Error 404 Money Not Found

A Family article with View Comments posted 22 May 2008.
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For values of $4.039 approximately equal to $4.04

BackupPC only when mobile device / laptop is plugged in

A Tech article with View Comments posted 22 May 2008.
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I’m the proud owner of a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet (which I will, of course, write about later) and I’ve been getting around to doing a bit of hardware hackery now that the semester has ended. I wanted to integrate this tasty little Linux machine into my home backup system, which is powered by BackupPC. Unfortunately, running rsync and wireless eats up the battery pretty quickly. Thus, I rigged up this command, which will cause the backup to fail if the tablet is not plugged in.

$Conf{RsyncClientCmd} = '$sshPath -q -x -l root $host grep -q 0 /sys/power/sleep_while_idle && $rsyncPath $argList+';

The key is grep -q 0 /sys/power/sleep_while_idle which queries the kernel to see whether the CPU should sleep when it’s idle. When the N800 is plugged in, the value is 0, grep -q returns a non-zero exit code, and the backup proceeds. When the N800 is on battery, the value is 1, and the backup stops. The string /sys/power/sleep_while_idle is definitely hardware specific, and you’ll need to poke around /sys or /proc for an appropriate filename and value to grep for.

Wartburg End of Year Celebration 2008

A Family article with View Comments posted 9 May 2008.
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I normally don’t “back blog,” but as I transition away from Google PicasaWeb for photos online, I wanted to include this gallery at the right time in my blog’s history. This is the celebration at the end of my Junior (first) year at Wartburg on May 9, 2008.