Monthly Archives: August 2006

I went out for beer and curry with my good friends Graham, Tom and Andy. The night started off in The Crown Tavern where a few glasses of Star were consumed whilst we all mulled over what it’s like to be a techy at the bottom of the pile in the corporations of today. We recounted stories of the usual lack of planning, underinvestment in administrative resources and a lack of appreciation of technological limitations of IT infrastructure. All that over a few pints, it was great to vent a little.

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