Karim Vaes

Almost forgot… I’m running this blog for two years now. It started out with a simple post, and it’s grown to 315 posts! So with this post a small shout to all the readers & fellow bloggers!

Sidenotes
Running a blog for two years gathers up some spam too;

71,562 spams caught, 496 legitimate comments, and an overall accuracy rate of 99.847%.

Or utilizes a bit of bandwith;

on average this blog uses 1,5 to 2 Gigabyte of traffic on a monthly basis, where a lot of the presentations are even stored on other servers.

We often think that we need to provide products that people need. But actually we need to provide people with products that they want! In essence people only need food & water…

When you take a look at this picture; do you think the person needs this bike or wants this bike? What do you think he wants? You’d might say that he needs the 21 gear model made out of full carbon. Wrong, he wants the experience of riding thru the above scenario. It doesn’t matter for him if the gear shift is 0,1sec slower, or if he has 21 or 28 gears… So a sales person should relate to the experience he wants and not the product he needs for this experience! What if he would have gotten the following sales talk:

This bike weighs less then the 1 pound which is about half of other bikes. With it’s 28 gears you’ll be able to go up the hill much smoother!

What he just “sold” was the Full carbon model with 28 gears, yet the packaging was different…

I have a very economic mentality. But my girlfriend has learned me that one also has to live. I always said that I’m working to live, and I don’t live to work. Yet I often fail to put those words into actions. Or is that because I just love the sector I work in?

Anyways, I bought myself a new “toy”. One shouldn’t refer to a motorcycle as a toy. But as the model I bought ‘only’ has a 125cc, I tend to see it as a toy bike compared to the big players.

It’s an Aprilia RS 125; a two-stroke 125cc engine, but limited to 11kW. As this allows me to ride it within Belgian borders without the need for a specific motorcycle license.

I almost forgot… last weekend this blog celebrated it’s one year anniversary!!!

Sometimes frequent readers ask me the question : “Why do you blog?”

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Being “Green” is being helpful towards the environment, but also to your electricity bills… The most commonly used techniques to reduce the power usage of a computer device are :

• Turning off your monitor/screen/tv when not used.
• Turning off the hard disks when they aren’t used
• CPU Frequency Scaling

For the last bit, you’ll have to check if you motherboard/cpu supports this… Most will probably support this, apart from the “really” old. The motherboard (& CPU) of my HTPC (MythTV) is capable of using AMD’s Cool’n'Quiet. I followed the following guide on the Ubuntu Forum, and used the “powersave” algorithm. It reduced my CPU frequency to 1000, where I must admit that I don’t notice anything on my combined MythTV frontend/backend. Next up is measuring the actual power usage, but I need to obtain a measuring device for that…

Extra
For an interesting readup on the same topic; check MythTV NZ, ThinkWiki’s How to reduce power consumption, …