I received an IBM Thanks! award recently from Darren for helping out with the Feel Good Inc. Extreme Blue project. One of the choices was a ‘Recycled Office Pack’ which sounded interesting and so I thought I’d go for that:

All items say things like ‘made from recycled paper and card’, ‘using sustainable timber’ etc.

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A simple thing but one that made me feel quite virtuous. I’ve written a very very simple script that turns off the screen whenever I lock the computer. Should save some energy every time I go to a meeting or off for a cuppa.

For anyone interested, it’s a Perl script which watches for the D-Bus signals from gnome-screensaver. Code is as follows:

my $cmd = "dbus-monitor --session \"type='signal',interface='org.gnome.ScreenSaver',member='SessionIdleChanged'\"";
open (IN, "$cmd |");
while () {
  if (m/^\s+boolean true/) {
    system(’/etc/acpi/screenblank.sh’)
  }
}


Note that it relies you running Linux, using GNOME and there being a screen blanking script ‘/etc/acpi/screenblank.sh‘ (which in turn executes ‘/usr/share/acpi-support/screenblank‘ for every display). Not too much to ask I’m sure

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