Alan Turing (109).
DNS (38).
>30Β°
When the temperature looks like this, as it does today:
It is time to mix up some apfelschorle and drop some ice cubes in there:
A good companion for the ZuriHac 2021 streams.
Switching off "discrete graphics" #computers #gpu
Around a year and a half ago I treated myself to a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 2.
The screen looked alluring - OLED, 3840x2160 - and I was happy with my previous Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 3, so why not?
They are quite different: the X1 Carbon is light and not much wider than the keyboard, while the X1 Extreme is larger and heavier. That's the way it has to be, going from 14" to 15".
One thing I did not consider was that the new laptop has a "hybrid graphics" setup - it has a "basic" integrated Intel 630 GT2 GPU for saving power and a more "powerful" Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q GPU for heavy lifting - and it is supposed to switch between them seamlessly.
When I got the machine I had some problems using the hybrid configuration, so what I ended up doing was to configure the laptop to use "discrete graphics" in the BIOS and installing the proprietary Nvidia drivers. This means that the Nvidia GPU is used all the time.
This also meant that battery life was quite bad - on the X1 Carbon it was good enough for me not to notice around the house, but with the GPU running full tilt on the X1 Extreme, it was between 2 and 3 hours. Not critically low, but not impressive either.
Another thing started to happen recently: the laptop got too hot to hold
in a lap. Kind of annoying. I ran powertop --autotune and often used
cpufreq.set --max to throttle the CPU to 0.8 GHz. That helped a little
on the temperature, but the lack of speed was kind of annoying in some
circumstances, especially in Emacs displaying a lot of pictures.
Definitely noticable. I started looking at new laptops, but
stopped when I realized how new this one
is.
A couple of days ago I read a blogpost "Laptop review: ThinkPad X1 Extreme (Gen 2)" which mentioned using only the Intel GPU, and turning off the Nvidia GPU by telling the kernel to remove it from the PCI bus, saving power. Interesting!
At first I tried disabling the proprietary Nvidia driver, but I didn't manage to, so instead I purged the package altogether, thus using the Intel GPU only, and added the commands to remove the Nvidia GPU from the PCI bus to my startup script.
What a difference!
The problems that made me go discrete graphics only are gone (they must have been ironed out during the last 1Β½ year), and now I get 4-6 hour battery life instead. Best of all: the laptop doesn't get hot enough to scorch my legs any more. Yay!
It is the small things
Sometimes it is the smallest things that make me happy.
Last summer I finally managed to change the broken light bulb in my oven. It had been broken for, well, a decade, or something. It was quite a struggle to get the glass it sits behind out. And it made me very happy to have light in that little window, when I finally succeeded.
A couple of days ago the new bulb broke (that was quick, Philips!) I bought a new one and installed it, and this time I remembered what direction to turn the glass (and I didn't fasten it too much last summer!)
Again I am surprised how happy it makes me that the light turns on when I turn on the oven.
Sometimes it is the small things.
Ring them bells #audio
The nearby Church of the Holy Ghost is equipped with a carillon that is played from time to time. It's fun to hear and they often play different melodies. Today I recorded part of the ringing:
After around 16 minutes the bells of the Copenhagen town hall take over, ringing for - count it - 12 o'clock. You might also hear some birds, and some loud crashing sounds from the cafΓ© nearby setting up (so be careful not to turn the volume up too much!)
Time of the Twins (1986) β β βββ #books
While cleaning out some bookshelves recently I came upon my old DragonLance books. I was about to chuck them out, but then I decided not to, maybe DragonLance would be fun to revisit.
I didn't have volume 1 of the original Chronicles trilogy, and it felt weird starting with volume 2, but I did find DragonLance Legends volume 1: Time of the Twins (1986), which I have then re-read during the past couple of weeks.
It's a light read. It refers a lot back to the things that happened in the previous trilogy, and it feels quiteβ¦ formulaic, I think? The ending is abrupt, but then the next page advertises volume 2 for only $3.95, soβ¦
β β βββ
I think I will try reading volume 2 of Chronicles, rather than continuing with the Legends trilogy.
Tivoli is definitely open
Loud fireworks tonight, if anybody was in doubt whether Tivoli in Copenhagen is open or notβ¦
Consumerism gone mad
I managed to break the fingerprint reader on my phone while carrying some book cases.
There is a physical crack across the reader, and the phone said that it was unavailable. After I restarted the phone it stopped complaining, it is now as if the fingerprint reader isn't there.
That's ok, even though it is convenient to unlock the phone and turn on the screen just by touching it.
What is worse is that the battery life has been reduced to something like a third or a fourth.
It should still last a day, so I really shouldn't be that worried about it. But the consumerism deeply embedded in my mind keeps saying "Buy buy buy!" "You can buy a new phone today, if you hurry up!"
I am not proud. So I will try to resist a little longer.
