In response to mjg59 (http://mjg59.livejournal.com/57875.html)‘s rant about controlling the LCD brightness on laptops, I invested some time to reverse engineer the Windows driver of my MSI S270 (http://0pointer.de/lennart/tchibo.html) laptop which implements changing LCD brightness. It requires some ugly fiddling with registers of the “embedded controller” on ports 0x62 and 0x66. The result of my work is s270ctrl (http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/s270ctrl/), a small userspace utility. I’m planning to turn this into a proper kernel module soon.