During the last interstate road trip, we purchased a 300W electrical power inverter and installed it in the car. It enabled us to recharge our laptop and a swag of electrical equipment using the 12V car electrical system. At the end of the trip a fuse blew so I took some photographs of the auto fuse system, the repair and the inverter and the power point that we used. You can view a slideshow I made for my science students.

Talking about power points .. one of the great ways to make e-friends when traveling overseas with the ACCE 2008 study tour crew was to carry a power board. We would walk about airport terminals looking for power wall points to jointly plug in our laptops to charge etc. I am getting better at spotting them near cafes, pylons or behind vending machines.

Only once I have been asked to move on in Federation Square when somebody accused me of stealing electricity from under a table in their courtyard. I apologised, and took my patronage elsewhere. I wonder what I would be taking if I was to use a solar panel to recharge from their indoor lighting. Probably an urban myth but I did hear of one farmer that was able to tap electricity from the Km of overhead power cables spanning his property by the current induced in his fencing wires.

The day might come when student lockers come with a power point, unless of course the thoughts of students hand-cranking their own electricity has more appeal. Then again, with enough twists and a good induction system, they could be cranking their way into the school grid to generate enough electricity and energy to pay off their lunch. Certainly sounds more productive than making them jog around the school oval to warm up. Imagine issuing a 103 Kilo Joule energy debit to be filled instead of a one hour after-school detention?

I stumbled across a good website with some VMWare utilities including a commandline switch that allows me to automatically start up my Ubuntu virtual machine whenever I powerup on my laptop. Very handy page with many command line programs that can replace and/or supplement the VMware's official VMwareTools.

Over the past few months I have tinkered with Ubuntu using a swag of different environments ranging from full installations, dual boot and virtual machines. I notice some blog posts by users that have struck some grief when they have attempted a dual boot Windows - Ubuntu setup. Although they often have a good technical background it seems that they still strike the odd problem with the grub, NT boot loader, drivers etc.

If anybody is interested in exploring or tinkering with a Linux installation on a laptop or work computer, I would highly recommend that they start with a virtual machine installation with software such as VMWare.

With VMWare, tapping Ctrl-Alt-Enter on my laptop keyboard switches to a full screen mode, tapping Ctrl-Alt switches between the two operating systems on the fly. Even just plugging in a plain old USB key allows files to be swaped between the two operating systems. A virtual computer HDD file can be copied to another computer, launched from an external USB HDD or recovered from a previous state with a snapshot restore.

Playing about with an operating system this way is a great way to learn without the fear of messing up an existing computer system. Running an operating system this way has also helped me to better appreciate the power of virtual computing.