot that thought “now we will have access to electronic components”.
I call it my very first free thought. and it one of the most strong memories from that times.
I’d like to know what was yours first free thought? Anybody?
I haven’t post something useful for a long time now (and I’m approaching the “second failure”). Due to the job load and lack of “inspiration” (please let a comment if you want to read about a specific subject) this status will remain in the near future… (and yes, I have a load of videos to prepare and publish but not enough free/creative time).
After a very long absence, due to various reasons, here is a fresh new video:
Is it good? Is it bad? Time will decide until I’ll found my kingdom (if you know of something available just drop me a line)…
A few minutes ago I’ve tried, for the first time, light painting. And it worked! After searching for a suitable flashlight, in the lunch break (finally I’ve found one but not small enough for my taste) I expected the night and… you can see the results. They are dedicated to a very special person for me… URS!
All I need now is imagination and time…