by ·0 Comments

It’s been a while since my last post, I think 7 months is a personal record. In my defence I have got a full time job and three young kids.

Back to the titular subject, picking a distro.

For a long time I’ve had a dislike for Linux Mint, I’m not even sure why. After much experimenting with Ubuntu, Linux Deepin, Peppermint and a variety of other Ubuntu flavours I finally tried the newly released Mint 17 cinnamon – I’ve got no love for KDE or the Gnome 2.x throwback that is MATE. I was pleasantly surprised. Everything looks good, and most importantly my laptop hibernates without any fiddling around and crossing fingers.

The single best thing about Mint is its increased adherence to Fitt’s law: the program launch menu is bottom left, Chrome/Chromium browser tabs are at the very top edge, close window is top right and I can even (after a slight customisation) control the volume by scrolling on the bottom right. As pretty and fully functional as Ubuntu is, I find its program launcher and browser tab location a complete pain.

So, Mint: it’s as pretty as Ubuntu and it doesn’t make me swear.

by ·0 Comments

My previous post on laptop fan speed worked for me, although wordpress buggered the quotes in the code. My only slight problem was that the screen brightness got reset to full after resuming from sleep. It’s taken me 6 months, but I finally got around to sorting it out.

The solution lay in reading the screen brightness from /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness, storing it in a variable then resetting it after the fan speeds have been reset.


sudo touch /etc/pm/sleep.d/99_cooldown.sh
sudo chmod +x /etc/pm/sleep.d/99_cooldown.sh
sudo nano /etc/pm/sleep.d/99_cooldown.sh

In the file paste (ctrl+shift+v) this:

#!/bin/sh
# Stop fan in HP2510p after resuming from sleep
value=`cat /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness`
/bin/echo "0" >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device0/cur_state
/bin/echo "0" >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device1/cur_state
/bin/echo "0" >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device2/cur_state
/bin/echo "0" >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device3/cur_state
/bin/echo "0" >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device4/cur_state
/bin/echo "0" >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device5/cur_state
/bin/echo "0" >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device6/cur_state
/bin/echo "$value" >/sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness
exit 0

You may need to edit this according to the number of cooling device entries under /sys/class/thermal/

by ·0 Comments

I’ve been a fairly heavy user of Spotify for about 3 years, playing about 40-60 hours per week. I’ve liked using it and am pretty happy with it on Android, Linux (at home) and Windows (at work, for my sins).

When Google music all access (snappy!) launched, I thought I’d give it a spin and stopped my Spotify premium sub.

My first thoughts were that it seemed OK. The PC client is web based, so is platform agnostic. I’ve noticed occasional stuttering during playback as it doesn’t cache music as well as Spotify. It also seems to have problems when the browser is bogged down with a few heavy tabs. The music selection seems pretty good, no complaints. The price is pretty much the same as Spotify too.

I’d be happy using it if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s Google.

I’ve got nothing specific against Google, but it’s everyone’s best interests to keep competition alive and prevent another Microsoft style monopoly. It doesn’t matter if Google music is better right now (it isn’t). When my free 30 trial is over I’ll be going back to Spotify, not because it’s has better caching or a good full-fat client application, not even because it has an offline mode. I’m going back to keep Spotify and competition alive.