Technology and me in 2023...

It has become something of a tradition for me to blog about my personal use of technology in the past year about now.

There’s nothing particularly special about this year, I havn’t updated or replaced any of my machines with the exception of my putting my money where my mouth was and building a distraction free lightweight machine for research, which, because I finally finished the pandemic interrupted documentation of Dow’s pharmacy a few weeks later, hasn’t seen as much use as I hoped.

I expect that to change in the new year, but until then I’m enjoying my downtime.

The refurbished Thinkpad I bought in 2022 to allow me to finish the documentation of Dow’s gave excellent service, and will probably see me onto another documentation project.

My now five year old windows 10 laptop that sits on my desk continues to work well, and I don’t yet feel a need to upgrade it.

The only doubts I have are about the very lightweight computer I had bought a few years ago to replace my Macbook Air as a travel computer.

It gave excellent service until we were in a remote area of Tuscany - I don't think being in the foothills of the Appenines had anything to do with it, it was more a case of creeping software bloat - when it started complaining about swap space. 

As a temporary fix I deleted a whole lot stuff, told it to write everything more than a day old to OneDrive, and removed various little used applications.

That worked, but it still gets slow when using chrome with a lot (>5) tabs open.

Various solutions are possible, including converting it to Linux, and using basically the same build as I did with the lightweight research machine, perhaps with the addition of chromium and some basic photo editing software.

However, before I do that I need to check the specification carefully I have an eMMC based model (why it was so cheap in the first place) and linux support can be a bit tricky on eMMC based machines.

I actually don't know this - looking at the blogs and discussion boards some people seem to have had trouble with eMMC machines - of course you never hear of the success stories. I would assume that the eMMC device presents itself as a standard storage device, so it should work. Equally, while the machine is more or less usable, I don't particularly want to brick it - probably procrastination with a purpose is a valid way of dealing with the problem.

(Confusingly Lenovo also sell an SSD based version of the same machine in some markets and as you would expect, Linux works well on the SSD machines.)

The alternative is to buy a refurbished machine as an alternative travel computer – refurbished due to the cost, and also because I don’t really want to carry around anything with a screen size much over 12”, if only because a lot of my backpacks only really support a 12” screen size.

Basic machines tend to some with larger screens these days, making them a non starter.

Or I could just use the lightweight research machine (or indeed my Chromebook, which has the problem of having only a single USB3 port which means that I would need to carry an external card reader around for photo imports.)

All of that’s a decision for the coming year.

Again my pandemic era Huawei tablet continues to perform well as does the dogfood tablet, both doing everything I ask of them.

I still have my old mac mini and keyboard combo as a note taker, but again, since the end of the Dow’s documentation project it’s seen relatively little use.

While it seemed a big deal at the time we went from an FTTC to a pure fibre FTTP connection here at chez Moncur - after the initial hassle of the migration process it faded into the background and totally unnoticeable, as all good infrastructure upgrades should.

All in all the only major change has been my ditching an iPhone for a mid range Android phone, after being so impressed by the performance of my Oppo phone when we went travelling earlier this year.

I’ve always had a suspicion that Apple is not the most cost effective for phone purposes and that there was nothing particularly special about their hardware capability and having swapped from android to Apple’s walled garden and back again, I’m more and more sure that they are over priced for what they deliver – a bit like the early 1990’s mini computer market where Digital was clearly the dominant player, and their hardware was good and highly capable, but there were all these other newer, more cost effective, manufacturers with Unix based machines that year by year became more and more capable and eventually pushed them out of the market. These vendors in turn fell victim to Linux on upspecc'd commodity hardware...