Jan 2020 Laptop Comparison

So we’ve narrowed down the options between going balls-in on a cell phone that can do everything or a normal-ass laptop. Let’s look at the options for laptops to see if there is anything compelling.

1. Google Pixelbook

Spec Points
CPU i5
RAM 8GB
Storage 256GB
Screen Size 12.3 in
Resolution 2400 x 1600
Arrow Keys T-Style
Charger USB-C

2. Samsung Chromebook Plus V2

Spec Points
CPU Intel Celeron
RAM 4GB
Storage 64GB
Screen Size 12.2 in
Resolution 1900*1200
Arrow Keys T-Style
Charger USB-C

3. Lenovo Flex 14

Spec Points
CPU Ryzen 5 3500U
RAM 12GB
Storage 256GB
Screen Size 14 in
Resolution 1920×1080
Arrow Keys Fat-Style ×
Charger Barrel ×

5. Lenovo Thinkpad e495

Spec Points
CPU Ryzen 5 3500U
RAM 8GB
Storage 256GB
Screen Size 14 in
Resolution 1920×1080
Arrow Keys T-Style
Charger USB-C

Summary:

So we can start by eliminating the lower scoring options. First the Lenovo Flex 14 is a spec improvement over what I have, but barrel jack power, same resolution and then fat keys means that it doesn’t offer any benefit in the key areas I’m looking to improve on. Next is the Samsung Chromebook. I can overlook the general low specs with the Celeron/4GB/64GB if the laptop can make up for it else where, which it almost does with the pen and USB-C input. The main place where this computer falls short is the resolution with 1900×1200 which does not seem like enough for my use. But this computer is compelling so I might take another look at it.

The main comparison comes down to the Thinkpad e495 versus the Pixelbook. And the main difference is screen resolution versus specs. As while they appear similar on the surface I think the Thinkpad has the advantage with ddr4 and nvme drive. But the main upgrade I’m looking for in resolution. So the specs almost make up for it, but I think I would go with the Pixelbook over the Thinkpad, but I would go with the Thinkpad if it had the option to upgrade to 1440p post-market. But there are three really compelling options here. So I might have to look at the Chromebook options a little bit more to see which ones support coreboot.


https://mrchromebox.tech/#devices

New Year Hardware Stupid Ideas

A new year and more time for stupid hardware ideas. Right now I’m split between three generally stupid ideas. So I’ll list them below.

1. Full On Cellphone

The first stupid idea is going full on cellphone. This means grabbing a Samgsung Galaxy S8/S9/S10 with Dex, and then grabbing the DexDock, NexDock and then a 15.4″ 4k usb-powered monitor. In terms of upside, there are a lot in terms of being able to do everything on one versatile device. I like the idea of being able to have a phone I can use to shoot video, and have a LTE connection that let’s me use the internet all of time, and then be able to carry a NexDock to plug it into where I need more screen real-estate at a Park or a Cafe or something. And then at home I can drop it in the DexDock, charge it and use it as a complete desktop. I can also bluetooth pair everything to it and have gamepads, keyboards, and headsets paired to it. So there are a lot of upsides, the only downside here is the lack of unproven track record and cost ends up costing about what a normal laptop would cost.

2. Wacom Desktop

This wasn’t originally on the table (pun intended?), until I saw a used Cintiq tablet at a used good store. Having a huge 24+ inch wacom tablet and being able to draw directly on the screen is something that I’ve wanted since college, as even through I’m mostly a programmer it would be great to be able to draw diagrams and notes directly on the computer screen. The main downside here is that I don’t have a lot of time to sit down and focus at a desk recently. I would get a lot more use out of laptop with pen input or something. So I’ll hold off on the Wacom screen and hope they continue to improve in resolution, and lower in price over the next few years. There’s definitely been a lot of competition that has forced wacom to step up their game in terms of innovation and rethink their prices a little bit.

3. Normal Laptop

I’ve been waiting to upgrade my laptop for several years now and the main problem is there aren’t any candidates that are reasonably priced. Generally with the two options being the Dell XPS 13 and the Thinkpad X1 Carbon. With this previous CES 2020, it looks like AMD has finally managed to get Ryzen into a lot of laptops. And the most compelling of these seems to be the Thinkpad e495 which is a 14″ Full HD Ryzen thinkpad with a USB-C charger for about $600. This laptop checks off almost every feature I could ask for, except for 1440p, which is kind of a deal breaker, as resolution is the one aspect I want to upgrade more than specs. And usb-C charging is nice, but it’s an added benefit and not something that I would really change hands for.

In summary of the three options the Wacom option is the easiest to dismiss. In terms of price and practicality it’s not there yet. So I can put off buying one anytime soon and not feel too bad about it. The main comparison comes down to a Samsung Galaxy S9 versus a normal laptop like the Thinkpad e495. And in general between these two options without 1440p on the laptop, the Samsung Galaxy comes off as the more appealing option of two. Though right now I’m thinking that I could probably get more benefit out of using the money for commissions is the hardware available isn’t going to necessarily improve my efficiency.

More hardware Notes

It ended up being not too hard to talk myself out of the Dsi and Wii ideas for now. In terms of the Dsi, the games I’m most interested in are the 3d titles for for the NDS, and 3d titles on the native hardware and the native resolution look terrible to put it politely. I’m genuinely curious of what the play experience of Mario DS, the Legend of Zelda games and Phantasy Star Star Zero would look like with better resolution and better controls. This generally implies emulation, but the problem with the DS is the top and bottom screens side-by-side really hinders the play experience. In this case I think I’m fortunate enough to have a 3ds with an IPS screen, so I might look into running ds games on that, or I might look into mods to see what can be done to make the emulation experience in terms of managing the dual screens.

For the Wii, I’m not interested in the Wii as much as the “legacy” titles from the NES, SNES, GB(C), GBA and Gamecube (not terribly interested in the N64). The first four can be emulated with a genuinely enjoyable experience on the PSP, Ps-Vita and Android. So it’s not as compelling as I originally thought. And another issue with the Wii and console games in general is that I don’t have a lot of time to sit down and play on a console at home, which is why my attention seems to be focused on what can be done with handheld recently. The main draw for the Wii would be the Gamecube titles, and that’s something that could just as well be done on a laptop since I have a USB and Bluetooth style gamecube controller and that would arguably be a better experience and easier to manage not requiring a dedicated device.

In terms of handhelds I think this would be the obvious choice to go with. It’s an Android cellphone with buttons similar to the layout of the PSP and I think I could reasonably be able to expect to play NES, SNES, GB(C), GBA, PSX and PSP. If it could play Gamecube and Dreamcast games, that would make me extremely happy, but this is just what’s available at the end of 2019, and people are finally seeing that there is a lot of demand in this area, so I think we’ll see more competition in 2020. I would be really tempted to buy a Switch Lite to use as a dedicated emulation machine, but I generally try to avoid handhelds and consoles until their life cycle is over and where it can be embraced by a community with open firmware. So I’ll see when I’ll have the option to order the Chinese handheld.

Wii And DSi

My intention for writing this blog was to try and arrange my thoughts and focus on things that I’m doing at the time, but so far it’s turned out to be nothing but me either trying to talk myself into stupid side projects, or try and rationalize stupid shit. For today’s topic of stupid shit, we’re going to be looking at the Wii and DSi. The idea is that the Wii and DSi are both old and wide open platforms of the console and handheld from the same generation. So it seems like having one of each and then putting custom firmware on them seems like it would be a lot of fun.

Wii

Wii’s are available for about $20-30 for a complete working Wii. Plus SD cards have really come down in price. And it seems like a pretty compelling idea to get a Wii which would include the Wii, Gamecube, N64, Snes and Nes libraries. It seems like it also might have some decent or fun homebrew to play around with.

DSi

I already have a DSi that I installed homebrew on. So another DSi would actually be to use as it was intended. Specifically for buying and collecting DS cards which could be loaded one at a time and played as intended. In terms of software I think I’d stick with games like Pokemon, Nintendogs, and Animal Crossing.

Looking for a new laptop

Now that I’ve managed to grab most of the items in my list of consoles to mess around with and a fare share of Raspberry Pi accessories and gamepads, the next list of things to play around with is a set of laptops. So my goal is to try and pick up two of the same kind of laptops. One to install Windows on and the other to run Debian Gnome on. The conditions for the computers is they need to be either 12inches or 14inches with a 1080p or higher IPS display, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of SSD storage.

For budget I’m looking at about $250 per laptop with a combined total of $500. For memory 8GB is the ideal goal, but 4GB is passable, and ideally I’d be looking at 4GB x2 for dual channel memory since at this price point I’m probably looking at integrated graphics. A few things like a dedicated microphone jack, or usb-c for power are definite bonuses. And in looking for computers, if there is a computer that is more than $250 and around or less than $500 and contains a hot-swappable hard drive then that could be a consideration. And the other thing is that the model needs to be the same for both computers. So for new computers this isn’t an issue, but if I go for something used, then I’ll have to look for models that I can reliably find two of, which will probably be outlet business computers.

So I guess I’ll list the candidate devices, and then try to figure out which one makes the most sense.

Chuwi Herobook

Link: https://www.amazon.com/CHUWI-HeroBook-X5-E8000-Notebook-Lightweight/dp/B07P5RT1P5?ref_=ast_sto_dp

This one is kind of surprising. I wasn’t expecting a new device to fit what I’m looking for so closely. It’s a 14.1 inch, 1080p IPS display with an atom processor and 4GB of memory. The description on the storage is pretty poorly worded. It looks like it as 64GB of eMMC memory which is included. And then it has an optional m.2 (sata/nvme?) ssd slot (up to 1TB) for expanded storage. And they they also claim the micro-sd card slot is storage, but I’ll leave that rant alone.

So the main thing about this device is the display, processor and memory are all fine. It really comes down to the storage. First of all I need to figure out exactly what kind of storage it’s expecting. And then second I need to figure out if the device can boot directly from the SSD. The 64GB eMMC seems kind of wonky, I don’t know if there’s anything I would really need or use it for. On Linux I could potentially map is to something. On windows I don’t know if it’s possible to group drives, or even if that’s a good idea. So as far as I can tell it seems like the best option would be to install a separate SSD and then pretend the eMMC doesn’t exist. Unless I could install Linux to one drive and Windows to the other and then figure out how to switch between them as a bios option. And then figure out how to separate the partitions so that they couldn’t see the other, only one shared mapped partition.

Latitude E7250

DashGL Season 2 Notes

So a quick note on hardware. Bought a PsVita, it is a really impressive device. For laptops pretty much want a 14″ 1440p ips, ryzen with 8gb of ddr4 ram and 256gb of nvme storage. So it basically doesn’t exist, so I’ll have to keep watching for when something of this description fits. Preferably a Thinkpad.

For DashGL the next season of tutorials took an unexpected turn. Originally I had planned to use SDL, but it turns out that emulation station doesn’t use the X11 environment. So rather than launching X11 specifically to run one game, I decided to look into egl and running games from the command line directly, and it’s an approach that I’m pretty excited about.

Though the drawback of using egl is that there is not a lot of documentation. So I’m kind of flying blind on this one. I’m thinking that the approach for this set of tutorials isn’t that I’m some kind of guru, but more to present some examples to act as a place to get started, and maybe people more familiar with the subject can fill in on the details.

Right now we’ve managed to get the first triangle down which took several hours of cleaning out the program included with the pi to get it down to the “hello world triangle”. Next step is to include the shader install part of the application as a library. So I’ll probably be writing about my issues with that in the next post.

More hardware follow ups

The second-hand shop close to my house had a PS-Vita in unexpectedly good condition for $50. I ended up making an unplanned impulse buy. First impressions are that the screen is really great. The analog sticks kind of get in the way and I wish Sony had gone with the nubs from the PSP. I’d be attempted to swap the sticks out myself, but looking at tear-downs of the Vita, it looks like there are multiple boards, and the analog sticks are one of the last things to come out. So the mod might be above my very low level.

I spent last night getting henkaku set up. So I’m running 3.60 with what looks like to be a persistent cfw. Even after reboot everything is usable. Right now I just managed to get mGBA working. I have a micro-sd card adapter coming tomorrow. So I’ll try to get StorageMgr working to be able to use the space. My plan is to mostly use the Vita as a Psp-plus, as generally the kinds of games I’m looking to run on it are Phantasy Star Portable 2 Infinity, Rockman Dash, Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker and Disgaea. So mostly a priority on PSP games, but I also want to throw on a lot of psx games like Vagrant Story.

Since I grabbed a PsVita that means generally the only other console hardware that I’m thinking about picking up would be the Wii or WiiU. Wii would be a lot cheaper. Though it kind of depends on what kind of homebrew is available. If WiiU would let me play NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube, Wii, and DS games on the tablet thingy. And then I guess the WiiU also had HD remakes would make the price of admission worth it. Though the Wii is super cheap, so being able to pop in an SD card and then being able to play NES, SNES, GBA, Gamecube and Wii games would probably be the easiest approach.

In terms of computers, I’ve recently been thinking about a computer that could switch back and forth between different OS’s easily, and I’m thinking the best approach is to hot-swap hard drives. I’ve been looking at the Thnkpad series and they seem to only have one screw to the harddrive bay and then tool-less swapping from there. I think I would buy a bunch of WD-blue SSD’s and then I could install different distro’s, ReactOS, Windows, (maybe even MacOS?) on them if needed. In terms of which machine to go with I’m leaning towards X240.

Originally I was thinking about the X220 or x230 because of Coreboot, but the resolution is capped at 1366×768, which I resolution that I hope eventually dies off forever. Starting from the X240 is looks like the display can be upgraded to a 1080p IPS display, and the machine itself is cheap and widely available. In terms of pricing it looks like $140 for the computer, $70 for the screen, and then I have an extra 8gb ddr3 sodimm stick lying around that I can use for the single memory slot. Which would just leave storage. For the X-series, it looks like it goes up to X280 before switching over to the carbon series, but in general it doesn’t look like the newer models offer any updates with respect to screen resolution. And the X240 is likely to get coreboot sooner than the other models (assuming it’s still a work in progress).

A few other alternatives would be the X1 carbon, which has the option of a 1440p screen, but it’s over a thousand dollars. So I think I’ll pass on it. There’s also the Thinkpad X395 which is the 13″ Thinkpad with a Ryzen chip in it, but it’s still capped at 1080p, and the newer processor means that I’d be less likely to be able to get something like Windows XP or ReactOS running on it. That isn’t to say that the X240 would definitely work, but it has a higher probability. So all in at it has a 12.5″ IPS 1080p display, potential to run multiple OS’s, 8GB of ram, and an easily swap-able hard drive bay for $200. Definitely sounds reasonable for the price. And the other advantage is that it doesn’t break the bank while I continue to wait for a 14″ 1440p laptop with usb-c charging that isn’t ungodly expensive (if it exists at all).

Another thing is that I’ve been thinking about switching over my work computer to Fedora as I continue to go more and more open source. Options for a work station computer I’ve been thinking about are:

1. The ThinkCentre M715q Tiny is a super tiny Ryzen desktop with multiple display ports. The nice part about going with this is I should be able to find some ddr4 sodimm ram and an nvme drive at work. Which basically means that I would only need to order the base unit and then I could have a pretty serious spec’d out small computer.

2. Going up in size there’s the ThinkCentre M91, which is more of a general category as a specific model. There are a bunch of used mini-itx Thinkcentre’s that look like the have space for a half-height graphics card to go in, and I can always swap out the power supply. The processors are a little older but my work-load can be managed perfectly fine with a dual-core i3. The main drawback behind this build is that I’m waiting and hoping AMD comes out with a lower power half height card on either their RX 5500 or RX 5300. Still not a lot of information on either of these cards, so this ins’t a viable option until more information comes out.

3. The Inwin Chopin is a great case for a Ryzen APU build. But I think for the price of getting the new motherboard and all of the memory, that it’s probably a better idea to go with the ThinkCentre M715q Tiny as the price is going to be similar. And as the power supply is built in and there’s no option of adding in a pcie-express slot, it seems like a better idea to go with the smaller option.

4. Dan A4. A guy can dream right? This case is pretty expensive and I think it would only be worth getting a case like this if I indented to get specs to fit the caliber of what this case can handle, which would probably be a Ryzen 7 3600 and RX 5700. Barring that it’s probably best to leave this case alone. If I wanted to go cheap there’s the option of a SG13 with a previous generation Ryzen and then an RX570 or something. But I think I’d rather wait to see what AMD has in mind with the RX 5500 before doing anything like this.

5. The last idea would be a Core 1100, which is a great sleeper case. Though my intention would be sleeper on the outside and on the inside. The idea would be to basically use the cheapest b450 motherboard I could find and pair it would older Ryzen Cpu’s an basically cobble something cheap together. Though again, this option really depends on what AMD does with their new cards, as I really can’t bring myself to buy polaris cards. They seem long overdue for an update the the port options kind of suck.

So in summary it likes like the ThinkCentre M715q Tiny would be the best option as it’s small and there are parts available for it. Following that up would be the ThinkCentre mini-itx, which is older but has the benefit of being a complete system for not a lot of money. And again my work load is basically text editors so it would be more than enough. The issue is when AMD will actually announce and release a new card, if it will suck or not, and if it’s actually available. Otherwise the only option here seems to be the Tiny one as all of the other’s depend on a deus-ex graphics card.

More stupid hardware Ideas – Thinkpad Edition

Not sure what it is about winter that makes me want to tinker more than normal. To follow up my previous post, I think I found some cheap Vita’s and Wii’s at a used electronics store close to my house. So I think that might potentially be an option for working with those consoles. Especially the Wii, it’s like 5$, and junky Vita’s were $50, which brings down the price of admission. But the more I see of the Vita UI, the less I like it. So buying some super cheap wii’s to play around with might be an option.

Though in this post I was specifically thinking about playing around with old Thinkpads. And the reason for that is that I’ve been using one of the original Zenbooks from several years ago, and I simply hasn’t had any reason to upgrade. The screen is a 13.3″ full hd matte IPS screen (with really bad screen bleed), 4GB ddr3 ram, 128GB SSD, and nothing is upgrade-able. So spec-wise there’s nothing exciting going on. The problem is that there’s no reason to upgrade, as the most important reason I would upgrade is for a 1440p or 4k screen. And what might come as a surprise is that I actually prefer 1440p as it allows for more stuff to fit on the screen without impacting battery life too much.

Now the problem is that the laptop market doe not seem to want to move passed the fullHD barrier. More and more cheap computers are getting fullHD screens, but as many premium computers are getting high resolution screens. And the ones that do are generally not in the thin-and-light department, or have some other defect (most notably Mac-style arrow keys). Or are otherwise ungodly expensive. Like specifically the three computers that I’ve thought, “yeah, I could go for that”, are the LG Gram, which being around $1,000 and stuck at fullhd resolution seems stupid, a customized Thinkpad Carbon X1 (except those hit $2,000 or more in pricing), and the 12 inch Mac. Which being a Mac has the stupid arrow keys.

And then another thing is that I would like to get an AMD laptop. And all of those seemed to be capped at 1080p, even though if anything they could actually take advantage of the extra pixels. And when microsoft finally came out with the AMD Surface 3, and it had the stupid Mac style keys. I mean at this point there’s barely anything in the laptop department that can’t be covered by the $200 Pinebook Pro. usb-c charging, 1080p screen, thin and light, and then the other specs don’t need to be amazing, mostly reasonable.

So that’s made me think that in terms of laptops, if there’s nothing new or exciting to buy, then I might look at old laptops and see what I can tinker around with. And what I’m really tempted to do is get into the old thinkpad seriers. There’s the X220, X230 and X240, and it’s hard to decide on one. As the X220 and X230 can both be flashed with coreboot, which would be fun to play around with. But then the X240 looks like it can be upgraded with a 1080p IPS screen. So what I would be really tempted to do is get several thinkpads and upgrade and customize them for different reasons.

Like I could get a x220 flash it with coreboot and then use it for reactos. Or get a x230, and then see if I could get macOS working on it (for fun), and then maybe see if it would would with an external GPU through the pcie slot. And then for the x240, while it can’t be flashed with coreboot, I would like to replace the screen with and 1080p IPS display and then put debian and xfce on it and customize xfce to use an IrixOS-like theme. Though then again I’d also like to get the Pinebook Pro to play around with that. One thinkpad would be cheap and fun to play around with, but several devices would probably start to add up to the point where it would be better to save towards something more practical. Which generally comes back to why I haven’t upgraded from Zenbook.