Hardware

One thing I’ve loved about ThinkPad laptops for many years, is the upgradability and repairability. Ever since the early days, it’s been possible to noodle around inside a ThinkPad.

Sadly, some of the modern X1/Ultrabook line, and some others, are less upgradable than previous generations. My year-old ThinkPad Z13 has a few options for noodling around inside though, including storage.

My Z13 shipped with Ubuntu out of the box. I wanted to try something different, but didn’t want to wipe the OS off the SSD. So I replaced the existing SSD with one of these 256GB Sabrent Rocket NVMe SSD devices for ~£45.

Back in 2021, I reviewed the Eufy RoboVac 30C (affiliate link) vacuum cleaner. I’d owned the device for three months by then. Enough time for it to chew up some socks, cables and shoelaces. In between all that, it did some vacuuming!

So I thought I’d re-visit the blog, and figure out if it’s still a decent device, three years after initially buying it.

We named him Harvey.

Harvey the cleaner, after the character played by Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction.

My loft is a treasure trove of old crap. For some reason I keep a bunch of aged useless junk up there. That includes the very first MP3 player I owned.

Behold, the Diamond Rio PMP 300. Well, the box, in all its ’90s artwork glory.

Here’s the player. It’s powered by a single AA battery for somewhere around 8 hours of playback. It’s got 32MB (yes, MegaBytes) of on-board storage. Which isn’t a tremendous amount for keeping all your favourite tracks on. There’s a small LCD display for showing track details, volume, battery status and so on.

Like many during The Event I bought an Air Fryer. Specifically I got the Pro Breeze XL 5.5L (affiliate link) from Amazon. I honestly didn’t do a tremendous amount of research, just reading a few reviews and using those as my basis for what to buy. The Pro Breeze models come in different sizes, and the reviews for the smaller model suggest the larger 5.5L one is preferable. I’m lucky enough to have enough kitchen workspace to leave it out on the side, so went for the larger model. It cost £89.99 and was delivered promptly.

“Printers are devices for causing pain and frustration. They also sometimes print stuff out.” - Me, many times over the years.

I have an HP LaserJet 100 MFP M175nw networked laser printer / scanner / copier. I’ve had it since 2013 where it’s generally worked okay most of the time. We don’t print a ton of things in this house, but when we do, it’s typically urgently required for work or school. It can drop off the network now and then, or just refuse to print sometimes. It’s always useful when it works, and frequently frustrating when it doesn’t.

My most “recent” laptop history looks a bit like this:

• Toshiba T1910cs (~1994)
• Toshiba T2100cs (~1995)
• Sony Vaio PCG-C1 (~1998)
• Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 (~2005)
• Toshiba Portege M400 (~2007)
• Apple MacBook Pro (~2010)
• ThinkPad X220 i7 (~2012)
• ThinkPad T450 i7 (~2016)

There have been other, non-primary computer devices over the years like the Intel Classmate, ASUS Transformer, Asus EEE 701 & 900, EEE 1000HA, Dell Latitudes, Toshiba AC100, Pinebook, Pinebook Pro, an Entroware Athena and, briefly a MacBook Air. I also have a collection of retro ThinkPads dating back to 1997 or so.

If you know me well in person, or online, you’ll almost certainly have heard me evangelise about the best toaster you can buy. If so, you are excused from reading any further. However, I may test you on this text at some point. So skip reading it at your peril!

There are no affiliate links in this post. I do not seek to financially benefit from your enjoyment of deliciously toasted bread. The satisfaction that you might do so though, is reward enough.

Three years ago I bought a Magewell USB HDMI capture device (affiliate link). It’s a neat, reliable and well made, if expensive device. I use it to capture the output of computers, mostly to get pixel perfect bug reports, and to make some videos for YouTube. I prefer these hardware solutions over the software screencasting counterparts, as they tend to be more reliable, and don’t consume resources on the computer being recorded.

This is a somewhat belated review, as I’ve had these headphones for over 6 months now, but I use them often enough for a long term review I think. Also, I’m no MKBHD, so this isn’t a deep dive into the audio response of these things. Set expectations accordingly. This is more of a ramble than a review.

I’m no audiophile. I tend to listen to music while working on whatever headphones are nearby. My ‘main’ ones are Scarlett Studio cans which are part of a Studio Bundle (affiliate link) I bought a few years ago. They’re wired, and pretty much tethered to my desk, for podcasting, and work calls. I needed something to use with my cellphone, a OnePlus 5.

In my messy office I have a main desk I work at. I have two portait displays on a hefty, but inexpensive BONTEC Dual Monitor Stand (affiliate link), clamped to the back, to lift the monitors up off the desk. The monitors are 3-year-old, low-end 24" ASUS VS248HR (affiliate link) “Gaming Monitor’s” 🤣.

I recently bought a Raspberry Pi 400 which also sits on my desk for quick-release arm64-action! The problem I have had with other Pi’s is the spiders web of cables needed, and additional keyboard. So when the Pi 400 came out, with integral keyboard, and ports all aligned at the back, I snagged one.