onetom's posterous

What's the connection between these things?

• ~1hour less battery life on my MacBook
• lagging SSH connection. can't type fluently...
• more sweat on my wrists or legs

To make the story short, if you run on batteries, my advice is:

1. Switch Gmail into standard HTML mode, so it doesn't pull advertisements or updates chat status (1-3kB/s each account)
2. Close PivotalTracker because it eats up ~1KB/s for polling state changes and prepare stories for offline usage with Pickler.

As a result, the CPU will work less (not just doesn't generate network traffic, but doesn't update the DOM to display ads..), the network interface works less (which is important if I'm connected via bluetooth), the phone battery life can be longer too and finally my SSH connections are not that sluggish during typing, since they are interrupted a lot less often and with smaller packages only.

Since I live in tropical environment, such a small change can make my laptop cooler enough to make my wrists sweat not that much if at all.

I experience from time to time how much wasting is going on everywhere and although I enjoy some benefits of these wastes myself too -because it's hard to avoid -, I can't overlook these funny drawbacks which actually causes inconveniences.

As a software developer, I feel responsible for these effects too. The inefficiencies in technologies we use nowadays are multiplied, since millions are using it, but we still have control over many of them, because a lot of them are open source.

When I write code I try to make it conservative with resources at least as an excercise. I try to promote software which follows these principles. REBOL is one of these of course, but I just noticed recently, that the father of Forth is still active at the age of 72 and he is blogging crazy shit about some low-powered supercomputer. He is the most extreme pioneer in rejecting today's complexity. He has even rejected the concept of daylight saving:

Why am I doing this? Out of disgust with Daylight Savings Time. I get up at dawn and don't care what Washington wants to call it. The cost and confusion of changing clocks twice a year is ridiculous. Especially when the dates of doing so also change. I'll live on local time.

-- Haypress Creek Weblog, 10 November 11:00 Tuesday