It's not even July and TV news programs are only talking about the high temperatures in Spain. Some southern cities have already hit 50ºC, and I melt just thinking about it. Even worse, it seems Seville had massive blackouts which lasted all day, due to a very high demand caused by air conditioning. I definitely don't want to be in Seville in such situation.

I generally don't mind high temperatures. I will start ranting about the cold weather when Valencia is at 10 or 12ºC in winter, but heat I can handle pretty well. My Athlon, on the other hand, doesn't like heat at all, and just a few months after buying this box, I suffered a few sudden reboots. After removing the metal case, it got a lot better, but when summer comes it's not rare to experience a few reboots...

The other day, Barrapunto had a story about cooling your Athlon, with links to the Athlon Powersaving HOWTO and the athcool utility. I had no idea these things existed. As one may expect, athcool is packaged in Debian, so it was quite trivial to try it out. I'm still quite impressed by the result. With the powersaving mode on, the system temperature got reduced by 12 degrees or so, and now it's quite far from the dangerous "reboot" limit. I'm not experiencing any of the problems the docs talk about (distorted sound, lockups or performance hits). If you've got an Athlon box, I suggest you try this stuff, even if it's just to help your power bill next month.

Bedtime, at 27ºC :)