I write this quietly freezing next to my computer.

This makes a change as usually my computer gives of sufficient heat to keep the room warm let alone myself but as temperatures plummet and the snow settles even this modicum of warmth has dissipated.

Mind you, the computer isn’t doing much at the moment so the chips are quite cool (33 degrees the sensor tells me) so maybe if I  start a taxing task for it so things will heat up.

Fabrice Bellard may have the answer, he is a computer scientist who recently calculated pi to 2.7 trillion places and all on a PC. This incredible calculation took 131 days and beats the last calculation performed at the University of Tsukuba in Japan by 100 million digits. The university used a T2K Open Supercomputer which only took 29 hours but then that computer costs 2,000 times more than the desktop PC used by Bellard.

However, 131 days will see us well into May and then it should be much warmer and having a PC belt out to much heat during warm weather is likely to be troublesome. So may be something a bit shorter.

I could start using the computer as part of the World Community Grid which has several advantages. First, it will use the graphic chips as well as the processor so that is more heat, Second, I can halt the computations half way through thus stop generating heat during warm weather and third it does important work that benefits mankind.

Well, that seems alright but then when I want to do any work the grid client will stop and the PC will cease to generate the heat. Think again!

I could fire up a PC game, I have a few recent games that really tax the computer and that should kick out a few degrees of heat but then I will have to continue playing games to keep warm and I do have other work to do.

No, there is nothing else for it, I will have to switch the heating on.