Hmmm... this past weekend I got it too. And it seems to be recurring rather constantly... The odd thing was, I caught it with the battery drained to 7 hours (standby), the back cover was hot, but there were no processes running with over 4 minutes of CPU time (Xomap and hildon-desktop were about tied at that). So whatever is the problem seems to exit when I wake the tablet?

I can't judge about good-looking and cool, but here's a script anyway:
Actually, if you have battery-status installed, you can run it with -d1 to see the battery status every minute, but that doesn't get you a processes. Also, if you want to prune the header info from the top report, you can use this version:

Me too with my N800
I notice occasional warm back, drained battery. Friday night it was left on charge over night but reported only 1-hour life in the morning. Power-off and restarted and I was able to charge it normally and the back cooled off. There were no applications running (only OMWeather and RSS feeder applets both set to manual update), off-line mode. I have no alarms set.

Seems to me like some hardware is not shut down properly or tries to start up (e.g. for polled connection - s/w updates?) but is not visible due to it being disabled. The only possible devices I can think of are:
WiFi (used daily)
Bluetooth (not used recently, but enabled when on-line)
DSP (used occasionally)
FM Radio (not used for ages unless MediaBox has turned it on despite me not going to that feature)
Camera (not popped out and no picture apps used for ages)
Battery

Is there any way of monitoring if these things are enabled?
What hardware is near the rear behind where the D-pad is?

Just some ponderings,

Graham.

Hmm, I had turned off my n800 the night before (left my charger at College Park) so I decided to conserve the battery. Turned it back on today and there was less then one hour of charge remaining.. (WTF?)

I have also seen shortened life. I will report this, but it may be difficult to quantify...

i cant say for sure, but i seem to have observed that while it takes a nice long time to show less the full battery on the graphical indicator, it will drop very quickly when it starts showing less then full.

and if it starts complaining about being near empty, no chance of leaving it over night with screen locked and all connections off.

I have noticed this sort of thing also. I simply put in a different cheap Hong Kong battery and am back in business, so I don't pay much attention.

Once the bar gets down to about 25% for me, it can plunge pretty quickly to red. The graph does not appear scaled to the actual life left.

I've also seen it show 50% availability, but the tablet start acting oddly (screen refusing input for one)... after a reboot, the battery graphic then only has a thin red line.

so all in all, that indicator in the corner is less the useful when trying to approximate how much time one have left before the device will power down?

It can be, yes.

and i thought it was my imagination...
i am not a developer or even a linux guru-but a "mechanic" this is my anecdotal evidence

something has been eating my power like nobodies business in the recent past.... it seemed like when i closed the slider the unit would not "lock" i then kept remembering to slide the lock key at top and that worked some of the time.... i tried something which seems to have worked in conjunction with sliding the lock key- i removed all of my desktop applets (i was using google search and omweather along with gpe summary ) and my battery drain seems to have stopped...

am i the only person who has auto-lock installed on diablo who has this issue??