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Comment by daok | Hacker News Reader

Am I reading correctly that he is using his CPU to heat his room...?

I have a script in my ~/bin that does some very inefficient calculations on some numbers from /dev/random. It is called heat.py and used to get run in the winter, when I lived in a less than ideal place with a barely working heater and poor insulation. Definitely made a difference.

Would you care to post that? I am going to have some problems in my new place.

Can't right now, as apparently my home internet connection is down. Off the top of my head tho, basically I used python's random module, and got a random int, and a random float, then did a bunch of pow(rfloat, rint) and multiplications in loops and bit shifts and so on. Basically i tried to utilize all the parts of the CPU I could think of, and keep the cpu usage pegged.

Better yet:

   apt-get install cpuburn

Alternatively, you could use Prime95. Run it in stress test mode and it should heat your room just fine.

http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft/#newusers

I used to live over a garage and during the winter it would get freezing cold in my room even with the heat on. I left my tower on all the time running World Community Grid to keep the place warm.

Conversely, during the Summer it would become unbearable to even operate my tower so it was a great incentive to turn it off, save electricity, and go outside.

Don't knock it until you've tried it.

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