thinktime

A new cancer drug has proven capable of shrinking melanomas in clinical trials in Australia.

There has been an increase in the number of home loans taken out by owner-occupiers in July.

A 19-year-old woman and 30-year-old man have been jailed for stealing a car with three children inside.

A sniffer dog will be used in the Victoria's prisons from today to help catch inmates using mobile phones.

The New South Wales constitution now recognises Aboriginal people as the first people in the state, after the Premier introduced a new bill into parliament today.

Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott have put politics aside to farewell another Australian soldier who was killed in Afghanistan.

The six Queensland policemen involved in a drunken, naked run on Brisbane's bayside last September have returned to operational duties.

A man has pleaded not guilty to the attempted murder of two police officers in Adelaide.

Authorities in Papua New Guinea are trying to track down the family of a fisherman who was rescued by an Australian container ship last week.

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh says she will be holding Prime Minister Julia Gillard to a promise to help build the Redcliffe rail line, north of Brisbane.

US religious leaders have condemned an "anti-Muslim frenzy" in the United States, including plans by a Florida church to burn a Koran on September 11, an act a top general said could endanger American troops abroad.

Newcastle's efforts to impress the 2,000 passengers on board a cruise ship have not quite gone to plan, after a forklift truck unloading the ship ended up in the harbour.

Thousands of people have gathered in Canberra to commemorate the contribution of Australia's national servicemen.

Schools in southern Thailand have been closed for at least three days after two teachers were shot dead by militants.

Samantha Stosur has bowed out of the US Open following a roller-coaster quarter-finals defeat to defending champion Kim Clijsters.

Toyota has announced a safety recall of more than 116,000 four-wheel-drive Hilux vehicles across Australia.

A few days ago I talked about how noisy my new Dell Studio 15 was but I can now report back with the beginnings of a solution to that problem, and it doesn't appear to be ACPI related.

The first clue I needed was that if I switch to the proprietary fglrx drivers for the Radeon the fan quite quickly drops off to a much more reasonable level. It seems the fglrx drivers have issues, however, in particular I get big black patches on my screen. This video corruption happens especially in Firefox, but sometimes in other applications as well. They also appear to screw up my suspend/resume, which is probably even more annoying to me.

The second clue that I needed was that Radeon power management support has only just made it into recent kernels. Thanks to Michael Kirkland for providing me with both of those clues :-)

Looking under /sys/class/drm/ I find a whole bunch of stuff, but in particular there are /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method and /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile.

Looking through the kernel source code I can see that power_profile can be set to low, mid, high, auto and default, while power_method can be set to either dynpm or profile.

Trying out all of these values, it seems I get the quietest result with the profile method and either the low or mid profile. The dynpm method is nearly as good, and I would think it should really be the default for a 'Mobility' chipset. From the detailed benchmarking that Phoronix did I wonder if it shouldn't be the default for everyone.

For myself, I see some small 'tearing' artifacts occasionally when running with the low profile. These disappear when I run with the mid profile, and since that seems to have pretty much the same temperature (and noise) results I'll go with that one. Though the laptop often does still make more noise than I would prefer it to, it is no longer annoying everyone in the room.

Not unexpectedly this seems to have a huge impact on power use, too. It appears that the laptop should now give me around 4.5 hours when I do everything I can think of to lower the power use, whereas before it was more like 2.5 hours.

Now I guess I can get back to hacking on DAViCal...

An Australian man who was jailed in Thailand over anti-government protests has returned to Sydney.

A Railcorp officer has been jailed for two years after he made his colleagues lie about an alleged assault on a teenage boy.

Earnings from Australia's mineral and energy exports have hit their second highest level ever, according to the Government's resource economics agency.