A while back, I tried out cpufrequtils package. I have an AMD X2 processor. I had success changing between the performance and conservative frequency governors, which would set the processor frequency to 2 GHz and 1 GHz, respectively.

The other day I picked up a Kill-A-Watt, after reading a posting by Guy Fawkes on technocrat.net. The Kill-A-Watt is a handy device to measure the power usage of electronics and appliances. You just plug the Kill-A-Watt into the wall, and the appliance into the Kill-A-Watt. Anyway, I was very surprised to find out that running the CPU at 1 GHz did indeed slow down my applications, but had no measurable affect on the power draw! I must be missing something. I think I'll go turn off my 117 W computer and use my 19 W laptop instead.

I just had success installing a TrendNet TEW-424ub wireless usb adaptor on an old laptop. I ended up using ndiswrapper with the supplied windows driver on the cdrom that came with the device.

There were a couple of tricky sticking points:

1. To find the correct .sys and .inf files, I had to install on windows XP, since the files were not actually present on the cdrom.

2. After hours of searching, I stumbled across the solution to my networking problem. My /etc/network/interfaces file needed to contain "open" after the wireless-key:

   auto wlan0
   iface wlan0 inet dhcp
   wireless-key open XXXXXXXXXX
   wireless-essid XXXXX

I was playing around with settings for the xfce4-terminal, and decided it would be fun if it looked like the desktop itself was a terminal. Here is the result of a command similar to

$ xfce4-terminal --geometry 130x43+250+50 --hide-borders

with preferences set for a transparent background and hidden menus and scroll bars.

.

# apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Lately firefox has begun crashing every 5 minutes under Etch when loading web pages. I have no idea what the problem is, but decided to try out konqueror. So far so good. Its fast and I've encountered no problems. The konq-plugins package brought in the search engine box in the upper right. That and tabbed browsing are the two features I like most in firefox, and they are both in konqueror.