Michele Campeotto: Tag thinkpad

Flying on a ThinkPad

micampe — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 00:48:00 -0700

After my SmackPad article, some people asked in the comments if I could port that to Windows. I don’t have idea where to start, but at least now I know that it is possible to do it (and quite easy, I suspect).

Thanks to the great work of Tatsuhiko Miyagawa you can literally fly over Google Maps with your ThinkPad. That’s amazing and far more amusing than switching workspace.

It would be nice to port this one to Linux too, but I think the only way would be a Firefox extension… any takers?

Here comes the SmackPad

micampe — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 01:54:00 -0700

You probably have seen the SmackBook video where a guy smacks his laptop to switch workspace. Too bad that only works on Macs right? Not really, my ThinkPad has a device similar to the Apple Motion Sensor and it runs Linux, so it ought to be flexible and easy to tweak.

Well, I’m happy to announce that you can smack your laptop too!

Requirements:

A ThinkPad with the IBM Active Protection System
The hdaps kernel module (if sudo modprobe hdaps fails, you’re not qualified)
The wnck Python module, provided by gnome-python (if python -c "import wnck" fails, you’re not qualified either)
An EWMH compliant window manager (most modern WMs are)
The smack.py script

Run the script from a shell:

$ python smack.py

and smack your ThinkPad at will to change workspace back and forth.

Caveat: It’s not really reliable: sometimes it’ll switch in the wrong direction, especially if you try to rapdly switch more than once, but it’a toy, I don’t find it really useful.

You’re welcome to improve the detection algorithm. A basic setting is the SENS variable at the start of the script: the higher the less sensitive the script will be and the harder you’ll have to smack the laptop. Remember, ThinkPads are though, don’t risk hurting yourself with too high values.

Update: Francesco provided iSmack.py for iBooks and Powerbooks with the AMS driver.

Update 2: Andrew hacked a version that works with Compiz.

Update 3: Gervase Markham has an improved version with stabilization.

Sensor applet on a ThinkPad

micampe — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 12:12:00 -0800

It was a boring sunday morning, and friends kept telling me I should write something in here, so I looked for something to do that I could then post here.

Here we are. I recently installed a script to control the fan of my ThinkPad and I used gkrellm to keep an eye on the system’s temperature to check the laptop wasn’t melting.

I didn’t particularly like having gkrellm’s window around, so I looked on Gnome files for an applet that could do the same. I found Sensors Applet, but it only displayed the value reported by the standard ACPI driver, wich is just the CPU temperature. The ibm_acpi driver reports more values in a different file, so I went and added a ThinkPad module to Sensors Applet.

If you want to install the patched version, download Sensors Applet 1.5.2 and my patch.

Uncompress the source and apply the patch:

$ tar xzf sensors-applet-1.5.2.tar.gz
$ cd sensors-applet-1.5.2
$ patch -p1 < sensors-applet-thinkpad.diff

Build and compile as usual (you need to install the applet in the same prefix as the Gnome Panel, unless you know what you are doing):

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/
$ make
$ sudo make install

Add the applet to the panel and activate the sensors as you can see here:

I sent the patch to Alex, I hope he likes it and commits it to the official sources.