Hacks and Gadgets by HJL

I have an Ott-Lite desk lamp. It puts out a nice white light which is great for reading and task work, but it also emits a modest buzzing / humming sound. I think the sound is from a transformer or some other part of the power supply for the fluorescent tube. I can make it stop if I press firmly on the middle, but it resumes as soon as I let go.

The Ott-Lite is by far the loudest piece of equipment in my office, since I’ve gotten the computers running virtually silent now.

Anyone know how to make the buzzing stop? I’ve tried paper shims, putty, and general banging on the case with no success.

It’s too bad, since otherwise it’s a great lamp. If you have a higher tolerance for ambient noise, or work with headphones on, I’d recommend it without hesitation. I find I swap between the Ott-Lite and my halogen lamp because of the noise.

I’ve been getting comment and trackback spam lately which links to nonexistent domains named with apparently random alphanumeric strings. Here are a few examples:

• zbnmktun.com
• youxrkab.com
• nalvynnj.com
• mmpuyrmg.com
• f4hurycdhn.com
• 6gvboi8prk.com
• puhkruw526.com

I’m not sure what the objective is, since the domains don’t appear to be registered. Perhaps the idea is to run a spam campaign and see what sticks? Or trying to throw off text statistics used by anti-spam filters?

Jeremy Zawodny reports good results running Ubuntu Linux on his Thinkpad T43P.

I booted from the Ubuntu 6.06 “live” CD and ran the installer. I then rebooted the notebook and found that it detected my wireless interface just fine. The screen was properly detected at 1600×1200, the sound worked, and the TrackPad worked fine.

Then came the real test. I decided to exercise the power management features. Suspend to disk (hibernate) and suspend to RAM (suspend) worked. In both cases, it worked as well as in Windows (better in some ways) and nearly as good as a Powerbook.

I cannot overstate how important this is: Ubuntu is the first real “desktop” Linux I’ve ever seen. There’s a lot of polish to it, most of the “right” things have been hidden from non-Linux geeks, and it just works.

I’ve been reading positive reviews of Ubuntu on notebooks for a while, and actually have a partition on my Thinkpad reserved for running Linux from when I originally set up the system last year. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to chase down power management and driver problems, which has kept me away from doing anything with it. Sounds like the current Ubuntu works pretty well for notebooks, or at least Thinkpads.