Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Enable/Disable Toshiba TouchPad Utility

I was rummaging through the services in my (issued) Toshiba Satellite A50 and disabled some processes and accidentally one of them was the TouchPad utility.


This morning when I turned the laptop on, I could only move the cursor by using the mouse, not the touchpad. I tried enabling it like the way I disabled it yesterday, by right-clicking the tray icon, but to no avail.

Then I learned of the shortcut key for enabling/disabling the TouchPad Utility, just by pressing Fn+F9. This toggles the status of the TouchPad utility.

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Blackle: Black Google

Blackle

Here's an interesting bit I got from one of my Y! groups. Just thought to share this also:


When your computer screen is white - an empty word page, or the Google page - your computer consumes 74 watts; and when its black, it consumes only 59 watts. Mark Ontkush wrote an article about the energy saving that would be achieved if Google had a black screen, taking in account the huge number of page views, according to his calculations, 750 mega watts/hour per year would be saved.

How is saving energy?

Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. "Image displayed is primarily a function of the user's color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen." Roberson et al, 2002

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.

We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly, we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.
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