For Europeans, August is usually a hot and turbulent month. Day after day the cloudless sky and scorching sun allow the fruits to ripen and turn our locals into various shades of pink. This month’s hacker camp is a lazy day of cool projects and a hot night of lasers, Club-Mate and electronic music. The tent is warm enough under the night sky without the need for sleeping bags.
But sometimes, the whims of global weather patterns have reduced the smiles of us hackers, and our warm summer vacation has become even colder. For example, on BornHack 2021, we packed up to meet the heat wave and met the Danes under the control of the northern air mass. How can hackers keep warm?
Ruthless global travel hacker world writer
It is still warm enough during the day at a low temperature of 20 degrees Celsius, but it drops even lower at night, which is a bit cold for people who are only equipped with thin summer sleeping bags. Buying a few crowns of electric heaters in nearby towns will surely become very unpopular in small events, so what is left? The answer, and the catalyst for interesting discussions in our village, is to run computationally intensive tasks on a laptop to generate enough heat for a comfortable night. For me, this means that Folding@home processed some medical research work units for the Hackaday team’s total score, but even though it turned out to be a comfortable night, did I find the best solution for calculating heating? This is the source of your opinion, so please share it in the comments below.
How to get more than 31W of power from the old Dell?
My Hackaday article was written on an Asus Chromebook or an old 2017 Dell Intel i7 laptop. Asus is not high in terms of thermal risk because it is designed as a low-power machine with frugal battery life, but by contrast, Dell is able to start the fan with the slightest notification. In addition to its four processor cores, it also has a spinning rusty disk drive, which can be beautiful and baked, a DVD drive must be good for a little heat, and a beautiful large LCD display, Unfortunately I did not use it for heating because I need to sleep. Therefore, using Folding@home I didn’t really realize the full potential of my laptop, because I was just lighting up the CPU. It uses 10W when it is free, and Folding@home can push it to 31W. Can I find an algorithm or a software to push it to the limit? Maybe I can mine a cryptocurrency, maybe I can plant Chia to warm up that disk drive instead of Folding@home, but it’s worth pointing out that 2017 Dell equipped with Intel chipsets will not make me a millionaire.
All of this opened up another discussion. Is what I’m doing is wasting computing power? Folding@home gives me a comfortable feeling of supporting medical research, but here I am concerned about the moral footprint of crypto mining in my tent. Considering that electric blower heaters do not have any benefits other than heat generation, maybe I should focus on heat.
Therefore, all the fun of heating the tent provides a fun pastime for Hackaday readers, just like a group of slightly cold hackers eating breakfast in a Danish field.how come you Get the most heat from your laptop? Distributed computing, encryption or some other specialized algorithms? Or maybe I solved this problem from the completely wrong direction, maybe I should make up something very inefficient in the amateur radio department. I’ll leave it to you!