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Alright, we got a MacBook Neo in at work and after playing with it for a bit I have come to the conclusion that it’s fine.

The built quality, keyboard, trackpad, and screen are all good, and when compared against a lot of the options in that price range they are downright fantastic.

Is it as good as a MacBook Air? No, the Air is slightly better across the board and if you care about the specifications of your device at all that’s probably a better choice for you. Is it as good as a MacBook Pro? Again, no, the Pro’s have active cooling, better performance, better screens, and nicer keyboards.

It’s fast enough to handle basic office stuff, basic media consumption, and it’s cheap.

And it should terrify the folks who churn out cheap crap laptops.

In the long term I hope that this thing is going to raise the bar for what those vendors are churning out. Hopefully we can get the plastic e-waste out of the way and start seeing devices that will live for more than a year before folding up and wining up in a landfill.

For the last several years I have been training Brazilian Ju Jitsu, something that I wound up getting talked into while my kids were working on their own martial arts training programs. Both were at the time pursuing black belts in their arts and I wound up sitting there six days a week basically twiddiling my thumbs.

At the time that my kids where training there was a Adult class in BJJ running and I was talked into jumping in because otherwise I was basically just sitting there doing nothing. At the time I was also looking into something to improve my fitness because I had just dropped a pile of weight and was looking to make sure that I kept it off.

At first I figgured that I would stick with it while my kids where training, and as they wrapped up I realized that I was spitting distance to a blue belt and figured that I may as well stick with it long enough to at least finish off that level of training, however around that time I also started to enjoy learning the art, and some of what was going on started to make actual sense.

It’s been a few years since, and that blue belt is now replaced by a brown one and i’m still digging through the training.

A good portion of why I’ve stuck with this comes down to the school that I train at. We are all very aware of the potential to hurt people and train in a way that protects our partners so that we can all make sure we can get to work the next day. Not to say that I have never been hurt when training, but it’s pretty rare and usually because I did something specifically stupid while training.

I have gone to some other schools over the years, and frankly a lot of those places seem come across as places that exist to just try to tear you apart. I’m sure there’s some value to that type of training but personally most of the folks there seem to be so focused on force and strength that I can still find ways to attack and progress forward.

It’s not something that I’ve put out the cash on, this is for the test pool of hardware in the office that we use to make sure that our software works properly. However since it’s a general pool this does mean that I’m going to be able to put hands on the thing and see how it feels compared to the current state of Windows devices that are out in the field.

At this point reviews on the thing are either super happy about the device, or super critical, no real in between.

Be interesting to see what the reality is when I can put my hands on one outside of the Apple Store.

Well over a decade ago I picked up a messenger bag that I really liked, it was from a local company to me called Onsite Equipment and I’ve really forgotten how long I’ve been using things thing and after many years it’s starting to show it’s age. The fabric isn’t wicking water during rain, all the straps are starting to fray, and I’ve replaced the buckles multiple times.

Honestly I like the bag enough that I wanted to just go get another of the exact same bag, understanding that the same exact bag may not be still being made but hoping that the manufacturer has something else that works and stays faithful to the original one that I’ve been using. However when trying to look the company up it’s looking like they may have folded.

So, now I’m having to start sniffing around for a new messenger bag.

Timbuk2 and Chrome are a obvious option, but given everything going on I would prefer a Canadian manufacturer, preferably somebody local if there is one making bags at a reasonable price.

I’ve found this from Cocoette;

Fred • Compact Messenger Bag

And another brand that I like the look of is the Life Behind Bars, but they don’t seem to have anybody local who stocks the things so no idea what they actually feel like. But I do really like the look of the Echelon in blue.

https://int.lbbjkt.com/products/the-echelon-m?variant=44218768949301

Now I just need to find an excuse to get out to Jakarta to get a look at the thing I guess.

So I like computers. I’ve played with them for years and spent a lot of time working my way into a career where I can work with tech on a daily basis.

At work I have access to piles of hardware, granted it’s not like what what the folks at LLT would have sitting around, but it’s still more than what a average person sitting at home would have sitting around. I still however maintain a decent pile of hardware at home to play with even though I have a large pile of gear to work with.

So why do I do that?

Well while I have a pile of gear at work to play with I don’t always get to have complete control over what I get to do with that hardware. In some cases projects that I want to play with or things that I want to do have nothing to do with what we are doing at work and I can’t really go and take work resources to mess with those projects. In some cases they will overlap and I can play with some interesting tools at work but a lot of what I’ve been playing with personally just does not overlap.

So the question becomes what hardware should you be using to build out a home lab?

Well what I did was just to reuse a lot of what I had sitting around from previous upgrades. Generally I would upgrade my primary machine every two or three years, and after a couple of years you wind up with a pile of older hardware sitting around that would otherwise be collecting dust so why not put it to work. The big advantage to this is that you already have the hardware sitting around and you won’t have to spend more money out of pocket to pick up stuff.

The other place where I have had some luck picking up hardware was from other people’s e-waste bins. A lot of companies still purchase hardware and rotate the hardware out within about three years or so depending on leases and other things. When that happens that gear can sometimes wind up finding its way to a recycler or refurbisher. At one point I came across a 11th gen i5 sitting in a e-waste bin and, at least from what I can tell, the only thing wrong with it was a broken wireless antenna cable. Even if you wind up buying the things devices that are a couple generations back show up on Ebay and local shops fairly cheaply, you might need to toss in some more RAM or a SSD but that’s still generally cheaper than a new machine.

The one thing that I try to avoid for the test stuff is buying things new.

That’s not to say that I don’t pick up new stuff from time to time. Personally I’m not a huge fan of used storage or other things that will eventually wear out like a mechanical hard disk or SSD eventually will. However a CPU? That doesn’t tend to wear out over time.

And honestly, If I’m going to drop 1200$ on a piece of hardware I would rather have it be the primary machine that I’m working on all day long rather than something that’s going to sit and run random docker images or other software that I decide to play with. Work is a different matter – there spending money on hardware that’s going to sit in the background and do stuff makes sense, but for home I would rather have the fancy toy sitting on my desk.

When you start this be willing to accept anything that you can get free or cheap, but don’t get attached to it. At some point you are going to wind up with too much gear and getting rid of it winds up being it’s own set of problems.

So as I have mentioned at other points I do collect pens. Specifically I collect fountain pens that I use for note taking and other writing at work and home.

Why fountain pens?

Well I’m left handed and what I find is that the inks that I use in them wind up drying quicker than the normal inks that I find in most ballpoint or gel pens and as such I don’t get as much of it sitting on my hands as my writing hand is dragged through the stuff I just wrote down.

So how did this start?

I was down in San Francisco for a work trip and was wandering in the area around Moscone Center before having to do work stuff and found a Pen Shop that was going out of business, and when wandering around there I found a green Lamy All-Star that caught my eye, and since it was on sale for a good price I picked it up on a whim and within 10 min of using it wound up going back after work to pick up another Lamy Safari that they had in stock since it was again very cheap and I really liked the way that the things wrote.

Over the years any time that I was shipped someplace for work I would wind up sniffing out Lamy Safari and All Stars and would pick them up as souvenirs of my travels. The thing with these pens is that Lamy releases special editions every year with them in new colours, so even after I stopped traveling I kept picking up the special editions from a local pen shop that I like to go to. At this point I think I probably have well over 60 of the things now.

That’s just a few of them.

Since then I’ve also picked up some other pens from Pilot and Twisbi, and I’m eyeing some others that look interesting to me but there’s a limit to how many of these things I can justify having sitting around.

The key for me is that these are pens that I use – I rotate through these things over time switching them out as they run dry on ink so that they just don’t sit laying around doing nothing. I wouldn’t mind having a better way to display these things other than the cases that I’m currently using but I haven’t had time to figure anything out. Might need to spend some time with a 3d modelling tool and a skadis pegboard or something like that.

As I have gotten older over the years I have in a lot of regards become less and less picky about brands for some things. However one place where I don’t like to bend is when I’m picking up tools that I’m going to be using a lot.

I’m not just talking about hand tools here either, one of the strangest things that I am picky about is my writing instruments and the keyboards that I work with.

These are items that, at least while working, I will have my hands on all day long in some form. Either taking notes, typing emails, writing documentation, or just doing other stuff keyboards and pens are two of the more important things that I have in my bag.

When given a choice I don’t think I’ve used anything other than a fountian pen for coming up on a couple of decades now, and I’ve bought far too many keyboards trying to find the right one for a full days use.

Thinking about it this even impacts my choice of laptops, either a Thinkpad or a Apple device since they seem to have the best keyboards around for typing.

Even though I consider myself picky about these tools I will use whatever is at hand if I don’t have a choice in the matter. And while someone might look at me writing with a 75$ pen and think that’s crazy there are people out there walking around with pens worth far more than what I’ve spent in their notebooks.

For me it makes sense to pay the premium for something that I’m using every day all day long. I would rather pay once and cry about the price once rather than keep having to replace tools that break or can’t do the job.

This is definitely something that I picked up from my father. He worked as a mechanic for years and if you look through his tool box he had some stuff in there that was completely overkill for someone who was not pulling massive trucks apart daily. For him however the cost of a broken tool meant that a job might not get finished on time leaving a truck out of service. There were some tools in the box that were really cheap – mostly stuff that it looks like he bought it for a single job and then tossed it in the back of his toolbox and forgot about them. You can tell however what was important just by the feel of the tools that were in the box.

I suppose at some point I’ll do some reviews of pens and other tools that I’ve got sitting around, for now however it’s getting to be bedtime and it’s time for some sleep.

The last season of The Boys is aging on Amazon Prime right now, and if you have not gone through and watched it yet you should.

It’s gory, and not something that you would want kids to watch but it’s dammed good and while I’m kind of sad that it’s going to be ending after this season it’s shaping up to be a banger of a send off.

The folks at Amazon have had a couple of really good shows in the last couple of years. Reacher is a solid watch, and the Eye of the World series they did was good, and it’s too bad that it was cut short since there is a pile of material they could have run through for that series.

Either way, if you haven’t seen it yet go get started on The Boys. It’s well worth the time.

While my D70 did a great job for me for 20 years it recently became time for a new camera and after a lot of digging around I picked up a Nikon Z50 II to replace it.

I was considering something in the Nikon DSLR range rather than the mirrorless cameras but after looking at the DSLR range and looking into the differences between them I really liked that the Z Series was a bit smaller and lighter and that would be better for packing the thing around while travelling since that was one of the things about the D70 – it wasn’t really a small camera.

So, after looking at the options I ruled out the Z30 since I like having a viewfinder for composing photos but anything higher than the Z50 or Z50 II jumped the price up quite a bit and didn’t give me enough to justify paying the extra.

Since they generally have deals on kits with these things I picked up a two lens kit that paired the body with a DX16-60mm f3.5-6.3 and a DX 50-250 f4.5-6.3 lens. I know that a lot of people poke at the kit lenses as being less than ideal the pricing of the kit was such that the lenses were almost a 2 for the price of 1 thing and it gave me some glass to put on the body to get started.

The lenses are good enough for most of what I’m doing right now, they give me a good range of focal lengths and are fast enough that I can actually use them when I’m walking around. Now personally I prefer shooting with prime lenses, not zooms. On the D70 the most common lens for you to find attached to that body was the 50mm f.1.8 that I picked up and after a short while I found that I really missed having a fixed lens on the camera. Shortly after I picked up the kit there was a point where the Nikor Z DX 24mm f/1.7 was on sale and after taking a look at some reviews I picked that up for the kit as well.

In the end I’m going to be looking for a couple more prime lenses, probably something in the 40-60mm range, and then something around 100mm or so. There’s lots of nice options in the line up, and I really have a eye on the MC 105mm f/2.8 VR S and the 50mm f/1.4 that they have in the lineup right now.

The other thing that I did have to do was pickup some extra batteries and some SD cards. The batteries man, those were just wild. On Nikon’s website the batteries from them run about 100$ cad, but you can’t charge them outside of the camera unless you pick up a charger that they don’t include with the Z50II. What I wound up finding was a set of batteries from a company called SmallRig that not only replaced the OEM one but have a USB-C connector on them so that you can just plug the battery in to charge with any USB power source. That option being about half the price wasn’t hurting the decision either.

SD cards were pretty simple, just some reasonably fast Sandisk ones at 256GB and I’m good to shoot for a very long time with those.

The nice thing about sticking with Nikon is that the Flash unit that I have works with the new body, it’s limited to lower sync speeds and such than the newer ones but it still works as well as it did on the D70 and if I’m in a space where I need a flash head I’m probably not too concerned about the 1/60th sync time. At some point I’ll swap out to something newer but that can take a back burner until some of the lenses are swapped out or the existing flash unit packs it in.

I’ve had the camera for a couple of months now, so in about a year I should have a handle on it and be more comfortable with the use of the device, until then I need to just get out there and snap photos as often as I can.