Review – etbe – Russell Coker

Cruises and Covid19

Problems With Cruises

GQ has an insightful and detailed article about Covid19 and the Diamond Princess [1], I recommend reading it.

FastCompany has a brief article about bookings for cruises in August [2]. There have been many negative comments about this online.

The first thing to note is that the cancellation policies on those cruises are more lenient than usual and the prices are lower. So it’s not unreasonable for someone to put down a deposit on a half price holiday in the hope that Covid19 goes away (as so many prominent people have been saying it will) in the knowledge that they will get it refunded if things don’t work out. Of course if the cruise line goes bankrupt then no-one will get a refund, but I think people are expecting that won’t happen.

The GQ article highlights some serious problems with the way cruise ships operate. They have staff crammed in to small cabins and the working areas allow transmission of disease. These problems can be alleviated, they could allocate more space to staff quarters and have more capable air conditioning systems to put in more fresh air. During the life of a cruise ship significant changes are often made, replacing engines with newer more efficient models, changing the size of various rooms for entertainment, installing new waterslides, and many other changes are routinely made. Changing the staff only areas to have better ventilation and more separate space (maybe capsule-hotel style cabins with fresh air piped in) would not be a difficult change. It would take some money and some dry-dock time which would be a significant expense for cruise companies.

Cruises Are Great

People like social environments, they want to have situations where there are as many people as possible without it becoming impossible to move. Cruise ships are carefully designed for the flow of passengers. Both the layout of the ship and the schedule of events are carefully planned to avoid excessive crowds. In terms of meeting the requirement of having as many people as possible in a small area without being unable to move cruise ships are probably ideal.

Because there is a large number of people in a restricted space there are economies of scale on a cruise ship that aren’t available anywhere else. For example the main items on the menu are made in a production line process, this can only be done when you have hundreds of people sitting down to order at the same time.

The same applies to all forms of entertainment on board, they plan the events based on statistical knowledge of what people want to attend. This makes it more economical to run than land based entertainment where people can decide to go elsewhere. On a ship a certain portion of the passengers will see whatever show is presented each night, regardless of whether it’s singing, dancing, or magic.

One major advantage of cruises is that they are all inclusive. If you are on a regular holiday would you pay to see a singing or dancing show? Probably not, but if it’s included then you might as well do it – and it will be pretty good. This benefit is really appreciated by people taking kids on holidays, if kids do things like refuse to attend a performance that you were going to see or reject food once it’s served then it won’t cost any extra.

People Who Criticise Cruises

For the people who sneer at cruises, do you like going to bars? Do you like going to restaurants? Live music shows? Visiting foreign beaches? A cruise gets you all that and more for a discount price.

If Groupon had a deal that gave you a cheap hotel stay with all meals included, free non-alcoholic drinks at bars, day long entertainment for kids at the kids clubs, and two live performances every evening how many of the people who reject cruises would buy it? A typical cruise is just like a Groupon deal for non-stop entertainment from 8AM to 11PM.

Will Cruises Restart?

The entertainment options that cruises offer are greatly desired by many people. Most cruises are aimed at budget travellers, the price is cheaper than a hotel in a major city. Such cruises greatly depend on economies of scale, if they can’t get the ships filled then they would need to raise prices (thus decreasing demand) to try to make a profit. I think that some older cruise ships will be scrapped in the near future and some of the newer ships will be sold to cruise lines that cater to cheap travel (IE P&O may scrap some ships and some of the older Princess ships may be transferred to them). Overall I predict a decrease in the number of middle-class cruise ships.

For the expensive cruises (where the cheapest cabins cost over $1000US per person per night) I don’t expect any real changes, maybe they will have fewer passengers and higher prices to allow more social distancing or something.

I am certain that cruises will start again, but it’s too early to predict when. Going on a cruise is about as safe as going to a concert or a major sporting event. No-one is predicting that sporting stadiums will be closed forever or live concerts will be cancelled forever, so really no-one should expect that cruises will be cancelled forever. Whether companies that own ships or stadiums go bankrupt in the mean time is yet to be determined.

One thing that’s been happening for years is themed cruises. A group can book out an entire ship or part of a ship for a themed cruise. I expect this to become much more popular when cruises start again as it will make it easier to fill ships. In the past it seems that cruise lines let companies book their ships for events but didn’t take much of an active role in the process. I think that the management of cruise lines will look to aggressively market themed cruises to anyone who might help, for starters they could reach out to every 80s and 90s pop group – those fans are all old enough to be interested in themed cruises and the musicians won’t be asking for too much money.

Conclusion

Humans are social creatures. People want to attend events with many other people. Covid 19 won’t be the last pandemic, and it may not even be eradicated in the near future. The possibility of having a society where no-one leaves home unless they are in a hazmat suit has been explored in science fiction, but I don’t think that’s a plausible scenario for the near future and I don’t think that it’s something that will be caused by Covid 19.

Amazon Prime and Netflix

I’ve been trying both Amazon Prime and Netflix. I signed up for the month free of Amazon Prime to watch “Good Omens” and “Picard”. “Good Omens” is definitely worth the effort of setting up the month free of Amazon Prime and is worth the month’s subscription if you have used your free month in the past and Picard is ok.

Content

Amazon Prime has a medium amount of other content, I’m now paying for a month of Amazon Prime mainly because there’s enough documentaries to take a month. For reference there are plenty of good ones about war and about space exploration. There are also some really rubbish documentaries, for example a 2 part documentary about the Magna Carta where the second part starts with Grover Norquist claiming that the Magna Carta is justification for not having any taxes (the first part seemed ok).

Netflix has a lot of great content. A big problem with Netflix is that there aren’t good ways of searching and organising the content you want to watch. It would be really nice if Netflix could use some machine learning for recommendations and recommend shows based on what I’ve liked and also what I’ve disliked.

On both Netflix and Amazon when you view the details of a show it gives a short list of similar shows which is nice. With Amazon I have no complaints about that. But with Netflix the content library is so great that you get lost in a maze of links. On the Android tablet interface for Netflix it shows 12 similar shows in a grid and on the web interface it’s a row of 20 shows with looped scrolling. Then as you click a different show you get another list of 12/20 shows which will usually have some overlap with the previous one. It would be nice if you could easily swipe left on shows you don’t like to avoid having them repeatedly presented to you.

On Netflix I’ve really enjoyed the “Altered Carbon” series (which is significantly more violent than I anticipated), “Black Mirror” (the episode written by Trent Reznor and starring Miley Cyrus is particularly good), and “Love Death and Robots”. Overall I currently rate “Love Death and Robots” as in many ways the best series I’ve ever watched because the episodes are all short and get straight to the point. One advantage of online video is that they don’t need to pad episodes out or cut them short to fit a TV time slot, they can use as much time as necessary to tell the story.

Watch List

Having a single row of shows to watch is fine for the amount of content that Amazon has, but for the Netflix content you can easily get 100 shows on your watch list and it would be good to be able to search my watch list by genre (it’s a drag to flick through dozens of icons of war documentaries when I’m in the mood for an action movie as the icons are somewhat similar).

As well as a list of shows you selected to watch Netflix has a list of shows that have been recently watched with no way to edit it which is separate from the list of shows selected to watch. So if you watch 5 minutes of a show and decide that it sucks then it stays on the list until you have partially watched 10 other shows recently. For my usage the recently watched list is the most important thing as I’m watching some serial shows and wouldn’t want to go through the 100 shows on my watch list to find them. If I’ve decided that a movie sucked after watching a bit of it I don’t want to be reminded of it by seeing the icon every time I use Netflix for the next month.

Amazon has only a single “watch next” list for shows that you have watched recently and shows that you selected as worth watching. It allows editing the list which is nice, but then Amazon also often keeps shows on the list when you have finished watching them and removed them from the “to watch” setting. Amazon’s watch list is also generally buggy, at one time it decided that a movie was no longer available in my region but didn’t let me remove it from the list.

Quality

Apparently the Netflix web interface on Linux only allows 720p video while the Amazon web interface on all platforms is limited to 720p. In any case my Internet connection is probably only good enough for 1080p at most. I haven’t noticed any quality differences between Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Multiple Users

Netflix allows you to create profiles for multiple users with separate watch lists which is very handy. They also don’t have IP address restrictions so it’s a common practice for people to share a Netflix account with relatives. If you try to use Netflix when the maximum number of sessions for your account is in use it will show a list of what the other people on your account are watching (so if you share with your parents be careful about that).

Amazon doesn’t allow creating multiple profiles, but the content isn’t that great. The trend in video streaming is for proprietary content to force users to subscribe to a service. So sharing an Amazon Prime account with a few people so you want watch the proprietary content would make sense.

Watching Patterns

Sometimes when I’m particularly distracted I can’t focus on one show for any length of time. Both Amazon and Netflix (and probably all other online streaming services) allow me to skip between shows easily. That’s always been a feature of YouTube, but with YouTube you get recommended increasingly viral content until you find yourself watching utter rubbish. At least with Amazon and Netflix there is a minimum quality level even if that is reality TV.

Conclusion

Amazon Prime has a smaller range of content and some really rubbish documentaries. I don’t mind the documentaries about UFOs and other fringe stuff as it’s obvious what it is and you can avoid it. A documentary that has me watching for an hour before it’s revealed to be a promo for Grover Norquist is really bad, did the hour of it that I watched have good content or just rubbish too?

Netflix has a huge range of content and the quality level is generally very high.

If you are going to watch TV then subscribing to Netflix is probably a good idea. It’s reasonably cheap, has a good (not great) interface, and has a lot of content including some great original content.

For Amazon maybe subscribe for 1 month every second year to binge watch the Amazon proprietary content that interests you.

Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 6

In February I reviewed a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 1 [1] that I bought on Ebay.

I have just been supplied the 6th Generation of the Thinkpad X1 Carbon for work, which would have cost about $1500 more than I want to pay for my own gear. ;)

The first thing to note is that it has USB-C for charging. The charger continues the trend towards smaller and lighter chargers and also allows me to charge my phone from the same charger so it’s one less charger to carry. The X1 Carbon comes with a 65W charger, but when I got a second charger it was only 45W but was also smaller and lighter.

The laptop itself is also slightly smaller in every dimension than my Gen 1 version as well as being noticeably lighter.

One thing I noticed is that the KDE power applet disappears when battery is full – maybe due to my history of buying refurbished laptops I haven’t had a battery report itself as full before.

Disabling the touch pad in the BIOS doesn’t work. This is annoying, there are 2 devices for mouse type input so I need to configure Xorg to only read from the Trackpoint.

The labels on the lid are upside down from the perspective of the person using it (but right way up for people sitting opposite them). This looks nice for observers, but means that you tend to put your laptop the wrong way around on your desk a lot before you get used to it. It is also fancier than the older model, the red LED on the cover for the dot in the I in Thinkpad is one of the minor fancy features.

As the new case is thinner than the old one (which was thin compared to most other laptops) it’s difficult to open. You can’t easily get your fingers under the lid to lift it up.

One really annoying design choice was to have a proprietary Ethernet socket with a special dongle. If the dongle is lost or damaged it will probably be expensive to replace. An extra USB socket and a USB Ethernet device would be much more useful.

The next deficiency is that it has one USB-C/DisplayPort/Thunderbolt port and 2 USB 3.1 ports. USB-C is going to be used for everything in the near future and a laptop with only a single USB-C port will be as annoying then as one with a single USB 2/3 port would be right now. Making a small laptop requires some engineering trade-offs and I can understand them limiting the number of USB 3.1 ports to save space. But having two or more USB-C ports wouldn’t have taken much space – it would take no extra space to have a USB-C port in place of the proprietary Ethernet port. It also has only a HDMI port for display, the USB-C/Thunderbolt/DisplayPort port is likely to be used for some USB-C device when you want an external display. The Lenovo advertising says “So you get Thunderbolt, USB-C, and DisplayPort all rolled into one”, but really you get “a choice of one of Thunderbolt, USB-C, or DisplayPort at any time”. How annoying would it be to disconnect your monitor because you want to read a USB-C storage device?

As an aside this might work out OK if you can have a DisplayPort monitor that also acts as a USB-C hub on the same cable. But if so requiring a monitor that isn’t even on sale now to make my laptop work properly isn’t a good strategy.

One problem I have is that resume from suspend requires holding down power button. I’m not sure if it’s hardware or software issue. But suspend on lid close works correctly and also suspend on inactivity when running on battery power. The X1 Carbon Gen 1 that I own doesn’t suspend on lid close or inactivity (due to a Linux configuration issue). So I have one laptop that won’t suspend correctly and one that won’t resume correctly.

The CPU is an i5-8250U which rates 7,678 according to cpubenchmark.net [2]. That’s 92% faster than the i7 in my personal Thinkpad and more importantly I’m likely to actually get that performance without having the CPU overheat and slow down, that said I got a thermal warning during the Debian install process which is a bad sign. It’s also only 114% faster than the CPU in the Thinkpad T420 I bought in 2013. The model I got doesn’t have the fastest possible CPU, but I think that the T420 didn’t either. A 114% increase in CPU speed over 5 years is a long way from the factor of 4 or more that Moore’s law would have predicted.

The keyboard has the stupid positions for the PgUp and PgDn keys I noted on my last review. It’s still annoying and slows me down, but I am starting to get used to it.

The display is FullHD, it’s nice to have a laptop with the same resolution as my phone. It also has a slider to cover the built in camera which MIGHT also cause the microphone to be disconnected. It’s nice that hardware manufacturers are noticing that some customers care about privacy.

The storage is NVMe. That’s a nice feature, although being only 240G may be a problem for some uses.

Conclusion

Definitely a nice laptop if someone else is paying.

The fact that it had cooling issues from the first install is a concern. Laptops have always had problems with cooling and when a laptop has cooling problems before getting any dust inside it’s probably going to perform poorly in a few years.

Lenovo has gone too far trying to make it thin and light. I’d rather have the same laptop but slightly thicker, with a built-in Ethernet port, more USB ports, and a larger battery.

Dell PowerEdge T30

I just did a Debian install on a Dell PowerEdge T30 for a client. The Dell web site is a bit broken at the moment, it didn’t list the price of that server or give useful specs when I was ordering it. I was under the impression that the server was limited to 8G of RAM, that’s unusually small but it wouldn’t be the first time a vendor crippled a low end model to drive sales of more expensive systems. It turned out that the T30 model I got has 4*DDR4 sockets with only one used for an 8G DIMM. It apparently can handle up to 64G of RAM.

It has space for 4*3.5″ SATA disks but only has 4*SATA connectors on the motherboard. As I never use the DVD in a server this isn’t a problem for me, but if you want 4 disks and a DVD then you need to buy a PCI or PCIe SATA card.

Compared to the PowerEdge T130 I’m using at home the new T30 is slightly shorter and thinner while seeming to have more space inside. This is partly due to better design and partly due to having 2 hard drives in the top near the DVD drive which are a little inconvenient to get to. The T130 I have (which isn’t the latest model) has 4*3.5″ SATA drive bays at the bottom which are very convenient for swapping disks.

It has two PCIe*16 slots (one of which is apparently quad speed), one shorter PCIe slot, and a PCI slot. For a cheap server a PCI slot is a nice feature, it means I can use an old PCI Ethernet card instead of buying a PCIe Ethernet card. The T30 cost $1002 so using an old Ethernet card saved 1% of the overall cost.

The T30 seems designed to be more of a workstation or personal server than a straight server. The previous iterations of the low end tower servers from Dell didn’t have built in sound and had PCIe slots that were adequate for a RAID controller but vastly inadequate for video. This one has built in line in and out for audio and has two DisplayPort connectors on the motherboard (presumably for dual-head support). Apart from the CPU (an E3-1225 which is slower than some systems people are throwing out nowadays) the system would be a decent gaming system.

It has lots of USB ports which is handy for a file server, I can attach lots of backup devices. Also most of the ports support “super speed”, I haven’t yet tested out USB devices that support such speeds but I’m looking forward to it. It’s a pity that there are no USB-C ports.

One deficiency of the T30 is the lack of a VGA port. It has one HDMI and two DisplayPort sockets on the motherboard, this is really great for a system on or under your desk, any monitor you would want on your desk will support at least one of those interfaces. But in a server room you tend to have an old VGA monitor that’s there because no-one wants it on their desk. Not supporting VGA may force people to buy a $200 monitor for their server room. That increases the effective cost of the system by 20%. It has a PC serial port on the motherboard which is a nice server feature, but that doesn’t make up for the lack of VGA.

The BIOS configuration has an option displayed for enabling charging devices from USB sockets when a laptop is in sleep mode. It’s disappointing that they didn’t either make a BIOS build for a non-laptop or have the BIOS detect at run-time that it’s not on laptop hardware and hide that.

Conclusion

The PowerEdge T30 is a nice low-end workstation. If you want a system with ECC RAM because you need it to be reliable and you don’t need the greatest performance then it will do very well. It has Intel video on the motherboard with HDMI and DisplayPort connectors, this won’t be the fastest video but should do for most workstation tasks. It has a PCIe*16 quad speed slot in case you want to install a really fast video card. The CPU is slow by today’s standards, but Dell sells plenty of tower systems that support faster CPUs.

It’s nice that it has a serial port on the motherboard. That could be used for a serial console or could be used to talk to a UPS or other server-room equipment. But that doesn’t make up for the lack of VGA support IMHO.

One could say that a tower system is designed to be a desktop or desk-side system not run in any sort of server room. However it is cheaper than any rack mounted systems from Dell so it will be deployed in lots of small businesses that have one server for everything – I will probably install them in several other small businesses this year. Also tower servers do end up being deployed in server rooms, all it takes is a small business moving to a serviced office that has a proper server room and the old tower servers end up in a rack.

Rack vs Tower

One reason for small businesses to use tower servers when rack servers are more appropriate is the issue of noise. If your “server room” is the room that has your printer and fax then it typically won’t have a door and you just can’t have the noise of a rack mounted server in there. 1RU systems are inherently noisy because the small diameter of the fans means that they have to spin fast. 2RU systems can be made relatively quiet if you don’t have high-end CPUs but no-one seems to be trying to do that.

I think it would be nice if a company like Dell sold low-end servers in a rack mount form-factor (19 inches wide and 2RU high) that were designed to be relatively quiet. Then instead of starting with a tower server and ending up with tower systems in racks a small business could start with a 19 inch wide system on a shelf that gets bolted into a rack if they move into a better office. Any laptop CPU from the last 10 years is capable of running a file server with 8 disks in a ZFS array. Any modern laptop CPU is capable of running a file server with 8 SSDs in a ZFS array. This wouldn’t be difficult to design.

Thinkpad X1 Carbon

I just bought a Thinkpad X1 Carbon to replace my Thinkpad X301 [1]. It cost me $289 with free shipping from an eBay merchant which is a great deal, a new battery for the Thinkpad X301 would have cost about $100.

It seems that laptops aren’t depreciating in value as much as they used to. Grays Online used to reliably have refurbished Thinkpads with manufacturer’s warranty selling for about $300. Now they only have IdeaPads (a cheaper low-end line from Lenovo) at good prices, admittedly $100 to $200 for an IdeaPad is a very nice deal if you want a cheap laptop and don’t need something too powerful. But if you want something for doing software development on the go then you are looking at well in excess of $400. So I ended up buying a second-hand system from an eBay merchant.

CPU

I was quite excited to read the specs that it has an i7 CPU, but now I have it I discovered that the i7-3667U CPU scores 3990 according to passmark (cpubenchmark.net) [2]. While that is much better than the U9400 in the Thinkpad X301 that scored 968, it’s only slightly better than the i5-2520M in my Thinkpad T420 that scored 3582 [3]. I bought the Thinkpad T420 in August 2013 [4], I had hoped that Moore’s Law would result in me getting a system at least twice as fast as my last one. But buying second-hand meant I got a slower CPU. Also the small form factor of the X series limits the heat dissipation and therefore limits the CPU performance.

Keyboard

Thinkpads have traditionally had the best keyboards, but they are losing that advantage. This system has a keyboard that feels like an Apple laptop keyboard not like a traditional Thinkpad. It still has the Trackpoint which is a major feature if you like it (I do). The biggest downside is that they rearranged the keys. The PgUp/PgDn keys are now by the arrow keys, this could end up being useful if you like the SHIFT-PgUp/SHIFT-PgDn combinations used in the Linux VC and some Xterms like Konsole. But I like to keep my keys by the home keys and I can’t do that unless I use the little finger of my right hand for PgUp/PgDn. They also moved the Home, End, and Delete keys which is really annoying. It’s not just that the positions are different to previous Thinkpads (including X series like the X301), they are different to desktop keyboards. So every time I move between my Thinkpad and a desktop system I need to change key usage.

Did Lenovo not consider that touch typists might use their products?

The keyboard moved the PrtSc key, and lacks ScrLk and Pause keys, but I hardly ever use the PrtSc key, and never use the other 2. The lack of those keys would only be of interest to people who have mapped them to useful functions and people who actually use PrtSc. It’s impractical to have a key as annoying to accidentally press as PrtSc between the Ctrl and Alt keys.

One significant benefit of the keyboard in this Thinkpad is that it has a backlight instead of having a light on the top of the screen that shines on the keyboard. It might work better than the light above the keyboard and looks much cooler! As an aside I discovered that my Thinkpad X301 has a light above the keyboard, but the key combination to activate it sometimes needs to be pressed several times.

Display

X1 Carbon 1600*900
T420 1600*900
T61 1680*1050
X301 1440*900

Above are the screen resolutions for all my Thinkpads of the last 8 years. The X301 is an anomaly as I got it from a rubbish pile and it was significantly older than Thinkpads usually are when I get them. It’s a bit disappointing that laptop screen resolution isn’t increasing much over the years. I know some people have laptops with resolutions as high as 2560*1600 (as high as a high end phone) it seems that most laptops are below phone resolution.

Kogan is currently selling the Agora 8+ phone new for $239, including postage that would still be cheaper than the $289 I paid for this Thinkpad. There’s no reason why new phones should have lower prices and higher screen resolutions than second-hand laptops. The Thinkpad is designed to be a high-end brand, other brands like IdeaPad are for low end devices. Really 1600*900 is a low-end resolution by today’s standards, 1920*1080 should be the minimum for high-end systems. Now I could have bought one of the X series models with a higher screen resolution, but most of them have the lower resolution and hunting for a second hand system with the rare high resolution screen would mean missing the best prices.

I wonder if there’s an Android app to make a phone run as a second monitor for a Linux laptop, that way you could use a high resolution phone screen to display data from a laptop.

This display is unreasonably bright by default. So bright it hurt my eyes. The xbacklight program doesn’t support my display but the command “xrandr –output LVDS-1 –brightness 0.4” sets the brightness to 40%. The Fn key combination to set brightness doesn’t work. Below a brightness of about 70% the screen looks grainy.

General

This Thinkpad has a 180G SSD that supports contiguous reads at 500MB/s. It has 8G of RAM which is the minimum for a usable desktop system nowadays and while not really fast the CPU is fast enough. Generally this is a nice system.

It doesn’t have an Ethernet port which is really annoying. Now I have to pack a USB Ethernet device whenever I go anywhere. It also has mini-DisplayPort as the only video connector, as that is almost never available at a conference venue (VGA and HDMI are the common ones) I’ll have to pack an adaptor when I give a lecture. It also only has 2 USB ports, the X301 has 3. I know that not having HDMI, VGA, and Ethernet ports allows designing a thinner laptop. But I would be happier with a slightly thicker laptop that has more connectivity options. The Thinkpad X301 has about the same mass and is only slightly thicker and has all those ports. I blame Apple for starting this trend of laptops lacking IO options.

This might be the last laptop I own that doesn’t have USB-C. Currently not having USB-C is not a big deal, but devices other than phones supporting it will probably be released soon and fast phone charging from a laptop would be a good feature to have.

This laptop has no removable battery. I don’t know if it will be practical to replace the battery if the old one wears out. But given that replacing the battery may be more than the laptop is worth this isn’t a serious issue. One significant issue is that there’s no option to buy a second battery if I need to have it run without mains power for a significant amount of time. When I was travelling between Australia and Europe often I used to pack a second battery so I could spend twice as much time coding on the plane. I know it’s an engineering trade-off, but they did it with the X301 and could have done it again with this model.

Conclusion

This isn’t a great laptop. The X1 Carbon is described as a flagship for the Thinkpad brand and the display is letting down the image of the brand. The CPU is a little disappointing, but it’s a trade-off that I can deal with.

The keyboard is really annoying and will continue to annoy me for as long as I own it. The X301 managed to fit a better keyboard layout into the same space, there’s no reason that they couldn’t have done the same with the X1 Carbon.

But it’s great value for money and works well.

More About the Thinkpad X301

Last month I blogged about the Thinkpad X301 I got from a rubbish pile [1]. One thing I didn’t realise when writing that post is that the X301 doesn’t have the keyboard light that the T420 has. With the T420 I could press the bottom left (FN) and top right (PgUp from memory) keys on the keyboard to turn a light on the keyboard. This is really good for typing at night. While I can touch type the small keyboard on a laptop makes it a little difficult so the light is a feature I found useful. I wrote my review of the X301 before having to use it at night.

Another problem I noticed is that it crashes after running Memtest86+ for between 30 minutes and 4 hours. Memtest86+ doesn’t report any memory errors, the system just entirely locks up. I have 2 DIMMs for it (2G and 4G), I tried installing them in both orders, and I tried with each of them in the first slot (the system won’t boot if only the second slot is filled). Nothing changed. Now it is possible that this is something that might not happen in real use. For example it might only happen due to heat when the system is under sustained load which isn’t something I planned for that laptop. I would discard a desktop system that had such a problem because I get lots of free desktop PCs, but I’m prepared to live with a laptop that has such a problem to avoid paying for another laptop.

Last night the laptop battery suddenly stopped working entirely. I had it unplugged for about 5 minutes when it abruptly went off (no flashing light to warn that the battery was low or anything). Now when I plug it in the battery light flashes orange. A quick Google search indicates that this might mean that a fuse inside the battery pack has blown or that there might be a problem with the system board. Replacing the system board is much more than the laptop is worth and even replacing the battery will probably cost more than it’s worth. Previously bought a Thinkpad T420 at auction because it didn’t cost much more than getting a new battery and PSU for a T61 [2] and I expect I can find a similar deal if I poll the auction sites for a while.

Using an X series Thinkpad has been a good experience and I’ll definitely consider an X series for my next laptop. My previous history of laptops involved going from ones with a small screen that were heavy and clunky (what was available with 90’s technology and cost less than a car) to ones that had a large screen and were less clunky but still heavy. I hadn’t tried small and light with technology from the last decade, it’s something I could really get used to!

By today’s standards the X301 is deficient in a number of ways. It has 64G of storage (the same as my most recent phones) which isn’t much for software development, 6G of RAM which isn’t too bad but is small by today’s standards (16G is a common factory option nowadays), a 1440*900 screen which looks bad in any comparison (less than the last 3 phones I’ve owned), and a slow CPU. No two of these limits would be enough to make me consider replacing that laptop. Even with the possibility of crashing under load it was still a useful system. But the lack of a usable battery in combination with all the other issues makes the entire system unsuitable for my needs. I would be very happy to use a fast laptop with a high resolution screen even without a battery, but not with this list of issues.

Next week I’m going to a conference and there’s no possibility of buying a new laptop before then. So for a week when I need to use a laptop a lot I will have a sub-standard laptop.

It really sucks to have a laptop develop a problem that makes me want to replace it so soon after I got it.

Huawei Mate9

Warranty Etc

I recently got a Huawei Mate 9 phone. My previous phone was a Nexus 6P that died shortly before it’s one year warranty ran out. As there have apparently been many Nexus 6P phones dying there are no stocks of replacements so Kogan (the company I bought the phone from) offered me a choice of 4 phones in the same price range as a replacement.

Previously I had chosen to avoid the extended warranty offerings based on the idea that after more than a year the phone won’t be worth much and therefore getting it replaced under warranty isn’t as much of a benefit. But now that it seems that getting a phone replaced with a newer and more powerful model is a likely outcome it seems that there are benefits in a longer warranty. I chose not to pay for an “extended warranty” on my Nexus 6P because getting a new Nexus 6P now isn’t such a desirable outcome, but when getting a new Mate 9 is a possibility it seems more of a benefit to get the “extended warranty”. OTOH Kogan wasn’t offering more than 2 years of “warranty” recently when buying a phone for a relative, so maybe they lost a lot of money on replacements for the Nexus 6P.

Comparison

I chose the Mate 9 primarily because it has a large screen. It’s 5.9″ display is only slightly larger than the 5.7″ displays in the Nexus 6P and the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (my previous phone). But it is large enough to force me to change my phone use habits.

I previously wrote about matching phone size to the user’s hand size [1]. When writing that I had the theory that a Note 2 might be too large for me to use one-handed. But when I owned those phones I found that the Note 2 and Note 3 were both quite usable in one-handed mode. But the Mate 9 is just too big for that. To deal with this I now use the top corners of my phone screen for icons that I don’t tend to use one-handed, such as Facebook. I chose this phone knowing that this would be an issue because I’ve been spending more time reading web pages on my phone and I need to see more text on screen.

Adjusting my phone usage to the unusually large screen hasn’t been a problem for me. But I expect that many people will find this phone too large. I don’t think there are many people who buy jeans to fit a large phone in the pocket [2].

A widely touted feature of the Mate 9 is the Leica lens which apparently gives it really good quality photos. I haven’t noticed problems with my photos on my previous two phones and it seems likely that phone cameras have in most situations exceeded my requirements for photos (I’m not a very demanding user). One thing that I miss is the slow-motion video that the Nexus 6P supports. I guess I’ll have to make sure my wife is around when I need to make slow motion video.

My wife’s Nexus 6P is well out of warranty. Her phone was the original Nexus 6P I had. When her previous phone died I had a problem with my phone that needed a factory reset. It’s easier to duplicate the configuration to a new phone than restore it after a factory reset (as an aside I believe Apple does this better) I copied my configuration to the new phone and then wiped it for my wife to use.

One noteworthy but mostly insignificant feature of the Mate 9 is that it comes with a phone case. The case is hard plastic and cracked when I unsuccessfully tried to remove it, so it seems to effectively be a single-use item. But it is good to have that in the box so that you don’t have to use the phone without a case on the first day, this is something almost every other phone manufacturer misses. But there is the option of ordering a case at the same time as a phone and the case isn’t very good.

I regard my Mate 9 as fairly unattractive. Maybe if I had a choice of color I would have been happier, but it still wouldn’t have looked like EVE from Wall-E (unlike the Nexus 6P).

The Mate 9 has a resolution of 1920*1080, while the Nexus 6P (and many other modern phones) has a resolution of 2560*1440 I don’t think that’s a big deal, the pixels are small enough that I can’t see them. I don’t really need my phone to have the same resolution as the 27″ monitor on my desktop.

The Mate 9 has 4G of RAM and apps seem significantly less likely to be killed than on the Nexus 6P with 3G. I can now switch between memory hungry apps like Pokemon Go and Facebook without having one of them killed by the OS.

Security

The OS support from Huawei isn’t nearly as good as a Nexus device. Mine is running Android 7.0 and has a security patch level of the 5th of June 2017. My wife’s Nexus 6P today got an update from Android 8.0 to 8.1 which I believe has the fixes for KRACK and Blueborne among others.

Kogan is currently selling the Pixel XL with 128G of storage for $829, if I was buying a phone now that’s probably what I would buy. It’s a pity that none of the companies that have manufactured Nexus devices seem to have learned how to support devices sold under their own name as well.

Conclusion

Generally this is a decent phone. As a replacement for a failed Nexus 6P it’s pretty good. But at this time I tend to recommend not buying it as the first generation of Pixel phones are now cheap enough to compete. If the Pixel XL is out of your price range then instead of saving $130 for a less secure phone it would be better to save $400 and choose one of the many cheaper phones on offer.

Remember when Linux users used to mock Windows for poor security? Now it seems that most Android devices are facing the security problems that Windows used to face and the iPhone and Pixel are going to take the role of the secure phone.

Thinkpad X301

Another Broken Thinkpad

A few months ago I wrote a post about “Observing Reliability” [1] regarding my Thinkpad T420. I noted that the T420 had been running for almost 4 years which was a good run, and therefore the failed DVD drive didn’t convince me that Thinkpads have quality problems.

Since that time the plastic on the lid by the left hinge broke, every time I open or close the lid it breaks a bit more. That prevents use of that Thinkpad by anyone who wants to use it as a serious laptop as it can’t be expected to last long if opened and closed several times a day. It probably wouldn’t be difficult to fix the lid but for an old laptop it doesn’t seem worth the effort and/or money. So my plan now is to give the Thinkpad to someone who wants a compact desktop system with a built-in UPS, a friend in Vietnam can probably find a worthy recipient.

My Thinkpad History

I bought the Thinkpad T420 in October 2013 [2], it lasted about 4 years and 2 months. It cost $306.

I bought my Thinkpad T61 in February 2010 [3], it lasted about 3 years and 8 months. It cost $796 [4].

Prior to the T61 I had a T41p that I received well before 2006 (maybe 2003) [5]. So the T41p lasted close to 7 years, as it was originally bought for me by a multinational corporation I’m sure it cost a lot of money. By the time I bought the T61 it had display problems, cooling problems, and compatibility issues with recent Linux distributions.

Before the T41p I had 3 Thinkpads in 5 years, all of which had the type of price that only made sense in the dot-com boom.

In terms of absolute lifetime the Thinkpad T420 did ok. In terms of cost per year it did very well, only $6 per month. The T61 was $18 per month, and while the T41p lasted a long time it probably cost over $2000 giving it a cost of over $20 per month. $20 per month is still good value, I definitely get a lot more than $20 per month benefit from having a laptop. While it’s nice that my most recent laptop could be said to have saved me $12 per month over the previous one, it doesn’t make much difference to my financial situation.

Thinkpad X301

My latest Thinkpad is an X301 that I found on an e-waste pile, it had a broken DVD drive which is presumably the reason why someone decided to throw it out. It has the same power connector as my previous 2 Thinkpads which was convenient as I didn’t find a PSU with it. I saw a review of the T301 dated 2008 which probably means it was new in 2009, but it has no obvious signs of wear so probably hasn’t been used much.

My X301 has a 1440*900 screen which isn’t as good as the T420 resolution of 1600*900. But a lower resolution is an expected trade-off for a smaller laptop. The T310 comes with a 64G SSD which is a significant limitation.

I previously wrote about a “cloud lifestyle” [6]. I hadn’t implemented all the ideas from that post due to distractions and a lack of time. But now that I’ll have a primary PC with only 64G of storage I have more incentive to do that. The 100G disk in the T61 was a minor limitation at the time I got it but since then everything got bigger and 64G is going to be a big problem and the fact that it’s an unusual 1.8″ form factor means that I can’t cheaply upgrade it or use the SSD that I’ve used in the Thinkpad T420.

My current Desktop PC is an i7-2600 system which builds the SE Linux policy packages for Debian (the thing I compile most frequently) in about 2 minutes with about 5 minutes of CPU time used. the same compilation on the X301 takes just over 6.5 minutes with almost 9 minutes of CPU time used. The i5 CPU in the Thinkpad T420 was somewhere between those times. While I can wait 6.5 minutes for a compile to test something it is an annoyance. So I’ll probably use one of the i7 or i5 class servers I run to do builds.

On the T420 I had chroot environments running with systemd-nspawn for the last few releases of Debian in both AMD64 and i386 variants. Now I have to use a server somewhere for that.

I stored many TV shows, TED talks, and movies on the T420. Probably part of the problem with the hinge was due to adjusting the screen while watching TV in bed. Now I have a phone with 64G of storage and a tablet with 32G so I will use those for playing videos.

I’ve started to increase my use of Git recently. There’s many programs I maintain that I really should have had version control for years ago. Now the desire to develop them on multiple systems gives me an incentive to do this.

Comparing to a Phone

My latest phone is a Huawei Mate 9 (I’ll blog about that shortly) which has a 1920*1080 screen and 64G of storage. So it has a higher resolution screen than my latest Thinkpad as well as equal storage. My phone has 4G of RAM while the Thinkpad only has 2G (I plan to add RAM soon).

I don’t know of a good way of comparing CPU power of phones and laptops (please comment if you have suggestions about this). The issues of GPU integration etc will make this complex. But I’m sure that the octa-core CPU in my phone doesn’t look too bad when compared to the dual-core CPU in my Thinkpad.

Conclusion

The X301 isn’t a laptop I would choose to buy today. Since using it I’ve appreciated how small and light it is, so I would definitely consider a recent X series. But being free the value for money is NaN which makes it more attractive. Maybe I won’t try to get 4+ years of use out of it, in 2 years time I might buy something newer and better in a similar form factor.

I can just occasionally poll an auction site and bid if there’s anything particularly tempting. If I was going to buy a new laptop now before the old one becomes totally unusable I would be rushed and wouldn’t get the best deal (particularly given that it’s almost Christmas).

Who knows, I might even find something newer and better on an e-waste pile. It’s amazing the type of stuff that gets thrown out nowadays.

Observing Reliability Last year I wrote about how great my latest Thinkpad...
I Just Bought a new Thinkpad and the Lenovo Web Site Sucks I’ve just bought a Thinkpad T61 at auction for $AU796....
Thinkpad T420 I’ve owned a Thinkpad T61 since February 2010 [1]. In...
Is a Thinkpad Still Like a Rolls-Royce For a long time the Thinkpad has been widely regarded...
Thinkpad T61 I’ve now had my new Thinkpad T61 [1] for almost...

Observing Reliability

Last year I wrote about how great my latest Thinkpad is [1] in response to a discussion about whether a Thinkpad is still the “Rolls Royce” of laptops.

It was a few months after writing that post that I realised that I omitted an important point. After I had that laptop for about a year the DVD drive broke and made annoying clicking sounds all the time in addition to not working. I removed the DVD drive and the result was that the laptop was lighter and used less power without missing any feature that I desired. As I had installed Debian on that laptop by copying the hard drive from my previous laptop I had never used the DVD drive for any purpose. After a while I got used to my laptop being like that and the gaping hole in the side of the laptop where the DVD drive used to be didn’t even register to me. I would prefer it if Lenovo sold Thinkpads in the T series without DVD drives, but it seems that only the laptops with tiny screens are designed to lack DVD drives.

For my use of laptops this doesn’t change the conclusion of my previous post. Now the T420 has been in service for almost 4 years which makes the cost of ownership about $75 per year. $1.50 per week as a tax deductible business expense is very cheap for such a nice laptop. About a year ago I installed a SSD in that laptop, it cost me about $250 from memory and made it significantly faster while also reducing heat problems. The depreciation on the SSD about doubles the cost of ownership of the laptop, but it’s still cheaper than a mobile phone and thus not in the category of things that are expected to last for a long time – while also giving longer service than phones usually do.

One thing that’s interesting to consider is the fact that I forgot about the broken DVD drive when writing about this. I guess every review has an unspoken caveat of “this works well for me but might suck badly for your use case”. But I wonder how many other things that are noteworthy I’m forgetting to put in reviews because they just don’t impact my use. I don’t think that I am unusual in this regard, so reading multiple reviews is the sensible thing to do.

[1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2016/11/06/thinkpad-rolls-royce/

Is a Thinkpad Still Like a Rolls-Royce

For a long time the Thinkpad has been widely regarded as the “Rolls-Royce of laptops”. Since 2003 one could argue that Rolls-Royce is no longer the Rolls-Royce of cars [1]. The way that IBM sold the Think business unit to Lenovo and the way that Lenovo is producing both Thinkpads and cheaper Ideapads is somewhat similar to the way the Rolls-Royce trademark and car company were separately sold to companies that are known for making cheaper cars.

Sam Varghese has written about his experience with Thinkpads and how he thinks it’s no longer the Rolls-Royce of laptops [2]. Sam makes some reasonable points to support this claim (one of which only applies to touchpad users – not people like me who prefer the Trackpoint), but I think that the real issue is whether it’s desirable to have a laptop that could be compared to a Rolls-Royce nowadays.

Support

The Rolls-Royce car company is known for great reliability and support as well as features that other cars lack (mostly luxury features). The Thinkpad marque (both before and after it was sold to Lenovo) was also known for great support. You could take a Thinkpad to any service center anywhere in the world and if the serial number indicated that it was within the warranty period it would be repaired without any need for paperwork. The Thinkpad service centers never had any issue with repairing a Thinkpad that lacked a hard drive just as long as the problem could be demonstrated. It was also possible to purchase an extended support contract at any time which covered all repairs including motherboard replacement. I know that not everyone had as good an experience as I had with Thinkpad support, but I’ve been using them since 1998 without problems – which is more than I can say for most hardware.

Do we really need great reliability from laptops nowadays? When I first got a laptop hardly anyone I knew owned one. Nowadays laptops are common. Having a copy of important documents on a USB stick is often a good substitute for a reliable laptop, when you are in an environment where most people own laptops it’s usually not difficult to find someone who will let you use theirs for a while. I think that there is a place for a laptop with RAID-1 and ECC RAM, it’s a little known fact that Thinkpads have a long history of supporting the replacement of a CD/DVD drive with a second hard drive (I don’t know if this is still supported) but AFAIK they have never supported ECC RAM.

My first Thinkpad cost $3,800. In modern money that would be something like $7,000 or more. For that price you really want something that’s well supported to protect the valuable asset. Sam complains about his new Thinkpad costing more than $1000 and needing to be replaced after 2.5 years. Mobile phones start at about $600 for the more desirable models (IE anything that runs Pokemon Go) and the new Google Pixel phones range from $1079 to $1,419. Phones aren’t really expected to be used for more than 2.5 years. Phones are usually impractical to service in any way so for most of the people who read my blog (who tend to buy the more expensive hardware) they are pretty much a disposable item costing $600+. I previously wrote about a failed Nexus 5 and the financial calculations for self-insuring an expensive phone [3]. I think there’s no way that a company can provide extended support/warranty while making a profit and offering a deal that’s good value to customers who can afford to self-insure. The same applies for the $499 Lenovo Ideapad 310 and other cheaper Lenovo products. Thinkpads (the higher end of the Lenovo laptop range) are slightly more expensive than the most expensive phones but they also offer more potential for the user to service them.

Features

My first Thinkpad was quite underpowered when compared to desktop PCs, it had 32M of RAM and could only be expanded to 96M at a time when desktop PCs could be expanded to 128M easily and 256M with some expense. It had a 800*600 display when my desktop display was 1280*1024 (37% of the pixels). Nowadays laptops usually start at about 8G of RAM (with a small minority that have 4G) and laptop displays start at about 1366*768 resolution (51% of the pixels in a FullHD display). That compares well to desktop systems and also is capable of running most things well. My current Thinkpad is a T420 with 8G of RAM and a 1600*900 display (69% of FullHD), it would be nice to have higher resolution but this works well and it was going cheap when I needed a new laptop.

Modern Thinkpads don’t have some of the significant features that older ones had. The legendary Butterfly Keyboard is long gone, killed by the wide displays that economies of scale and 16:9 movies have forced upon us. It’s been a long time since Thinkpads had some of the highest resolution displays and since anyone really cared about it (you only need pixels to be small enough that you can’t see them).

For me one of the noteworthy features of the Thinkpads has been the great keyboard. Mechanical keys that feel like a desktop keyboard. It seems that most Thinkpads are getting the rubbery keyboard design made popular by Apple. I guess this is due to engineering factors in designing thin laptops and the fact that most users don’t care.

Matthew Garrett has blogged about the issue of Thinkpad storage configured as “RAID mode” without any option to disable it [4]. This is an annoyance (which incidentally has been worked around) and there are probably other annoyances like it. Designing hardware and an OS are both complex tasks. The interaction between Windows and the hardware is difficult to get right from both sides and the people who design the hardware often don’t think much about Linux support. It has always been this way, the early Thinkpads had no Linux support for special IBM features (like fan control) and support for ISA-PnP was patchy. It is disappointing that Lenovo doesn’t put a little extra effort into making sure that Linux works well on their hardware and this might be a reason for considering another brand.

Service Life

I bought my curent Thinkpad T420 in October 2013 [5] It’s more than 3 years old and has no problems even though I bought it refurbished with a reduced warranty. This is probably the longest I’ve had a Thinkpad working well, which seems to be a data point against the case that modern Thinkpads aren’t as good.

I bought a T61 in February 2010 [6], it started working again (after mysteriously not working for a month in late 2013) and apart from the battery lasting 5 minutes and a CPU cooling problem it still works well. If that Thinkpad had cost $3,800 then I would have got it repaired, but as it cost $796 (plus the cost of a RAM upgrade) and a better one was available for $300 it wasn’t worth repairing.

In the period 1998 to 2010 I bought a 385XD, a 600E, a T21, a T43, and a T61 [6]. During that time I upgraded laptops 4 times in 12 years (I don’t have good records of when I bought each one). So my average Thinkpad has lasted 3 years. The first 2 were replaced to get better performance, the 3rd was replaced when an employer assigned me a Thinkpad (and sold it to be when I left), and 4 and 5 were replaced due to hardware problems that could not be fixed economically given the low cost of replacement.

Conclusion

Thinkpads possibly don’t have the benefits over other brands that they used to have. But in terms of providing value for the users it seems that they are much better than they used to be. Until I wrote this post I didn’t realise that I’ve broken a personal record for owning a laptop. It just keeps working and I hadn’t even bothered looking into the issue. For some devices I track how long I’ve owned them while thinking “can I justify replacing it yet”, but the T420 just does everything I want. The battery still lasts 2+ hours which is a new record too, with every other Thinkpad I’ve owned the battery life has dropped to well under an hour within a year of purchase.

If I replaced this Thinkpad T420 now it will have cost me less than $100 per year (or $140 per year including the new SSD I installed this year), that’s about 3 times better than any previous laptop! I wouldn’t feel bad about replacing it as I’ve definitely got great value for money from it. But I won’t replace it as it’s doing everything I want.

I’ve just realised that by every measure (price, reliability, and ability to run all software I want to run) I’ve got the best Thinkpad I’ve ever had. Maybe it’s not like a Rolls-Royce, but I’d much rather drive a 2016 Tesla than a 1980 Rolls-Royce anyway.