Marcus D. Hanwell's Blog

In the last few months the CPU temperature of my Acer Ferrari 4005 laptop has been getting higher and higher when idle or under load. I suspected it was just some dust reducing cooling efficiency but hadn't had chance to check it out. I was also putting it off as laptops generally aren't that easy to get into. Last week I was compiling a few applications as I was testing them for keywording bugs and the laptop shut itself down.

I rebooted and then resumed the emerge. I spotted the CPU temperature was up at 95 C and shortly after the laptop shut itself down again. Since then I had just left it turned off until I got a chance to look at it today. I found a very helpful article on Gentoo and the Acer Ferrari laptop which linked to a very helpful service manual as well as documenting how to get most of the hardware to work.

Twenty four screws later and I unclipped the keyboard to realise I didn't even need to undo any of the screws in order to clean the CPU heat sink and fan! I used the trusty blower that was intended for cleaning my SLR lenses to blow all the dust out of the fan and put the keyboard back. Booting back up and emerging something taxing showed a 25 C drop in temperature both idle and under load - and no sign of any more shutdowns.

I also spotted there is now a project to get the integrated memory card reader working under Linux. Apparently SD cards are already working (don't use them yet, but might if I manage to get hold of a Nikon D80) and xD support is planned which I would love to see as that it what my Fuji F10 uses. Looks like people have had success getting suspend to ram working too - I will have to see about getting that working when I get chance too.

On Wednesday I went and did my coldest dive yet - 7 C. I think before that I had experienced as low as 10 C and figured it wouldn't be too much colder. After about 20 minutes I could feel my hands and feet going numb and we got out after 30 minutes on the first dive. I was in my Oceanic two-piece semi-dry suit but what was more surprising is that Mark, my dive buddy, seemed even colder in his dry suit.

We did go in for a second shallow dive and just used up the rest of the air in our tanks from the short first dive which was to about 20 m. It was good fun but both of us agreed you need something better to see than the stuff in Stoney Cove to make it worthwhile. I think it took about half an hour for the feeling in my feet to return! I miss Egypt - it was 22 C over there at the end of January... I think that is about as cold as it gets out there too.

Long time no blog... Life has been really hectic and I rarely have time to stop right now. On 23rd January Louise and I along with four friends went to the Hilton Long Beach Hotel in Hurghada, Egypt for a week. As luck would have it my 27th birthday fell in the middle of our week away (on the 26th of January). I didn't think we were even going to make it out to Egypt in the week leading up to our holiday with the fence blowing down, a client's server going down and the car misbehaving but we got there in the end...

We got to the hotel pretty late on Tuesday, just in time to get a little food and some beer before getting some sleep. As usual I didn't manage to sleep on the plane and so was exhausted. Our room was really nice, all our dive gear made it out with us, we packed lightly enough to avoid excess baggage charges and the weather was great.

On the first full day we went down to the resident dive cetre, Pirates Diving (not a very nice web site), my friends signed up for their PADI open water course and we took our dive gear down to the centre and did a beach dive in the afternoon. They kept us waiting around for a few hours until the divemaster finally turned up. I was getting impatient to hit the water, but he got there after a few false starts, we kitted up and jumped in off the jetty. It was a nice dive, warm water at 22 C but the reef was pretty barren and there was a sandy bottom at about 7 m and so no blue to stare off in to.