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A Really Good Laptop

Entry created on 2024-08-18 (edited 2024-09-04) Authors: steeph (376) Categories: #100DaysToOffload (41) Computers (22) Laptops (2) ThinkPads (2) Languages used: en (257) edit

This entry is referencing the entry 'A Really Very Good Laptop'.

What makes a good laptop? Unknowingly I've been asking myself that question for years. I wasn't looking for a definitive answer; I wasn't making notes; But I was trying out different laptops in the hopes to find the one that is right for me. The bost one. I think I've found an answer. And a surprisingly specific one.

Of course a good battery, a good screen, good speakers, and almost every detail about a laptop can be considered important in some situation or another. But when it comes down to it, what I've made out to be most important to me is: A good keyboard (whatever that means), reliability, endurance (also when in a dirty or dusty envirement) and repairability. Although I'm not sure whether the last one should be on that list. When a laptop of mine becomes unusable because something breaks, I tend to replace it because I want to try something new, anyway. I've tried an ultrabook for a while. It's fancy, but not important to me. I've tried a powerful one in the style of a Macbook Pro and didn't like that any more than the original. I had a fable for small netbooks for a while, subnotebooks and mini notebooks as well as some modern PDAs, and still think they're all great for certain use cases. But that's not what I want as an everyday laptop. I didn't seriously try gaming notebooks or those cheap, sleek discounter laptops (because why would I?) or a workstation laptop. I don't need that power on the go. When I need that power, I use a stationary machine. After a while, I stopped looking at new laptops or ones that were released in the last 10 years when I had the intention to buy one.

15 Years Or Older

One reason why I focus on older laptops is the keyboard. No new laptop has a keyboard with a good typing experience, keys with 1.5 mm of travel space or more. Newer laptops seem to be designed to be as thin as possible above all. That is a feature with almost no use. But what I consider a good keyboard is sacrificed to design guidelines. There are good business laptops from the 2010s with a Core2 Duo CPU or newer, with 4 or 8 GB of RAM, that are still fast enough for most everyday tasks. That's what I'm using right now and what I've used for a while. The displays are at best what I consider the minimum that allows me to use it for hours from different angles without getting annoyed. But that's good enough. No 4k screen. No reason to play H.265 4k video files. So I don't usually notice that that's something that isn't possible with a Core2 Duo and old intel graphics chip anyway. Speakers also tend to be worse in older laptops. But even with modern ones with good speakers, if I want to enjoy the sound or want good bass or mix the profile myself or need volume, I rely on external speakers or headphones anyway. So there's not much of a difference. Batteries don't last as long on older laptops. But they are replacable in seconds and cheap to buy. So that's a plus for older laptops in my view. 15 to 18 year old laptops are thick and heavy compared to what's become normal. But not so much that it would be a problem to cary them all day, fit them in a bag or handle them with two hands and no table.

ThinkPad Legend

So, after hearing so many good things from so many people and having experienced something from every category I've decided to try ThinkPads for myself. Two T400s with different configuration, a T420, then an X201 that I got for free from a nice person who wanted to throw it away simply because of its age. I must admit I got hooked on the ThinkPad fan train for a bit. Those are very very good machines after all. I enjoy the price (used ThinkPads are everywhere and everybody wants to sell loads of them), the build quality, design and that's it. T4xx are good business laptops among quality good business laptops from other manufacturers. There are many, many small things that make up the ThinkPad experience of the 2010s and earlier. I appreciate the status lights, middle mouse key, track point, separate function and multimedia keys, sleek docking station and easy to open screen cover lock. But they haven't become too important to my daily life. Those details were even more plenty in even older ThinkPads (and comparible laptops, I want to say. But there weren't really many comparible machines.). IBM ThinkPads were also definitely among those with really good keyboards. I like the clickery keys in old laptops better than more modern ones. But I don't consider laptops with CPUs older than Core2 Duos as viable options for everyday machines anymore. Everyday tasks for me include playing videos embedded in web pages and editing raster images as well as vector graphics. Core2 Duos with 4 GB or more RAM work fine. Everything older than that is for retro computing tinkering tasks.

Business Machines With Good Reputation

There are other laptops from the same time to be considered. Those in the business line of HP and Dell. In my experience and personal opinion, HP EliteBooks (as well as some HP Compaq laptops) provide a superior keyboard to those of T400s, but lack some other desireable features that you can trust to find in any old ThinkPad. And Dell Latitudes tend to be reliable and withstand my lifestyle better than ThinkPads from the same period but the keyboard experience varies. Dells come in rugged variants, but more important is that they, according to my experience, handle dust and other dirt better than their competitors. EliteBook keyboards make better use of the available surface area that a 14 or 15 inch screen gives the lower half of the device. The keys are spread out more, arrow keys aren't burried in the rest, insert, home, end and paging keys get their own row to the right. A unique layout, but not stranger than that of other laptop keyboards. A new Latitude keyboard feels much nicer than an EliteBook or ThinkPad keyboard. The keys are springy. When abused for years, they become as good as their competitors, then whimpy and stale. ThinkPad and keys stop working when they meet dust and keys break when cuttings or hard dirt gets under the caps. EliteBook keys just watch and wait to be cleaned. Either are good devices. But considering that both Latitudes and EliteBooks cost 50~70% more than comparible Thinkpads, it's easy to let the choice fall back to the brand with the best reputation: ThinkPad. Surprisingly (to me) that is, in the end, ThinkPads biggest advantage.

To be continued in another entry…

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Macro photos of PC parts

Entry created on 2024-09-03 Authors: steeph (376) Categories: Macros (3) Photos (29) edit

A hot, rainy summer night. A bridge, somewhere in the north.

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WAMP 2024

Entry created on 2024-09-02 Authors: steeph (376) Categories: #100DaysToOffload (41) Camping (7) Camps (7) Events (23) Pictures (61) Languages used: en (257) Topics: Events → Camps (7) Events → Chaos → WAMP (5) edit

Das WAMP war mal wieder eine tolle Erfahrung dieses Jahr. Ich muss mich bei den Organisierenden dafür bedanken, den Besuchern einen angenehmen Urlaub und gleichzeitig ein Chaos-Event mit Programm zu bieten. Aus der Erfahrung der letzten beiden Jahren wurden Verbesserungen extrahiert und umgesetzt. Die Teilnehmerzahl ist auf etwas über 100 gestiegen. Genau so kann das WAMP meinetwegen bleiben. Ich hätte nichts dagegen, wenn noch ein paar mehr Tickets in Umlauf gebracht würden. Platz ist da. Aber es war dieses Jahr von angenehm stressfreier Größe.

Sicher gäbe es viel zu erzählen. Aber geht doch selbst mal hin, wenn es euch so interessiert. Wer Chaos-Events kennt hat anhand der hier angehängten Fotos schon einen ausreichenden Eindruck. Ich weiß, keine Bildbeschreibungen aktuell. Also zusammenfassend: Viel Platz, wiesen, ein paar Bäume, alles mit viel RGB, in der großen, offenen Holzunterkunft das Hockcenter und der Essensbereich. Ein Vortragszelt, dieses Jahr auch ein Hardware-Hacking-Zelt vom ZLT mit gutem Lötbausatzangebot, beheizter Pool, Sauna, Feuerstelle.

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The Silicon Underground Blog

Entry created on 2024-08-17 Authors: steeph (376) Categories: #100DaysToOffload (41) Blogs (5) CPUs (5) Computers (22) Retro Computing (6) Shared (17) Vintage Tech (1) Languages used: en (257) edit

I don't feel like writing because it feels like work right now. I'm in the transition to a new job. Maybe that's why my brain is fuller than last month. But I resolved to post more regularly here now. So I fall back to a simple trick: I use interesting content that somebody else has created and link to it.

There's this blog about 80s and 90s things, with on of its main focus topics being home and business computers from the 80s up until 1999. It's so interesting to learn more about the tech from back then. Like this article about the AMD Athlon. I loved tinkering with PCs at the time. I loved the Athlon and its successors even more than its predecessors. But reading the article is more than fond tinkering and gaming memories for me because I never knew about the legal surrounding and background of technological developments back then. It was slightly pre my first computer magazine subscription.

The Silicon Underground - David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more

There are a lot of posts about computers and its components, model trains, clothing and fashion, but also other things that should work both as entry points into nostalgic reminiscing and a source for interesting but likely now useless facts.

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The web is too slow for most of what it's providing.

Entry created on 2024-08-16 Authors: steeph (376) Categories: #100DaysToOffload (41) EDGE (1) Gemini (2) Mobile Internet (1) World Wide Web (10) edit

I have a certain fondness for the Gemini space ever since its initiation. I like the main idea and am continuesly glad to see it growing in size and usefulness. I imagine that this is similar to how the web looked like at some point. Although I'm not about to make a Gemini site, I sometimes end up browsing other's sites. And it's a better experience every time. New search engines and other services, new blogs, geeky, topical sites and collections. It's such a great space for consuming interesting information when you're not exclusively looking for one specific piece of information.

Recently I was reading some personal Gemini sites and regretting not having more time before initiating a long duration of sleep is inevitable, when I suddenly noticed that I wasn't connected to the WiFi I thought I was getting my internet through. I was getting my internet through an EDGE connection with one bar on my Unighertz. That is generally not enough to do anything on the web noawadays. I wouldn't even deem it enough for today's emails. Mastodon works with that kind of connection. But you have to wait a very long time for thumbnails. Twitter didn't work at that speed when it still existed. But browsing Gemini capsules it hardly makes a difference. Not different from what I expected. But having had this experience I'm even more confident now in saying that most web sites are shit. Even a page from this site with relatively few data to load besides the actual content often consists of more than 50% of things that are not the blog article (CSS, menu, markup).

I've often thought about different ways how the Web could be used in a way that provides a better experience by making sure that bloated, malicious and faux sites aren't even linked to, without impairing the usability too much. People had so many ideas. Some of them more viable than others. But neither those I've read or heard about nor those that I could come up with fundamentally solve the problem (if you want to see it as one) that the web technologies are extremely flexible and powerful to the extend that they might as well be seen as infinitely capable of any function (and resource usage) imaginable only restricted by the client and server hardware in combination with the fact (and I think it has been sufficiently proven as such by reality) that people will create web sites that make use of the possibilities simplified by the accumulation of abstraction layers built on the core web technologies. Bad web sites will be built and linked to. Avoiding them will always be a hassle and can probably only be reliable if huge cutbacks are made by excluding the majority of web sites completely. An improved web experience in the form I imagine it would likely be easiest to achieve by starting from the ground up and creating a new web, possibly by restricting to a set of older technologies. Often suggested are CSS2, (X)HTML4 and a very limited set of JS instructions, although any set of technologies in various versions, no JavaScript, a new set of HTML tags, etc. has been suggested by now. Trying to find a way to technologically realise such a new, independent web might be a moot task.

A web built exclusively on older versions of the technologies that make up the World Wide Web seems desirable. It's what I and many others are used to already. It's very easy to make sure existing web sites work as expected on that new web: If they worked in Firefox 2, they're good. But taking this idea of a new web further, one might want to modify the feature set to prevent the same development happen to parts of the new web that happened to parts of the current web. And that's exactly the path of thoughts that Solderpunk seems to have followed and that might have lead them to the feature set of Gemini. (I'm sepculating here.) I don't agree with every single design decision. But almost all have a very good reason that adresses something that went wrong with the Web.

I've come to believe that this is the way to go if you want to escape the bloated web.

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F(x)tex Pro¹ X

Entry created on 2024-08-03 Authors: steeph (376) Categories: #100DaysToOffload (41) Android (4) Batteries (7) Computer (78) Crowdfunding (4) Hands-On (3) Hardware (16) Keyboards (10) Phones (3) Smartphones (4) Languages used: en (257) edit

First of all: Look at the title. That's how the name of this device is spelled. I've never, and probably will never, be able to spell that correctly without looking it up.

I've contributed to the crowdfunding campagne in 2020. Various pandamic-related issues, a partly re-design, Chinese lock-down delays, devious shipping-issues and, during the last few years, suspected additional, unexplaned issues caused the delivery date to be postponed uncounted times. More than three years later, I've received my Pro¹ X arrived. That means that I guessed right about the makers not being the worst scum of the earth because the ran off with the money without sendind out the devices that we knew had already been produced. I don't know how this scam should have worked unless they sold the devices again to other people. But that was the general tone to which the comments on Indiegogo had goaded each other over the years.

I wanted a keyboard phone for years. I've had My experience with the Planet Computers devices, which some see as the competition. I've had more hopes for the Pro¹ X being the device I was whishing, searching and waiting for becasue it's keyboard is closer to those of the later slide-out qwerty smartphones, like Nokias N900 and because the Pro¹ X's predecessor, the Pro 1, has been reviewd positively by people with the same preferences as me.

So, the phone finally arrived. And, it didn't work. The battery hasn't been charged in years. It didn't charge. It did nothing electronic. But luckily some other campagne contributor has figured out a way to persuade the phone to charge. Interesting that they decided to send out the devices without knowing how the receipients could use them. Of course, the battery's capacity isn't what it was advertised as. In airplane mode with the display turned off and no app running the battery lasts for just over 24 hours. When used, the battery gets drained respectively quickly. But it works. Enough for a few sentences about my first experience.

The keyboard is not the theoretical ideal my brain has developed in the last 10 years. But I don't think that ideal exists. There probably are keys with a nicer preassure point and a click that feels nicer and is even more reliable. There have been in 2O02. But I didn't honestly expect that in a sub-1000-€ phone. The slide-lout mechanism is as snappy and firm as I've seen it described by users od the previous F(x)tec phone. I hope it lasts at least a few hundret times as long as the one on the Astro Slide.

The camera is fine. Much better than the alibi camera of the Titan Pocket that I'm currently using as my main phone. As it happens, I the week after I received the phone I stayed in the same hotel I was in when I tried out the Astro Slide. So I was able to make the same pointless test photos that I've posted in the Anstro Slide entry back then. (See below.) Okay resolution, mediocre sensore, unreliable auto white balance, usable but not enjoyable under artificial light (of normal brightness).

The screen is nice, which is the absolute minimum one expects in the cheapest of phones nowadays. It's bright enough, has a higher resolution than I need, has noticable colour-shift when viewed at an extreme angle. One edge is rounded, which is a first in my personal phone, but not really something I'll expect to use. It's more than fine. I don't need a display as great as what's common nowadays.

It's the best phone I had in my hands in years. The best for my preferences. If only the battery hadn't been killed by it's years-long storage period, the software would be the only thing I'd have to concern myself with in order to make this my primary phone. The pre-installed Android is very very Google-y. Not to my taste anymore. It works well, as one would expect. Not as buggy as with the Astro Slide and previous Planet Computers' Mediathek-based PDAs. Once I've installed LineageOS and replaced the battery, this may become my favourite smartphone ever. It might finally be the one to beat the Nokia 9300 for practical reasons.

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Prince Whateverer and Catastrophe at GalaCon 2024

Entry created on 2024-08-03 Authors: steeph (376) Categories: GalaCon (4) Music (5) Photos (29) Pictures (61) Prince Whateverer (1) Languages used: en (257) Topics: Events → My Little Pony (6) edit

I like seeing Prince Whateverer live. We both hope that recent years are a sign that he will be a yearly guest at this convention. That would mean that I don't have to go to another event to see him. I'll be at GalaCon anyway.

Last weekend has been the first time that I decided to take stage pictures of a rock band in years. And it was Prince Whateverer with Catastrophe at GalaCon 2024. I've made a 119 picture selection and attached it to this entry. I kind of didn't want to reduce the selection more. Although not all of the pictures are that nice or necessary to paint a picture of the concert. I did the basic post processing to the JPEG files. Let me know if you're interested in a higher resolution or a properly developed RAW of some pictures.

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New Acrylic LED Pictures

Entry created on 2024-08-02 Authors: steeph (376) Categories: #100DaysToOffload (41) Art (2) Light (4) My Little Pony (10) Pictures (61) Ponies (7) Languages used: en (257) edit

I still make st least some of these LED pictures each year to sell at GalaCon Some of them I like better than others. But there aren't really any that stand out enough for me to want to share them here. I'm making qantity above all, not investing the necessary time and effort to realise the more elaborate ideas. A sheet, a template, outlines, possibly shadows. Like the ones of which I've attached quick snapshots below (quick and dirty, including greasy fingerptints, sorry). No multiple colours, no 3D effect, no several seconds, no customised software for the LED driver. There are so man things that could be done. I'm producing what I think that people want to see at my vendow table. That's still fun. I'm just not approaching the limits of my potential, which could potentially be much more fun. I've always approached this LED picture thing like cooking for a popular restaurant. I make what I knwo people will like, plus some variety. But I'm neither a cook nor am I trying to make money with this venture. Maybe I'll explore making what I want to make more from now on. Just one more interesting picture a year, or something.

I've always had ideas for more complex LED pictures and night lights. At making some of them I've made attempts before. But Nothing that I'm proud of enough to post here. The idea to spend more time on a single picture and possibly make multiple iterations until I'm satisfied has been rekindled though by one specific conversation that I had last year with themisto97. He has made some very elaborate multi-colour LED pictures. There's Jungle Sunset, Sunset Magic, Daring Do and he told me last week that he might try and get around to adding more to his Gallery soon.

And while I'm at it, here are three more LED pictures that I like that are not just outlines: A hand-engraved Princess Luna with different area-filling styles by Ksander-Zen (more night lights from them), hand-engraved, multi-coloured Colonia by Malte279 and laser-etched, monochrome ditcher of Moon Dancer with Party Favor by VasGoTec.

Oh, look, there's an extra paragraph where a description of my ideas for multi-coloured LED pictures could be that could make somebody hold me to making them because I said I wanted to.

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