How I found my lost graphics card

Once upon a time … a friend of mine gave me his graphics card for development purposes. After a while he needed it, because his card died in a thermal inferno. So I had to give it back – and ordered a new one. Meanwhile I wanted to use my old card, but I wasn’t able to find it anywhere in my room. Then I remembered that another friend of mine wanted to test a mulithead environment with the card. Ok, I thought by my self, I will call him later and ask him to give me my graphics card back.

A few days later … I was just updating my Gentoo (Linux). I looked up the system configuration with lsusb and lspci. I was very surprised to read the following line:

03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Matrox Graphics, Inc. G400/G450 (rev 82).

Ok, now I know where my graphics card is :-)

The Cup Warmer Investigation (Part #2)

Welcome to the next chapter of the cup warmer investigation. Unfortunately, this is another one which is rather sad. In the first part, I mentioned my idea to put more heat-conductive paste on the lower side of the heating plate. That’s exactly what I tried this time. I don’t want to sound like Marvin the robot from the Guide, but somehow I think the cup warmer doesn’t respect my needs. It just lets me sit here at my desk working all the time without giving me a chance to prove my cleverness by drinking hot coffee.

In fact, my experiment didn’t turn out to help in any way at all. The plate is still cold at its borders. But hmmm, someone here in the office suggested plugging the device into a standard power outlet…