Bottomlesspit

Fix Thinkpad t420s loud fan on Fedora linux with thinkfan

212 days ago

I got a t420s several months ago and I found the fan to be loud on this machine. I wasn’t sure if it was a Fedora kernel problem (I was using ubuntu on my t61p before), an upstream kernel issue (Fedora is pretty bleeding edge) or a bios / microcode issue. So I just waited and hoped things would fix themselves.

Well they didn’t and I’m still unsure about root cause but anyway, reading thinkpad wiki and googling in general, I stumbled upon a great article which seemed updated, talked about the t420s specifically and had a simple enough solution. So I decided to give it a go.

Silencing the fan and reducing the power usage of a ThinkPad T420s

So far so good, it works really well, my fan is almost always quiet so I’m really glad.

Here are a list of tweaks and Fedora instructions in addition of his article that I’ll post here for future personal reference and maybe help someone someday:

AT YOUR OWN RISK Overheating hardware is a bad idea.

installation
- install from source (there’s no packaged version, follow upstream make instructions)
- sudo cp thinkfan /usr/sbin/
- sudo cp examples/thinkfan.conf.thinkpad /etc/thinkfan.conf
- modify according to the guy’s file. With the following changes:
  - modified the 7 line and added a new line otherwise my fan would never go to full speed (level 7 != full speed on my thinkpad on linux 3.6.1):
```
(7,     65,     75)
("level disengaged",    70,     32767)
```

systemd integration (added to startup)
- download thinkfan.service from archlinux’s thinkfan tarball
- sudo cp thinkfan.service /usr/lib/systemd/system/
- sudo systemctl enable thinkfan.service
- sudo systemctl start thinkfan.service

verify
- monitor temp with: sensors
- stress your system with: openssl speed (run one per CPU) or glxgears

I’m on Fedora 17, can’t see why it wouldn’t work on 16 (or 18).

p.s.: the power management piece from source article is no longer required it recent kernels
p.p.s.: I also posted a comment with the above notes to increase chances of people stumbling upon them

— Olivier Bilodeau

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yeast face to face in cider making: bread yeast against unibroue's

307 days ago

The intro

A good friend of mine, jRd, once told me he was using those easily available 1.89L growlers to do cider batch experiments. It slowly germinated in me. I was keeping those growlers around, until, last week, my girlfriend found past-due bread yeast. Then I decided that it was the time for my own experiments!

So, here we have a canonical example of a methodical man (not to say engineer) brewing cider: I want to compare how different yeasts will deliver given all the other variables are the same.

The constants

Grocery store Rougement Apple Juice made of Royal Gala apples (apparently the juice is sweeter than usual Rougement). ~ 4$ for 4L

Getting better juice is complicated.. you need to research, rent a car, drive and everything. For larger batches it’s worth it but I decided that, this time, I will try doing cider from off-the-self grocery store juice.

250g of sugar added. ~0.50$

Before adding the sugar gravity was 1,054 and after it was 1,066. More alcohol potential and/or more sweet potential, all around it’s a win. One day I’ll do a similar experiment testing sugar against honey or brown sugar and its effect on taste. That would be interesting!

temperature: they are going to ferment between 21 and 24 (aka room temp with air conditioning)

The variables

On one side we have:

old bread yeast found by my girlfriend (due date somewhere in 2010). 0$

And on the other:

the bottom few sips of a unibroue Don de Dieu. 0$ (easily available here and I would’ve drink beer anyway so lets consider the yeast a beneficial side effect)

The waiting

We’ll see how this turns out.. I already see little activity in the bread yeast bottle. It’s pushing gaz out. I think this is going to be a turtle vs rabbit fight. The bread yeast will destroy those sugars fast while unibroue will take its time.

Announcing a new era for mobile Tomboy!

417 days ago

After a couple of years working on Tomdroid the Android port of the Tomboy note-taking software, we decided it was time to focus our efforts on the winning mobile platform.

It is with a lot of pride that I announce TomWins – Tomboy for Windows Mobile!

TomWins We worked really hard on porting the Tomboy code to Windows Mobile. But since it was already .Net (actually Mono) it didn’t take long.

Expect .msi installers for your phones shortly. We just have a little licensing issue to resolve.

_{and of course this is an april’s fool ;) we actually held a hackathon for Tomdroid on the 31th (yesterday) and a release is coming}

— Olivier Bilodeau

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pw2kindle: a perl projet meant to experiment

438 days ago

Intro

I love my kindle. With it, I’ve been reading even more than before. Especially during commuting. I read books at first but then discovered instapaper which allows you to push articles in a ‘to read’ list which then gets converted into a magazine format and wirelessly delivered to your kindle for free! This is so convenient that it went to the point where I’ve mostly stopped reading in front of the computer.

I love perl! I love reading about perl! As a “born-again” perl developer I’ve stumbled on perlsphere and have been browsing it more or less thoroughly since 2-3 years. I say more or less thoroughly due to the fact that I have to remember to come back to it from time to time. Then, lately, Perl Weekly arrived into our lives, and I thought: “If I could read that on my kindle it would be awesome!”.

Enter pw2kindle.

First, I must say that my next from-scratch perl project had to incorporate new and fancy things as a test bed to simplify stuff at work. pw2kindle is that next project. What does this means? This software is completely overkill and out of proportion for such a simple task.

Here’s a quick rundown of the stuff I tried and the stuff I learned:

Command line application framework

I wanted to play with CLI framework. First and foremost because a simple perl script isn’t testable until you factor it out into a module. But mainly because, at work, we have probably one of the worst case of a command-line application that I would like to split into chunks and refactor (but never got the time to… you know, the reality of a small-business doing open source…).

So I wanted to experiment with command line applications frameworks. After some research:

Were the candidates. In the end it came down to MooseX::App::Cmd versus CLI::Framework. I chose MooseX::App::Cmd because of Moose. I have always wanted to try Moose out on a ‘real’ problem (instead of doing tutorials). Although I have to give a mention for CLI::Framework (CLIF) which seems definitely the more powerful one and then one I would’ve gone with if it was not for Moose.

Web::Query

Another great thing I played with is Web::Query. To quote the author’s description:

Web::Query is a yet another scraping framework, have a jQuery like interaface.

Look at the kind of terseness you can achieve with it. The following adds $article objects to the @articles array that come from all <p class=entry><a href=...>title</a><p>description</p></p> in the given URL:

Child process exited with error

The beauty is in the find() with it’s CSS style selector (borrowed from jQuery I guess?) and then the ability to run an each with a closure on it. Very neat!

Problems along the way

The frame that App::Cmd provides needs some effort learning but I also see a lot of benefit in the boiler plate removal. It’s doing all the splitting for you, enforcing some structure in the package naming. Also, it recommends using autouse so large command-line applications probably benefit from it performance wise.

That said, I spent some time in the debugger tracing problems blaming issues on Moose although it turned out that it was a user problem.. To my defense, the documentation doesn’t covers unit testing.. So I spent some time thinking it was a MooseX::App::Cmd to App::Cmd mismatch problem instead of me misusing the framework trying to test.. In any case, I traced it and fixed it, it was my fault using new() instead of prepare().

What is pw2kindle

Right now, being mostly focused on getting Perl Weekly on my kindle quickly, here’s what the thing does:

it fetches the given Perl Weekly issue #
extracts articles titles and URLs
pushes them to instapaper (so that it will be delivered on my [or your] kindle)

What should be pw2kindle

Ideally I would like to do the ‘instapaper’ text (and relevant image) grinding myself but I have another project that needs attention right now (shameless plug: Hacker Jeopardy @ HackUS 2012) so I won’t touch it for little while.

Concluding

The Moose learning was awesome! I love that stuff although I barely used it. I enjoyed the structure and splitting provided by the CLI framework. I’m definitely re-using one of these on any relatively large command line application. I hope I will have the chance to make this one grow.

Now, I can’t wait read Perl Weekly on my kindle.

Feel free to fork pw2kindle! Check out the TODO if you are interested to contribute.

— Olivier Bilodeau

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