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Some new tech

2021-09-12

I've been trying to resist the urge to spend my paychecks on gadgets that I don't really need, but last month I caved and bought a couple of things that I honestly most likely don't need, but which I wanted.

First, I decided to upgrade from my old laptop. My previous laptop was a A10-9600p APU laptop with a slow AMD dGPU that I bought as sort of an experiment to try out how well multi-GPU stuff works in Linux in an AMD+AMD configuration, but ultimately the dGPU was so slow that I never used it and it basically was just a parasite eating into the already rather short battery life of the device. The APU in that system also came at a tough time right before the Ryzens that superseded it, so performance-wise it has been falling behind fairly quickly. But, it managed to get me from 2016 to 2021, so its lifespan wasn't that bad.

I've been contemplating upgrading it every now and then, but I had a hard time justifying the upgrade, because I don't use my laptop that often and the APU laptop was still mostly working, apart from having a crappy battery life and being just slow enough and having just little enough RAM to be annoying to use for heavier software development. Buying a completely new laptop felt a bit yucky, but also doing component upgrades on the laptop would really be a losing battle. So, I decided to go for a refurb laptop instead, so that I can avoid the guilt of buying new crap that I don't need and can instead buy old crap that I don't need.

So, the "new" laptop I went for was a ThinkPad T470s that I found on an online store that sells refurbished business laptops that have been chucked out by leasing companies. It cost me about 650€, with which I probably could have gotten a new consumer-grade laptop just fine, but I don't mind too much. This T470s also felt like a bit of a side-grade in the sense that it came out in 2017 whereas my APU laptop came out in 2016, so they are more or less same generation. But after using this thing for a bit now, I'd say it was absolutely worth the money. This is absolutely the best laptop that I've used: it's lighter than the previous one, smaller, it has a battery life of around 8 hours of light use compared to the measly 4 hours of my previous laptop and it's also a fair bit faster thanks to Intel CPUs being a fair bit quicker in those days than the AMD counterparts, plus this T470s has an i7 processor, whereas the APU was a relatively low-end part even in AMD's own product line-up. This thing has been an absolute pleasure to use and apart from some surface-level scratches on the surface, one would never know it's been used. This has been a good enough experience that I'll probably go the used business laptop route for future upgrades too, both because the business class of laptops seems to have a higher quality and because it makes me feel like I am not contributing to the e-waste problem by buying new crap.

Another rather silly thing I bought was a 10W solar charger. Do I need a solar charger? Absolutely not. This was just an impulse purchase that I made because the gadget felt cool and I wanted one. Usually these things are used by people that go hiking or camping and I don't really do either of those. But the idea of being able to charge at least some of my electronics off-grid sounds pretty cool to me. So, I threw some of my hard-earned money at a silly thing just because it was cool. But maybe I will be the one to laugh one day if there's an extended blackout or something? Maybe not.

Anyway, I've been taking advantage of this thing for a couple of weeks now, because if nothing else at least I want my money's worth in playing around with it. For that 2 week period I've exclusively kept my tablet and my phone charged with the solar charger and a power bank that I got when I went to the army. The power bank was pretty much empty at the start of this little experiment, but the solar charger was pretty good at charging that when I was away and when I was around the solar charger I plugged my devices right into it. I came out of that 2 week experiment with 78% battery remaining on my phone, 83% battery on my tablet and my power bank is at 100%. Considering I'm doing this in September, I think that's pretty decent. There have been some days of bad weather when I haven't had basically any charging and the power bank has been used to compensate for that along with getting my phone charged in the morning before going to the office.

Taking full advantage of the solar charger does take a bit of work, because I have to move it from one side of the house to the other to get the full day's worth of sun rays. This has had the side-benefit of giving me a small incentive to go hang out in the backyard while I charge my phone or tablet. Figuring out the optimal places to put the solar charger for optimal charging and monitoring the charge levels of my electronics has also become a bit of a game for me.

Sadly, I think this game will soon come to an end for a while. Solar charging naturally is rather dependent on the sun and because the winter is approaching I lose a couple minutes of daylight every day until I'll only have a few hours of fairly ineffective light for a couple of months. Will be worth testing if I can get the thing to do anything for me during the winter. But, based on this test that I've been doing in September, the charger ought to work well at least during the summer months of very long days. It would also be cool to try running something like a Pinebook Pro off of it... oh no...