For a long time now, I’ve been doing an annual review of my personal use of technology, so following on from last year’s review here’s the review for 2024.

In a sense, not much has changed.

I have finally bought myself a new laptop as an everyday Windows 11 machine, something I’ve been resisting while my old Lenovo Windows 10 laptop was still working well, but I suspect that with Windows 10 dropping off support in 2025 we’ll see a gradual move with newer versions of some applications requiring Windows 11.

As a replacement I bought a fairly standard i7 based Lenovo IdeaPad, powerful enough for most purposes, be it writing, spreadsheet work, or research via the web.

As always the promised seamless migration was anything but, but after an hour or two of swearing, I think I’ve got most things working the way I want. I’ve not really used it for anything serious yet, but the screen is noticeably crisper and the keyboard nice to type on so it looks like it’s going to be a positive experience.

That does leave me the dilemma as to what to do with my old Windows 10 laptop.

The refurbished ThinkPad I bought a couple of years ago for documentation work continues to give excellent service, and I did also buy myself an additional refurbished HP laptop to take travelling earlier this year, the rationale being that if either one died on me in the course of the year I’d have a standby replacement.

It’s a tribute to the build quality of both machines that, in the case of the ThinkPad, it’s survived being trundled down to Chiltern and up to the Athenaeum in the back of my rattly old Subaru on a weekly basis, and the HP survived a ferry trip to Tasmania and a trip to FNQ at the end of the dry season.

For the moment, I think what I will probably do is move my old laptop onto my second desk in place of the old ThinkPad Yoga I bought back in 2019, which while it still works is a little slow in use.

My pandemic era Huawei tablet is stuck on an old version of Android, and gradually it’s starting to suffer from bitrot with newer versions of some applications not working and recently it began to periodically complain that its internal storage is full.

Given that one of the main uses I have for it is reading my email and the online news at breakfast time, I gave it a factory reset and am now running with a minimal set of applications to see how that goes – I had been using my Chromebook Duet in tablet mode as a replacement, so that I know that I can do everything I want via a web browser, but I find the Duet is a little heavy for prolonged use in tablet mode I reckoned that it was probably worth giving the Huawei a post-reset go to see if that prolongs its useful life.

The Dogfood tablet, while undoubtedly slow, and generally useless for anything other than an e-reader continues to soldier on with Lithium to read epub format books.

Howver, I’m quietly enamoured of the run out Lenovo M8 I bought myself as a sort of birthday present earlier this year which has proved to have amazingly good battery life, and with an 8” screen is perfectly usable for web searches and wikipedia.

On the Linux front, I must admit that I’m not using the distraction free writing machine as much as I thought, in part because I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my previous travel computer, a Lenovo IdeaPad 1, to Linux earlier this year – a bit of a white knuckle ride – but once upgraded, it proved an excellent note taking device for meetings, or rather it did until I upgraded the version Ubuntu, and found that for some reason it was less stable and ended up reverting to the previous version.

It certainly seems quite a bit better behaved since reverting, so I think I’ll leave it on the previous version of Ubuntu for the moment.

At the same time I started playing with Lubuntu on an old Dell laptop I’d originally bought second hand for J at the start of the pandemic as an emergency replacement when her old machine died and new machines were almost unobtainable.

The machine is nice to use, with a good keyboard, but I’m not sure about Lubuntu per se, it feels a little unfinished, but all the main applications work well and I’m basically trying to use it as an alternative to my daily machine, in part because it’s blessedly free for now of applications which have been infected with AI.

While I think that AI has a range of great applications in automated image analysis and handwriting recognition, I am less convinced about it when it tries to act as your helpful assistant, and rapidly becomes extremely annoying, for example I do not need a pdf reader to offer to create a summary of my power bill or bank statement, or indeed create a useless summary of a nineteenth century newspaper article.

Besides computers, the revived Lumix camera has proved useful when documenting larger artefacts at Lake View, as has my $25 Temu lightbox.

I did start playing with retro photography, and I did find it a valuable exercise to improve my own image taking, but I’ve also come to recognise that I probably won’t do anything particularly serious with film and film cameras.

However besides improving my own photographic skills it has helped me learn and relearn about classic film photography, and its history, which has also helped me assess some of the historic images I’ve been working with as part of my various projects.

And of course we’ve acquired an internet connected cat feeder, which strangely enough the cats took in their stride, and even when we’re home and feeding them traditionally, will check out just in case it’s come to life – however, as a human still has to reload it with cat nuts every so often we’re not yet dispensable.

And finally, a word about social media.

I abandoned the socials over eighteen months ago, and have no urge to go back. I do use mastodon, and post what I think are interesting links, but basically I lurk and use it as a source of train porn – essentially it reminds me that there is a world out there where people say things that I find interesting.

I obviously still blog, and still use an RSS reader to read a number of newsfeeds and blogs I’m interested in, but that’s more or less the sum total of my online involvement, and I’ve found that to be enough …