2004-10-26-0121Z


The hourglass.py script was definitely a timesaver, but its constant cycling was not allowing the monitors to go into "green" power-saving mode. Also, it was inflating my google-ads impressions counts, so I couldn't tell how often my pages were really being visited. So, I hacked up a quiescent module, which lets me check how long a computer has been without keyboard or mouse activity. I guess screensaver apps use a similar method, I never looked at any of Zawinski's code though... I came up with this by trial-and-error.

So anyway, now with all 3 monitors blacking out after 3 minutes, I'm saving 1.5 amps, which means my café draws 2.1 rather than 3.6 amps when nothing's happening. That's not counting the lamp, which is on a separate circuit, I'm using a clamp-on ammeter on the one duplex outlet; I just took off the cover and made a loop of the slack in the blue wire. Anyway, the lamp is one of those circular flourescents, nominally 22 Watts, which should mean about .2 amps (22 / 120 = .18333), for a total of 2.3 amps "quiescent" current. Much better. Saves the monitors from raster-burn too.

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