I received a mail from a friend – Jerry – asking if my Dell was one of the exploding ones.
According to the BBC Dell are recalling a load of batteries for safety reasons.
I have a Dell Inspiron XPS laptop which may be affected by this. I am at work, and my laptop is at home though! It may be burning down my house right now!
No matter, I simply logon remotely to my laptop using SSH and execute the following command.
alan@hactar:~$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info present: yes design capacity: 7200 mAh last full capacity: 6856 mAh battery technology: rechargeable design voltage: 11100 mV design capacity warning: 720 mAh design capacity low: 218 mAh capacity granularity 1: 72 mAh capacity granularity 2: 72 mAh model number: DELL C54475 serial number: 1082 battery type: LION OEM info: Sanyo
Not a battery in the list on the website – yay! Linux to the rescue again. Of course if it was then I’d issue shutdown -h now" to shut it down.
Yes Jerry, I can turn *any* conversation into one about Linux 
