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Stopping Dwarf Fortress melting my laptop..

OmnutiaOmnutia
edited August 2008 in Everything Else
Title says it all, once I get past 50 dwarfs in my fortress the CPU temp goes into the high 60s which may be ok for a desktop but I am not comfortable with that much heat, especially as it comes up through the keyboard.
I've been looking at the pads which cool the underside of your laptop but wanted to try feeding air directly into the intake on the bottom of the laptop. If I could somehow rig up a larger desktop sized fan it should also run quieter (thankfully the whining noise has gone). My laptop is already about 1.5cm off the desk.

Questions:
1) Would sucking air out of the outake have the same effect as blowing into the intake?
2) Does anyone know of any prebuilt/documented-DIY ways of doing this?

Comments

  • OmnutiaOmnutia
    edited August 2008
    Similar idea drops the CPU temp 10 degrees (Celsius) but I want to attach a full size desktop fan to make it quiet as well.
    Post edited by Omnutia on
  • thaneofcawdorthaneofcawdor
    You are not alone:
    06/11/2008: I folded some supermarket receipts into little boxes and used them to elevate my laptop further off the desk and positioned my desk fan to blast air through the resulting tunnel. That lowered the temperature by 10C, and I got through world generation on the same seed that acted up before, so I guess heat was the problem.
  • AprecheApreche
    There is only one real solution. In all honesty, as awesome as Dwarf Fortress is in the ways it is awesome, it is programmed very poorly. As you heard in our interview, he refuses to open source it. Everyone seems to think that the game is just so awesome and complex, and that is why it must use so much CPU. That is not true. If Dwarf Fortress were re-programmed properly, it would fly. This is the #1 reason I do not play it, and will not play it until such a time when it is either open sourced, or a team of professional developers reworks it.
  • thaneofcawdorthaneofcawdor
    There is only one real solution. In all honesty, as awesome as Dwarf Fortress is in the ways it is awesome, it is programmed very poorly. As you heard in our interview, he refuses to open source it. Everyone seems to think that the game is just so awesome and complex, and that is why it must use so much CPU. That is not true. If Dwarf Fortress were re-programmed properly, it would fly. This is the #1 reason I do not play it, and will not play it until such a time when it is either open sourced, or a team of professional developers reworks it.
    Then my guess is that you'll never play it again. It won't be open sourced, because Tarn believes it would destroy his donation income, and it won't be bought, because it's far too niche to sell to a broader audience, and also probably too poorly coded to be easily understood by an outsider.

    Me, I'm willing to tolerate it because it is unique and has so much potential, but I understand fully why someone would walk away. I just hope one day some genius comes up with a better implementation of the same idea.
  • AprecheApreche
    I just hope one day some genius comes up with a better implementation of the same idea.
    It won't take a genius. Someone with my level of skill could easily recreate the same game with a better user interface and proper multi-threading. I think the only reason nobody has done it yet is because nobody wants to.
  • OmnutiaOmnutia
    I'm getting the "Thinking like a Computer Scientist" book in a few days. Could I program a relatively complex ASCII RPG/town building game using that? More along the lines of Animal Forest/Crossing though.

    Another question about fans, does reversing the polarity on a fan get the same air flow in the other direction or would the fins need to be changed. The reason I ask this is that I have one of those radial slot extractor fans which would fit into a smaller gap more easily.
  • ......
    Another question about fans, does reversing the polarity on a fan get the same air flow in the other direction or would the fins need to be changed. The reason I ask this is that I have one of those radial slot extractor fans which would fit into a smaller gap more easily.
    Depends, look at the fan, if the fins are curved they won't create the same airflow, if they are straight and at a 45 degree angle, they will push the same amount of air around in whatever direction. If reversing the polarity will make it spin at all.
  • AprecheApreche
    I'm getting the "Thinking like a Computer Scientist" book in a few days. Could I program a relatively complex ASCII RPG/town building game using that? More along the lines of Animal Forest/Crossing though.
    You will learn the fundamentals of object oriented programming using Python. If you truly learn and understand those fundamentals, you will theoretically be able to program almost anything. If you want to do ascii stuff specifically, I suggest looking into the curses or ncurses python modules. That is, of course, after you learn about using modules.
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