Now that I’m safely at my destination, I can continue where I left off. Recently I’ve been trying to see how long I can extend my battery life on my Thinkpad T30 (aka darkstar, running xubuntu). One of the methods I’ve been trying is not starting x (and thus not starting xfce). Of course there are a lot of variables that determine battery life, but so far under normal use I seem to get about 30 more minutes. Normal use would be internet (elinks vs firefox) and typing (nano vs open office). I’m going to continue to track battery life over time to get a better estimate over longer periods of time and for different amounts of CPU usage.