Because I can.

For mirroring my backup drive, central data store for devices, music playing and a webserver for experiments, I'd like to run a small server at home. I want this server to be energy efficient, easy to modify, robust, silent and run customizable free software. It should have at least 500 GB of storage, but 1 or 1.5 TB is better. You can buy very low-energy computers such as the Fit-PC 2 (6 watt) or the Linutop 2 (8 watt). Energy costs for machines that run constantly can be roughly estimated by doubling the power draw in watt, so running a device that uses 8 watt constantly costs about 16 euro a year.

Until recently the computer I used most was a Dell X1 Latitude laptop. That machine is now 4.5 years old. At the time, I chose it because it is a laptop with no fan and hence very silent. It is still better than any atom based netbook. So I would like to use this laptop as a server. UPS and screen are integrated which is a nice plus. The machine has a 1.8" disk built in. It is not possible to replace it with a disk of at least 500 GB. I wanted to know the energy cost of adding more storage to the X1. So I did some power measurements with an 2.5" external disk (Toshiba, 160 GB) and a 3.5" external disk (TrekStore 500GB). I measured on my current main laptop, a Lenovo X200s too.

Lenovo X220s (console, idle, low brightness unless otherwise specified)
Adapter only: 6 W
Console, low brightness: 19 W
Console, high brightness: 21 W
100% cpu and high brightness: 40 W
mounted 2.5" disk: 24 W
active (dd) 2.5" disk: 28 W
mounted 3.5" disk: 37 W
active (dd) 3.5" disk: 41W

Dell Latitude X1 (console, idle, low brightness unless otherwise specified)
Adapter only: 0 W
Console, low brightness: 15 W
Console, high brightness: 19 W
100% cpu and high brightness: 23 W
mounted 2.5" disk: 17 W
active (dd) 2.5" disk: 21 W
mounted 3.5" disk: 32 W
active (dd) 3.5" disk: 37 W

The 2.5" disk uses USB for power. The 3.5" disk has a separate adapter which is included in the power measurements. The device used for the power measurements is a DEM1379.
The idle 3.5" drive uses 13-15 more watt and the active drive uses 13-16 more watt. The difference is as large as power usage of the entire server. So I am now wondering if there are more energy efficient external 3.5" drives.

Ladies and Gentlemen, introducing Adam:

I started to publish on Twitter some days ago to not stay completely silent about the good stuff that is happening with KDE/openSUSE. Most of the time my posts even appear on other people's pages and in Twitter Search. According to the "Find People" function I don't exist though.

I have moved my blog to kdedevelopers.org. The previous blog was self-hosted (at home) but I simply don't have enough bandwidth to host it (that box will be used to serve uber-lightweight static pages and a koji instance only).

And since I've been mostly blogging about Qt and KDE in the past, I think that this is the best place to host my blog.

See ya!

yes it's been a fun ride. For the past 18 months, I had a nice job, but since yesterday not anymore. I think it's a nice occasion to look at all the stuff that eat all the space on my hard disks and see what can be reused and released as opensource.

but for now time to relax and enjoy the simple pleasure of doing nothing, of having nothing to do and also not having to be at the office on time ... this is life ... except without the $$$

The best compliment for you, KDE devs, ever:

"Daddy you have a new computer!"

-- my ~4 years old son Michał, yesterday while sitting with me at a (4 years old) ASUS notebook rebooted from Vista to Linux+KDE 4.2.3...

Well, today I was let go after being at Platform Computing working on our Open Source software for almost 5 years. It's been one of those up and downer days. I read the FLOSS blog postings from all the different communities and see people being let go and now I'm one of them

The writing was on the wall though for months, it's not like I didn't know this would happen. I just wanted to deny that It could happen, but it has happened.

When people used to say that blogs are the new usenet, they meant that discussions and flamewars which used to happen on usenet newsgroups, now happen in blogs and their comment sections.

Some bloggers even use their new publishing channel for making inquiries, i.e. the famous and infamous "dear lazyweb" postings.

See? I wrote unconsciously even used "postings", not something like "personal log entry"!

Anyway.

I've come to the conclusion that there is another shift of media going on, this time a move away from mailing lists. I have to say that I haven't yet been able to determine where the usage shifted to, so in case you have ideas, please let me know.

It is probably also quite dependent on target audience because at least our developer mailing lists seem still to be used for questions, announcements and so on.
Since, as a free software community contributor, I am primarily a developer nowadays, I wasn't aware of this change in other areas of contributions.

For example about a month ago I sent an invitation to the two main Free Software Desktop projects, cunningly addressing their "external relationship" mailing lists (or what I percieved to be their most likely mailing list for promotional activities): GNOME's marketing-list and KDE's promo list (same posting on both links, called cross posting in the good old times).

Unfortunately, I have missed the memo about switching to a different communication channel, see above.

Or neither project has any interest in getting in touch with their Austrian users or just trying to attract Austrian contributors.

I know, I know! Even thinking about this possibility is absurd, it must be the change of communication channels.

So, dear lazy web (see? can do this as well, I am quick study), if you have any hint on what this new channels are, the Austrian Free Software enthusiasts would be very greatful to know, in particular the organizers of Grazer Linuxtage.

New year means some snow and cold noses here in Warsaw, and a new job to me, this time in the mobile industry, what has rather diversified my day, and that's good. Happy 2009 to you, to your friends and family.

But I am on the KDE board too, it's not going to change. What's recently time-consuming for me is refactoring of the Native Kexi Forms. The most serious and anticipated decision is dropping the (implemented in 2004..2005) idea of the forms component reusable at a rich API level for other applications. The idea has introduced too man layers after months of development, too many to have things maintainable, with just proof-of-concept KFormDesigner being the only app using the framework except Kexi.