I found it quite interesting that you seem to be a minority in the way you use the desktop. I would have expected you to run a tiling window manager and emacs or vim but it is somewhat refreshing (and interesting) that you use kde with konquerer as your browser and kwrite for code.

As an aside do you use konsole for you console as well?

Yes, I usually have at least 5 Konsole windows open on various desktops.

It was a very interesting read.

On a side note, I want to thank you for all you've done on security for bsd - the OS I primarily use.

Regarding the heat issue you are having with your laptop: I was having similar problems with a different laptop, and I got an "XPad Slim" (http://www.xpad4laptop.com/) cooling pad to put under it. It weighs around a pound, has no fans, and does a pretty decent job of dispersing heat from the computer. No more burning legs!

Hmm, I may try that. Thanks!

Have you tried under-volting and under-clocking your laptop to solve your heat problem?

Yes, but I don't want to give up the availability of short bursts of high CPU, so I only do this if I'm expecting to spend a significant time compiling things.

You can under-volt without reducing speed at any time. With a program like rmclock, you can switch to high frequencies on the fly like a turbo button.