It feels like it was a million years ago that I was just playing around with btrfs. I am not playing around any longer—my primary workstation (also known as my laptop) has been running btrfs as its root file system for a little over a month now.

I haven’t run any benchmarks, because I don’t want to know if it tests any slower than ext4. The machine feels pretty much exactly like it did before the switch, and that is good enough for me. The only thing btrfs has been absolutely terrible at is storing QEMU/KVM disk images. That’s a bit disappointing because copy-on-write snapshots and file clones of virtual machine disk images would be quite awesome, especially once deduplication hits btrfs.

How I Configured my Subvolumes

The first thing I did was store my / in its own subvolume. This makes changing your default root subvolume easier if you later decide you don’t have a need for the original again (if something like an apt-get dist-upgrade goes awry). It also lets you keep the real default btrfs subvolume unmounted and out of the way.

I ended up with five subvolumes:

• / – The operating system and config files
• /home – All my local user home directories; there is only one user
• ~/wip – My “work in progress” directory. Most anything I am working on. I broke this one out because it is the volume I am most likely to manually snapshot
• ~/tmp – Junk. Garbage. Mostly I untar and compile things here. This one gets its own subvolume because it is likely to fill up with junk that I won’t need. If I run low on space I can clobber old snapshots of this without even giving it much though.
• ~/Downloads – My default web browser download folder. Almost exactly like the ~/tmp directory.

This layout has mostly been working pretty well. I like that I can snapshot /home without accidentally storing copies of useless data in ~/tmp and ~/Downloads. I bet I have saved a few gigabytes by not snapshotting any Linux kernel compiles sitting in ~/tmp.

Unfortunately, I realized I would always like a snapshot of ~/wip with every snapshot of /home. It isn’t a big deal in practice because it is simple enough to script.

The Verdict

I’m very happy with btrfs. The performance is great for me in all but one use case. I’ve been wanting proper read/write copy on write snapshots on my workstation ever since the first time I read about zfs a few years ago. I’m so happy to finally have them!

I haven’t yet noticed any corruption (I hope!). However, I am running backups way more often than I ever did. I lost data to a file system corruption once (reiserfs on my dual Intel Celeron 366). While running ext3 and ext4 I was really only worried about hardware failure. Now I am worried about hardware and software failure, which makes me quite a bit more nervous.

There aren’t very many good Bluetooth mice on the market. One of my favorites is the Logitech V270. It is big enough to use but still small enough to be portable. It also sips on batteries and lasts for months on a pair of AA batteries. Unfortunately, it is absolutely useless for playing FPS games. It goes to sleep after a very short time period. It wakes up fast enough that you won’t notice it when you’re just clicking around on your desktop, but if you duck behind a corner to wait for an unsuspecting victim you will certainly notice the time it takes for the V270 to wake up…

Choosing a Mouse

There wasn’t a big selection of Bluetooth mice 3-4 years ago, and I don’t want to carry a dongle when my laptop already has Bluetooth. I ended up buying a used and discontinued Logitech MX900 on [eBay][15]. It is a fine mouse even if it is a little on the heavy side. Unfortunately it drains a pair of AA batteries in two or three days and lacks a power switch.

This wasn’t a big deal until I stopped using the laptop display and switched to a pair of external monitors. I used to just use the touchpad, now I have to use a mouse…

Why Do I Need the Dock?

The Bluetooth module in my current HP Pavillion dv8t laptop is rather underpowered. The signal is so bad that my mouse is very jittery when the laptop is it its hiding spot behind my desk (my old Dell Inspiron 6400 didn’t have this problem at all). The poor signal and the need for a battery charger were two good reasons to dig out the dock that came with the MX900.

I’m convinced that Logitech has absolutely no idea how to make a decent charging cradle. I was going through all sorts of contortions and dances trying to get the mouse to actually start charging when I placed (or slammed) the mouse into the cradle. I’m also lucky if it continues charging after I walk away. We have the same sort of problem with our older Logitech Harmony remote control; I might have to try this on him as well.

How Did I Fix It?

My fix was quick, easy, cheap, and quite ugly… I made two short cylinders out of aluminum foil that matched the diameter of the little charging contacts on the cradle. Then I just put them over the contacts and mashed them down in there. They may not look pretty, but they are small enough that they aren’t very noticeable. The mouse charges properly every single time I place it in the cradle now.

I have wanted to build an arcade cabinet for a very long time. I finally decided to stop thinking about doing it and actually do it!

Some of the Inspiration

I decided that we are going to build a four player cocktail cabinet. We like the design of the Crazy Canadian’s Custom Cocktail Cabinet. We might use nice-looking stain grade wood, but I really like the look of The NEON MAME cabinet with light blue t-molding on a black cabinet.

Some of our Constraints

I think a cocktail cabinet will be more useful than an upright cabinet, since it can also double as a table. I want this build to be more like a table instead of just a standard cocktail cabinet. I don’t want to have a box underneath, I want you to be able to pull a chair up to it and put your legs underneath. I also don’t want the control panels to stick out past the glass tabletop. I am also trying to keep the tabletop at about the usual height of a desk or table.

It turns out that this isn’t going to be as easy as I thought at first. The joysticks are fairly deep and you need enough room between the control panel and the glass so that you can comfortably use the controls. Our joysticks drop about 3 inches below the top of the control panel and we think we need about 6 inches of clearance between the panel and the glass. Fudging in one inch for the glass tabletop and the covering under the panel that will put the bottom of the controls 10 inches below the tabletop.

My desk is about 30 inches high. 10 inches below that would have the controls just about sitting on my chair. We’ve been figuring the tabletop height will end up having to be somewhere around 34 inches (maybe 33 if we’re lucky!). It is a little on the high side but shouldn’t be ridiculously tall.

Our life size whiteboard diagrams have the tabletop dimensions at about 37 by 29 inches using a 24 inch LCD panel. We’ve seen some deals on 36 inch square tabletop glass (for some reason square is significantly less expensive than a rectangle).

Control Panel Layout

We will definitely be using a 4-player layout. We thought about putting two players on one of the long sides of the cabinet. That would let me put the table up against a wall and it would be great for fighting games. We think it might be a little too crowded, though, so we will probably go with one player to a side.

What Games Do I Want to Support

The most important game this cabinet needs to support is Mortal Kombat II. I was in high school when Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat II were released and we used to play quite a bit.

The four-player game I have in mind is Gauntlet), though I’m sure there will be others. There is no reason to limit the cabinet to arcade games. I was thinking Liquid War would be a good fit.

The Parts We Have So Far

I ordered joysticks, buttons, and connectors from Groovy Game Gear. I was hoping to use their GP-Wiz40. It looks like a good product and a good value (and an even better value if you don’t mind soldering). Unfortunately, we need 44 inputs, and that is four too many.

I ended up going with an I-PAC 4 from Ultimarc. It has more than enough inputs and didn’t cost much more than a pair of GP-Wiz40 controllers.

I went with the HAPP™ Super Arcade Joystick. I am surprised how happy I am with them. They work very well as an 8-way joystick and they seem to make it pretty easy to perform circular-style moves in Mortal Kombat.

I also got buttons for players one through four and six HAPP Black Horizontal Pushbuttons for each player.

The Mock-Up Test Controller

We put some holes in a piece of wood and put together a test controller. It works great. The buttons feel right and the joystick feels great. We will definitely be going with the two-rows-of-three-buttons layout, but I am unsure what sort of spacing and staggering they will have. Yes, we indeed forgot to leave room for the Player 1 button…

The test controller has very arcade-like wide button spacing: 2.0 inches between button centers on the vertical, 1.625 inches on the horizontal. It seems a little too wide; I will probably tighten that up for the final product.

Plopping the control panel down on my desk isn’t ideal. Getting the half-circle moves to go off is a little hit or miss because the controller slides around. I don’t think it will be a problem on the real controls that are bolted to the table.

How Long is this Build Going to Take?

Hopefully not too long! We’ve been talking about this and drawing on the whiteboard for probably two months so far. Now that I have actually had a controller in my hands I am getting very excited.

I just upgraded to a (way too) shiny HP Pavilion dv8t laptop and a pair of inexpensive Sceptre 1080p LCD panels. The laptop seems to work pretty well with Linux. I'm running Ubuntu 9.10 with a 2.6.34-rc1 kernel, before the laptop got here I read that the latest kernels have better support for Turbo Boost. I don't know for sure if the kernel is helping me, but nearly every piece of hardware is working fine without any tweaking. So far I am unable to control bass/treble (the sub woofer makes it pretty loud this way), it does not report how fast the battery is being drained, and I'm unable to connect to my 802.11a access point.

These Sceptre LCD panels are WAY too red. I read warnings in the comments on Newegg before I bought them but I figured they couldn't be that bad. They are. Reds and oranges are quite bright. I've tried to tone them down and I'm not very happy with any of my results. I got exactly what I paid for.

What is All This Really About?

Enough about the new hardware! My goal was to be able to plug the laptop into the monitors and have everything just work without any manual intervention. If the two Sceptres are plugged in, I want the desktop to automatically expand across them and shut off the laptop display. When they're unplugged I want it to revert to the laptop display.

Using Two Monitors with an Nvidia Card

I started with the open source driver and xrandr. Using the VGA port was not a problem. For some reason, the open source driver was unable to detect when a device was plugged into the HDMI port. The proprietary Nvidia drivers did not have this problem. My hardware is able to drive any two out of the three displays. Unfortunately, it is not even able to use the third as a mirror of one of the other two.

Controlling the Outputs from the Command Line

I found an application called disper that makes it very easy to control the active outputs from the command line. First I used the nvidia-settings application to set up the two external displays the way I wanted them. Then I exported the settings with disper:

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disper --export > ~/.disper-sceptre

Then I used nvidia-settings to set up the single laptop display and ran:

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disper --export > ~/.disper-single

disper can list the displays that are connected:

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wonko@zaphod:~$ disper --list
display DFP-0: CMO
 resolutions: 320x175, 320x200, 360x200, 320x240, 400x300, 416x312, 512x384, 640x350, 576x432, 640x400, 680x384, 720x400, 640x480, 720x450, 640x512, 700x525, 800x512, 840x525, 800x600, 960x540, 832x624, 960x600, 896x672, 928x696, 960x720, 1024x768, 1152x864, 1360x768, 1280x960, 1440x900, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1600x1024, 1680x1050, 1920x1080
display CRT-0: Sceptre X226W-1920
 resolutions: 320x240, 400x300, 512x384, 680x384, 640x480, 720x450, 700x525, 840x525, 800x600, 960x540, 832x624, 960x600, 1024x768, 1152x864, 1360x768, 1280x960, 1440x900, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1680x1050, 1920x1080
display DFP-1: Sceptre X226W-1920
 resolutions: 320x175, 320x200, 360x200, 320x240, 400x300, 416x312, 512x384, 640x350, 576x432, 640x400, 680x384, 720x400, 640x480, 720x450, 640x512, 700x525, 800x512, 840x525, 800x600, 960x540, 832x624, 960x600, 896x672, 928x696, 960x720, 1024x768, 1152x864, 1360x768, 1280x960, 1440x900, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1600x1024, 1680x1050, 1920x1080

I wrote a short daemon-style shell script that periodically checks the connected displays and passes the correct settings to disper:

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#! /bin/bash
sleep 8  # The script crashes my X server if it ran too early

while [ 1 ]; do
  if [ `disper -l | grep -c X226W-1920` == 2 ]; then
    disper -i < ~/.disper-sceptre-dual
  else
    disper -i < ~/.disper-single
    sleep 2;
    xset dpms force on  # laptop display won't wake up without this
  fi
  sleep 10
done

I needed to add the xset dpms force on line or else my display would never wake up on its own. I don't know how specific that is to my hardware.

Xinerama and Xrandr

I don’t see any reason why this couldn't be adapted to work with Xinerama and xrandr. xrandr can easily be used to detect and configure the displays. I know xrandr sometimes caused the screens to briefly go blank on my old laptop when it was detecting displays. That would be a bit problematic…

I saw an article about Stealing from Padre for Vim and I got a bit jealous that this functionality wasn't already available for Emacs. I guess I lucked out because it was very easy to make use of App::EditorTools in Emacs.

It probably took about a half hour to an hour to get this all up and running. The hardest part was actually tracking down the elisp functions that would return the current row and column of the beginning and end of a region. The terminology was just not easy to search for.

I did not include any default bindings in the package. I am still not entirely sure where their permanent home will be within my own config. For now I am using these:

(define-key cperl-mode-map (kbd "C-c e r") 'editortools-vim-renamevariable)
(define-key cperl-mode-map (kbd "C-c e t") 'editortools-vim-introducetemporaryvariable)

I don't think I want a binding for the renamepackage/renamepackagefrompath functions. I think I might set it up to call one of those automatically when I create a new file.

The elisp file can be found at:

http://rcs.patshead.com/dists/editortools-vim-el/

A Darcs repository is also available at http://rcs.patshead.com.

I am a huge fan of whiteboards. I can never have enough. Early last year I started hanging some inexpensive 4’ by 8’ melamine panels in my new home office. One of the three walls wasn’t big enough for a full sheet. I had to cut that one to 4’ by 5’.

After over a year of use I am still very happy with all 84 square feet of melamine whiteboard. When I was first purchasing the melamine, I read a lot of complaints about how hard it can be to cleanly erase them, especially after the ink has been on there for an extended period.

I am using Expo Low Odor Dry Erase Markers. I've read that they can be more problematic, but that is the only kind that were on the shelf the day I was shopping for them. One of the colors didn't like to erase very well. We hung some of the left over whiteboard inside the door of our pantry. Any colors that ended up being difficult (or ugly, like brown) ended up in there.

Most of the colors that I use have erased pretty easily even after setting in for two months or more, but at that point they usually require a bit more effort. Unfortunately, today I had my first complete failure at erasing. The area I was trying to erase had been written on for almost a full year.

I don't have any special whiteboard cleaners here. First I reached for my little bottle of screen cleaner—my own mix of a small amount of glass cleaner in water. It worked just as well as the undiluted glass cleaner I tried next, which is not at all.

Fortunately, I remembered that I had a cheap generic Mr. Clean Magic Eraser in the closet. I sprayed the whiteboard with my screen cleaner, since it was handier than water, and scrubbed away. Everything came clean with barely any elbow grease. It was quite awesome!

I am apparently not the first person to think of this.

I did see some people who were wary of using these on whiteboards because they are a mild abrasive that might eventually wear down the writing surface. These melamine boards were very inexpensive. I wouldn’t mind replacing them every few years.

My Intel 80 GB X25-M G2 in my laptop died recently. Everything was running smoothly when I shut down, but when I powered back up the BIOS couldn't see the drive any longer. Fortunately, I keep pretty good backups, and I was up and running on a spare platter drive relatively quickly.

The RMA process was pretty disappointing. Phoning Intel was the only option.

I called in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, since they are only available during business hours. My time on hold was pretty short, probably about five minutes, and it took less than 10 minutes to get the RMA rolling. I was told I'd receive an email shortly with RMA instructions.

I didn't receive an email. At that point it was after business hours so I used their web-based form to submit a question. I included my RMA and case numbers, and I never heard back from them.

At this point there is a delay that is completely my fault. I didn't get a chance to call back until a week, later on Monday, February 8. It turned out they got my email address wrong. I pronounced my email address and I spelled it to them letter for letter. They didn't only have it wrong, they were short on characters…

I was happy with the turn around time on the package. I had the drive at the post office on Tuesday, February 9, and the new drive arrived at my door on Tuesday, February 16.

The night of my second call to Intel I realized there was a pretty good chance they also didn't get my address correct. They do not include your shipping address in the RMA email. This time I emailed the address listed in the RMA email, which is rma@mailbox.intel.com. I never heard anything back.

My Overall Opinion

I was happy with the service once I was able to get to the point where they were actually able to ship the drive out. I'm generally unhappy with their telephone support, and I am extremely disappointed with their email communications.

I Sure Did Miss the SSD

Certain tasks were noticeably slower. Most of the time the performance difference isn't something you can feel, but some disk intensive tasks are significantly faster with the SSD. Things like booting, installing and updating numerous packages with apt, and importing photos into F-Spot are at least twice as fast with the X25.

The thing I noticed most was the heat. When I first moved from the old hot platter drive to the X25 I didn't think the difference was so dramatic. Running on the SSD for months sure made the platter drive feel scary hot. The SSD is warm underneath the laptop where there is only a piece of plastic covering and physically touching the drive.

The platter drive even made the top of the laptop very warm to the touch. The difference in temperature is huge.

• Update: The replacement drive died in the middle or April 2010 (about 3 months later). It died in a different make/model laptop, my new HP DV8T, but under similar circumstances. The drive was fine when the laptop was cleanly shut down; the BIOS could no longer see the drive on next boot. The replacement-for-the-replacement has been running fine since then, it is now September 2010.

I'm starting to get impatient. I really want to start running a next-generation file system. I'd like to have easy to manage sub volumes, block level checksums, and RAID-like redundancy at a higher level.

Writable snapshots are what I'm most excited about, though. Snapshots of my home directory will help protect me from accidental file deletions and modifications between backups.

I'm currently saving disk space with my QEMU disk images by juggling cloned qcow images. It should be much easier to manage some writable Btrfs snapshots instead. Deduplication would likely save me quite a bit of space as the virtual machines age. ZFS already has deduplilcation, but it sounds like deduplication won't be all that far away for Btrfs.

What are the Best Practices for a Btrfs Root File System?

I have absolutely no idea, but I think I am on the right track. I did not want to use the root of the Btrfs file system as my / file system. I created a sub volume called rootfs instead. I mounted that sub volume as / and I mounted the entire Btrfs volume under /mnt/btrfs.

Doing it this way felt pretty well organized. From this point, it would be pretty easy to create a homefs and a tmpfs. I didn't want to break out /var/ or /usr. That would make it too difficult to snapshot the operating system between upgrades.

Overview of How to Get it All Up and Running

There is a tool to convert and ext3 or ext4 file system to Btrfs. I didn't use them and I don't know if they would allow me to lay out the file system the way I was hoping. I ended up doing it the long way.

This isn't going to be a step-by-step guide. The quick overview of the steps was:

• Install Ubuntu 9.10, small ext2 or ext3 boot partition
• Compile and install kernel 2.6.32 and the latest btrfs-utils (you can skip this if you don't need snapshot removal)
• Add btrfs.ko, zlib_deflate.ko, and crc32c.ko to the initramfs
• Back up everything on the / file system
• Create a Btrfs on the old / block device, create a rootfs sub volume
• Restore the old / file system contents to the rootfs subvolume

GRUB and fstab

You'll have to change your root kernel parameter and add a rootflags parameter:

root=/dev/sda2 rootflags=subvol=rootfs

I left fstab just pointing to /dev/sda2. That seemed to be work fine and allowed me to boot from different snapshots. I also added a line to mount /dev/sda2 under /mnt/btrfs.

Taking a snapshot and booting from a snapshot

I created a snapshot of rootfs called rootfs-1 and then I performed an apt-get dist-upgrade and installed a few extra packages. It wasn't a huge change but it was enough to test booting from a snapshot.

Booting from a snapshot turned out to be easy. At the start of boot, I chose to edit the GRUB entry before booting. I just changed subvol=rootfs to subvol=rootfs-1. It would probably be pretty easy to automatically generate a GRUB menu with all the snapshots as options.

One Little GRUB Hiccup

update-grub ran fine the first time, while my root filesystem was still ext4. update-grub got angry and wouldn't update properly with a Btrfs root. I don't have a good fix for this yet—I just kept fiddling with the GRUB entries during boot.

GRUB, Btrfs, and Kernels

Being able to snapshot root will be very handy. I'd be tempted to set up some automation to snapshot root every day and at every apt-get upgrade.

Unfortunately, GRUB doesn't understand Btrfs or its snapshots. Kernels and initrd images have to be stored on a boot partition that won't support snapshots. That makes the kernel the weak link in the upgrade chain.

It would be nice if the boot loader could pull a kernel straight from the snapshot. That would let you keep your snapshots more self-contained. I don't feel this is very important, though. Snapshots of root alone will be a huge step forward.

Sorry for the Lack of Screen Shots

My X25 died this week and I didn't get around to backing up my Btrfs virtual machine. I didn't think I would need to back up that image because I was planning on deleting it after I wrote this article.

I am seriously considering giving Btrfs a try on my laptop when the replacement X25 gets here. I will post some screen shots if I do.

I bought my first Moka Express about a year ago. It is a wonderful little machine. It is very easy to use, simple to keep clean, and durable. It doesn't take up any counter space and it is easy to take with me when I travel. It also makes a good strong espresso-like coffee.

I should probably mention here that I am not a coffee aficionado. I can't tell the difference between coffee I ground today or last month. A lot of people would probably say I don't even really like coffee.

I do like French Vanilla creamer and caramel syrup, though. I don't make proper coffee beverages. I usually mix about 1/3 Moka Express coffee with 2/3 french vanilla creamer (50/50 if it's iced) with a bit of caramel syrup.

We have a Keurig K-Cup machine. I can only get a strong enough brew out of it to make a coffee the way I like if I use the iced-coffee (3.25 oz) setting and use it to make a hot coffee. Even on that setting it is much, much weaker than what comes out of the Moka Express. It may not be as strong, but it sure is fast and convenient.

I've learned a lot about brewing coffee with the Moka Express over the last 12 months. Some of what I learned is exactly the opposite of what "The Internet" told me.

Don't Grind the Coffee Too Fine, Watch Out For Dust

The first batches of coffee I made with my Moka Express were awesome. After a while, things got bitter. Tiny grounds of coffee were making it through the filter into my beverage.

It turned out that the pre-ground coffee we had lying around was probably processed with a blade-style grinder. No matter how coarse the grind, a blade grinder will generate tiny grains of coffee dust. These pass right through the metal filter and make the brew extremely bitter.

My first attempts at grinding my own beans failed in the same way, since I was using a cheap blade-type grinder. I picked up an inexpensive Nesco burr grinder. Now my brews are consistent and taste better than ever.

My good friend, "The Internet," told me to grind the beans finer than for a drip machine. I'm actually getting much better results on a slightly coarser setting (the 6.5-7.0 setting on my Nesco grinder).

When I ground too fine the water couldn't get through the grounds. The valve would whistle, it'd take forever to brew, and it would taste terrible.

I've made plenty of tasty non-bitter coffee with pre-ground mass-produced coffee. If you're buying pre-ground, you will just have to find one that works. You can also probably grind the coffee in the store.

It is OK to Pack the Coffee

You sure don't want to tamp it down like you would in an espresso machine, but I do lightly pack the coffee into the pot. I probably fit an extra teaspoon or more in there this way.

You know you packed it too tight if the pressure release valve starts whistling.

How Much Heat?

I've read all sorts of ideas related to applying heat…

I crank the stove up all the way. Right before the coffee starts flowing, you'll recognize the sound; I turn it down to about half heat. It brews quite a bit slower than at full heat and it seems to taste better. I haven't really done any sort of blind taste test here, though.

Light or Dark Roast?

This is more about personal taste than anything else. I prefer to use a lighter roast. I've been buying huge, cheap bags of Sam's Club brand breakfast blend coffee. We're happy with the taste and the price.

We managed to buy a huge bag of Sam's Club French Roast coffee. We really didn't know our coffee lingo at the time. We did not know that French Roast was the darkest over-burnt coffee. I feel it is way too dark. It has been handy to have around, though. I sometimes throw a few spoonfuls in with the breakfast blend if we want a darker-tasting coffee.

Is it Hard to Keep Clean?

My old friend, "The Internet," tells me that the coffee tastes better when the walls of the pot are coated with coffee oils. I don't actually know if this is true or not.

I rarely use any soap to clean it, though. As long as I use the pot every other day or so, I just take it apart and rinse it before each use. Just make sure you empty and rinse the top of the pot out after you use it. If you don't you will have scrub out the dried out, caked-on day old-coffee.

How Does it Compare to Proper Espresso?

I have absolutely no idea. I do know that the Moka Express produces a much stronger, more caffeinated brew than a drip machine. They are also much cheaper than a proper Espresso machine and seem easier to maintain.

I've been fairly unhappy with the battery life of my G1. With the stock 1150mAh battery, I am lucky to get 12 hours out of it most of the time. I was once able to use 49% of my battery in an hour and a half by driving to a doctor's office and surfing the web in the waiting room… Bluetooth was at the top of the list of battery consumers, so be sure to turn that off if you don't need it.

I found a cheap 2300mAh battery at dealextreme.com. I've ordered lots of cheap gadgets and cables from them in the past, so I figured it'd be worth spending $11.22 at this battery to try it out. They ship their items, slowly, from Hong Kong. I think it took about 3 weeks to get the battery.

How long does it last?

I haven't actually run it down to empty yet. The first day I had it, I ran it down to 25% in a little over 19 hours. I had everything enabled except Bluetooth. I watched a little over an hour of video, listened to some SHOUTcast radio with Tunewiki, played a bunch of games, read email, and surfed the web. I tried to use the phone as often as I could. That last 25% should easily have put it over 24 hours, but I was tired and I needed a full battery for the next day.

Just how big is that thing, anyway?

I looked at a lot of batteries. Nobody seems to give dimensions. Unfortunately, I don't have anything terribly accurate like a caliper to measure this thing with. I did come up with an easy way to convey the difference in thickness between the stock battery cover and this new battery cover.

The top part of the battery cover that sits over the camera is probably identical in thickness to the stock battery cover. Just below the camera it gets thicker and it maintains that thickness all the way to the bottom of the phone. I was able to stack 3 pennies on the shallow side of the cover and it came out pretty flush with the deep side. My good friend Wikipedia tells me that a United States Penny is 1.55mm thick.

My math tells me that the thickness of my phone has increased from 17.1mm to about 21.75mm. That puts it just a smidge under the thickness of my old Treo 650. I think I can live with that.

Is it heavy? Does the cover fit well?

I may not have a caliper handy, but I do have access to a shipping scale! The stock battery came out at 25g; the beefy new battery came out at 45g.

The first time I put the cover on the phone it didn't feel like it was going to fit. I may have had to press it on a little harder, but it fits very snugly with no gaps anywhere.

Update 2010-01-06:

My phone has mostly been sitting idle the last few days and I forgot to put it on the charger last night. The battery use applet is showing that I've been unplugged for a few minutes shy of 39 hours, with 29% capacity remaining. The three biggest battery wasters seem to be Cell Standby, Bluetooth, and Phone Idle, all clocking in at 29%. Wi-Fi clocked in at 9%, Voice Calls at 6%, and Display at 2%. I was on the phone for about 45 minutes.

All the power-wasting goodies were turned on—GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Sync. It probably helps that I live about a quarter of a mile from a cell tower.