Got my chinese driving license

or: part two of How to apply for a driving license in Shanghai (for foreigners with a foreign driving license)

I went in there with my pamphlet containing the 100 questions, of which 90 must be answered correctly to get the license. Being 20 minutes early, I had to take a seat in the waiting hall of room 200, building 8. A few minutes after the the test should have begun, I heard a woman calling my chinese name, so I walked in there. They asked me to take a seat on one of six computer terminals. The screen asked me to press the enter key when ready, after which the test began. The questions were exactly those from the pamphlet, but in another order. If I remember correctly, the choices to each answer were in the same order as in the pamphlet though 😉
After about 15 minutes I had completed 97 questions after which the screen suddenly told me that I passed with a score of 97. A clerk at the right counter called me, and printed my result. With the result I had to go to the left counter, where the guy compiled some other papers and put everything into a small bag. On the bag I found instructions on what to do next: Go to the first floor, pay 55 Yuan, then go back to the second floor, counter 16 and draw a number.
After waiting for some minutes, I got my driving license freshly printed from counter 16 and could go home 🙂 That’s it! Wasn’t that hard 😉

Now I may officially drive in China! 🙂

Intel’s “powertop” gives hints on how to save power

I discovered this small ncurses based tool just yesterday… Just start it as root and it will spit out info on how often the CPU must return from C3 sleep mode to a more power consuming mode, and what the reasons are. It will also show various hints on how to reduce power consumption on your system. The tool is intended for computers with Intel mobile CPUs. It’s available through portage (sys-power/powertop).

Nice work, Intel!