Jan-Lukas Else

Using non-Apple hardware usually has one big advantage: Much better upgradeability.

Even though my laptop isn’t as modifiable as the Framework Laptop (it was a lot cheaper, though), I just upgraded its battery from the 36 watt-hour version to double that, 73 watt-hours. Pretty good for a 14" laptop, I think. Based on past battery performance, this new battery should easily last 10 hours of my typical usage.

Past upgrades: 16 GB to 40 GB memory, 512 GB to 1 TB storage.

I can’t really explain why this is happening, but I noticed that my home server is now idling at 7 watts instead of 13 watts as before. I checked powertop, and it seems that the CPU is staying at C7 (pc7) for about 85% of the time, which seems to be the most power efficient state.

Maybe it’s a result of moving my Baïkal instance to my VPS or some other updates? Maybe Home Assistant or Tailscale? The operating system is still Ubuntu 22.04. What else could explain almost 50 percent power reduction without any hardware or major software changes?

Update: I found a likely source: When the powered-off TV is connected with an HDMI cable to the DisplayPort adapter plugged-in into the home server, it idles at about 13 watts. When I remove the HDMI cable from the DP adapter, it goes back to 7 watts. So it might have to do something with the integrated GPU. I guess, I will leave the TV disconnected unless I really need it.

It was a bit cold and quite windy today, but otherwise the weather was beautiful with a clear and sunny sky.

I took advantage of this opportunity and used my pedelec again after a long time to do what I originally bought it for.

I bought it in 2018 (German blog post from back then) so that I didn’t always have to drive to university by car. I sometimes took the bus or train, but the public transport to the neighboring town 15 km away (Wolfenbüttel) wasn’t that great and the journey took a long time, especially at off-peak times (for example in the evening after the last lecture). A normal bike wasn’t a good alternative for me either, as I didn’t want to sit in the lecture hall sweating.

Anyway, today, after a very long time, I cycled past the university where I studied from 2017 to 2021 and completed my bachelor’s degree in computer science. From 2020, mostly just from home, pandemic and all…

It was kind of cool to stop by there again, I got a bit nostalgic. But I’m also kind of glad to have the degree behind me, as I mostly saw it more as a necessary prerequisite for my favorite job.

Everything in the park is covered under the white magic! ❄️

I’ve made the sad observation that numerous people started to blog during the pandemic, but stopped in 2021 or 2022. Today, I cleaned up my feed subscriptions in Miniflux and removed many feeds that saw no activity for a long time. At least, I can’t remember of a site I subscribed to that completely disappeared.