Our cellar houses an old grey box that acts as a home server for the family. It's quite useful in a number of ways, as a file server, web server, database server, and so on. It also, traditionally, had a habit of wasting power—it's so much nicer to just have the machine running when you use it. But, with the wonders of Wake on LAN, even the “I'm too lazy to run into the cellar” argument has lost any validity it might have had.

So much for turning the box on, how about turning it off? Figuring out when nobody is using the machine and then remembering to turn it off as well is hardly a task for a mere mortal. So I wrote a script that does it for me. is_anyone_here.py checks whether anyone is logged in, and looks for any evidence of recent usage. It was written on/for a Debian GNU/Linux (lenny) system with vsftpd and samba, and may require some modifications to work properly in your environment.

Have a look at the whole script after the break.

Years ago, I used Linux because it was new and interesting to me, and I had the time and motivation to just play around with it. The fact that I switched distributions all the time was a mark of that.

At some point or points in between, it might have been the freedom.

Now, the reason is: “Why not?”; I've used GNU/Linux for ages, I can almost always make it do what I want to do when I want it – it works. Windows or Mac OS X would probably also work just as well if I was as used to them as I am used to Linux. But I'm not.

Once again, my desk is rather clean (a state that doesn't tend to last for long, let's see how long it holds this time), and I have decided to reintroduce a multi-head setup at my workstation. I've done this twice, and always enjoyed the space, and now I've also seen what it's like to have only a 20in wide flat screen sitting in front of you. In addition to that, I made sure there was a place for my laptop, as the recent acquisition of a PCMCIA network card made it desktop-compatible once again.

To spice things up a bit, and, I'll be honest, to spare myself the tedious labour of stretching toward my laptop whenever I want to use it, I've started using one quite magnificent piece of software called Synergy. What Synergy does is, quite simply, allow me to control my laptop with my desktop's keyboard and mouse (over the network). This feels just like having multiple X11 displays: I just move my mouse pointer off the left edge of my big screen and focus is on my laptop. This allows me, for instance, to have an IRC client running on the wee laptop screen without really being distracting :-)

By the way, the video deliberately placed on the right-hand screen in the photograph is one of Julien Doré's extremely arty «Les Limites»-clips. Grep Youtube for it if you will.