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Something you don't think about every day, but something that could save you enough change to get a Big Gulp every now and then: You can take a few simple steps to drastically reduce the amount of power consumed by your computer. Especially when you're doing many things at the same time with multiple hard drives and the screen turned on at full brightness!

This article is written specifically for the 24" iMac (late 2008), but applies to pretty much any Mac that uses electricity (read: ALL of them). By following the steps in this article, you can save a bit of power, which translates into saving a small amount of change each month. And who wouldn't like a few extra nickels in this economy?

The Discovery

I recently purchased the APC Back-UPS NS 1250, and one of the most amazing features of the UPS is the ability to see how many watts are being actively consumed by a device plugged into it.

I found the results of my testing to be quite interesting. When I had the iMac running with the screen at full brightness, the computer was using the energy equivalence of an old 100 Watt tungsten (i.e. 'energy sucker') light bulb! I don't typically run the screen this bright, though, because the lighting in my computer room is typically subdued. So I turned the brightness down all the way (a comfortable level for my vision), and looked again. This time, the computer was using about 75 Watts. NICE!

(Big bright chart for visual learners).

I recently had a problem with cron on one of my Drupal sites, related to an issue I'll be posting about soon (namely, using Drupal's built-in search with more than 4.5 million entries in the search_index table). When I manually tried running cron, I got a "Cron failed" status message. I checked the log, and it said "Attempting to re-run cron while it is already running."

Apparently, something had messed up (probably due to the fact that I was messing with database tables while cron was working on them) with the previous cron job, and Drupal couldn't start a new cron job anymore. So, with the handy help of Google, I found part of a solution to my cron woes in the Drupal.org forums. Here's what I did to prevent this cron error from happening again:

Recently, an article on Accessibility appeared on Planet Drupal which caught my eye, so I clicked on it. When I was taken to the article page on d7ux.org, the banner across the top of the page caught my eye (as it was intended to do!):

Our UX Principles:

1. Make the most frequent tasks easy and less frequent tasks achievable.
2. Design for the 80%.
3. Privilege the content creator.
4. Make the default settings smart.

I think those four principles, especially numbers one and two, should be the driving force behind any web or product design.

From a marriage at which I was the photographer late last month:

It was a Wedding Mass done in the Extraordinary Form, and the whole ceremony was very solemn. Definitely not the kind of Mass that giddy multi-thousand-dollar-spending brides would love, but the kind of wedding someone who has a strong Eucharistic devotion would like!*

What a beautiful Cathedral! I could take a thousand pictures and not capture even a small part of the glory and majesty of this wonderful building.

I was running around the Cathedral trying to grab some frames to be used in the Archbishop-elect Carlson's Installation Mass literature, and I think this is my favorite frame. I set the camera on my tripod and used the IR remote to get a steady shot (I love watching people run around the place with their little cell phone cameras and small digicams (with flash turned on, of course) trying to get a picture when half the lights are out!).

Just an update... the Catholic Canonball Awards' voting begins tomorrow (Sunday, the 3rd), while nominations began earlier today for the Catholic New Media Awards (formerly known as the "Catholic Blog Awards").

Local favorites LOLSaints and Rome of the West are both up for voting in the Canonballs.