Flying Chainsaws!

Working for an aviation safety company occasionally alerts you to some interesting things:

Helicopter mounted chainsaws - www.helimatic.com.au

Could there be anything cooler?*


* I suspect environmentalists may not agree.

Annual update follows: Have now switched to Google Chrome from firefox. I can't say I've done this based on concrete evidence of any sort, but it does give you more screen space, and it is faster.

In other news, I'm thinking about trading in my soul for an ipad. I had a play with one that was purchased in Vegas, and it's pretty cool for closed source drm-riddled stuff.

If I were smarter, I'd wait for ipad version 2, since Apple has a history of abandoning the first generation of their iproducts.

Getting into xscreensaver prefrences

Since I can't seem to find enough time to post lengthy messages about my most recent nerdity, I've decided just to post snippets of whatever I'm working on. All my computers, bar one now run Gentoo, and the other one's days are numbered, so I guess that'll be the default flavour of the posts. For the most part, I'm just going to document each hurdle I come to, and how I've got past it, so that when I forget it, I have it recorded somewhere.

So today: Xscreensaver, the default screensaver for the X windows system. It does just about everything you would want, not that screensavers are all that critical.

Install:
emerge x11-misc/xscreensaver

The only issue I've found is that if you have Xfce4.1 like me, there is no icon placed in the menus to control it's behaviour, and as pretty as some of the screensavers are, they can suck the battery life of your laptop right down. So to get into the preferences:

/usr/bin/xscreensaver-command -prefs

That's it. Not rocket science, huh?

Dark themes = Longer battery life

The backlight on any given laptop is it's most power-hungry component.

if your screen is shiny and white, it will eat through the battery faster, and generate a modicum of extra heat.

If only the majority of dark themes that are available for the main desktop environments didn't suck. The theme developed for Crunchbang Linux is an exception to that rule, but it's one of only a few.

Of course, most economical of all, the Command Line Interface uses less power than any dark theme, but that way madness lies...

Introduction

I've created this blog as a site for my ramblings about Linux & tech related stuff, since I don't want to spam my LJ with it. For the record, I primarily use Gentoo Linux, with occasional forays into Archlinux. I have a soft spot for Ubuntu, where I began my conversion, and specifically for Crunchbang Linux, a derivative that is lighter and uses most of the software I like to install by default.

First the blogosphere, next the world!