My personal laptop is out of commission until Monday. The power cable has been dealing with a bad kink and it's been getting worse. A few months ago I wrapped some tape around it to try and protect it. Yesterday morning, as I picked the laptop up I heard crackling and looked at the tape on the cable abd saw sparks. Needless to say, the cable was immediately unplugged.
I ordered a replacement with same-day delivery but sadly when it arrived it turns out I had ordered the wrong replacement. I've ordered another one, which is slated to arrive tomorrow. I'll have to survive until then.
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Spacetop, a laptop with no screen
Instead of a screen it uses tethered AR glasses. Interesting concept from this article. At $2,000 it's a steep purchase for early adopters, and with only 1,000 initially available it's definitely not going to be showing up everywhere. But I think this concept has some interesting space for technology to play in. Screens burn a lot of battery and add a lot of cost to machines. I'll be curious to see how those who get the real device report around things like battery life.
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Introducing the new and upgraded Framework Laptop
I'm excited to see they are updating the laptop and that this hopefully means continues sales and growth for the company. I don't need a new laptop, and probably won't for a few years (knock on wood,) but when I do - I will be seriously looking at Framework.
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As noted previously, it is time I replace Turk. Its replacement arrives tomorrow, and I have decided to name it Ted, after Ted Lasso. A fun merging of my naming conventions between TV characters (Marvin & Turk) and my server names after soccer coaches (Klopp & Schmetz.)
I have been running Lubuntu on Turk, largely to ensure it ran well on the older hardware. Ted will be a much newer and more powerful laptop. Not quite top tier, but definitely leagues ahead of Turk. Given that, I am planning to keep Ted as a dual boot system, with it running Windows as well as Linux. I have decided to give OpenSUSE a go, so we will see how I like it. Otherwise I might soon be replacing it with Ubuntu or one of its variants.
The new machine will arrive tomorrow, and with it I'll begin moving in.
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Replacing Turk
After a number of years, it is finally time to replace my long in the tooth Acer laptop. It's nearly four years old, but it was a budget purchase at the time and I had a number of issues with it. Only after replacing the hard drive and switching it over to boot on Linux, did I get it to work. Since then it's been my daily driver for non-work stuff. It is far from a beast of a machine, but it got the job done for my uses (internet, coding, Minecraft, etc.)
After doing some research I decided to go with a beefier machine that was on sale at Costco, an MSI gamer laptop. I don't plan to use it for gaming, but given that I spend 99% of the time I'm using it plugged in, I figured the beefier specs were good.
The real question is what to name the machine. Is it Turk2? Or is it something new?
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This morning I decided, on a lark, to switch my Linux laptop to another distro. I've been using Lubuntu, which has worked fine. My biggest complaint with it was that it would bog down and sometimes crash if I dared have too many tabs open on Firefox and a big project for coding. Also, it just wasn't very pleasing to interact with. It was functional and fine.
So this morning, after perusing some other lower spec Linux distros, I decided to give Bunsenlabs a try. It's a Debian-based distro, the same underlying distro as Ubuntu/Lubuntu, though they have different layers in between. And so far, it's very nice. The graphics and feel are smoother and no crashing, yet. But I haven't really put it under load so we will see how it progresses.
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