Most years I do a post recording how my personal use of technology over the year.

Looking back at last year’s post, I can see there’s been a few changes but perhaps not as many as you might expect.

The major event affecting my use of technology was not the end of Windows 10, but my finally coming to the end of my documentation projects for the National Trust. My guerilla cataloguing exercise for the Athenaeum doesn’t require so much in the way of equipment – a laptop, a camera, and a scratchpad seems to cover it, along with the beanbags and some of bits a pieces out of my work kit.

Almost, I have occasionally documented artefacts up at the Athenaeum, most recently some nineteenth century tools leant to us as part of an exhibition, and when doing so I’ve reused the tweaked methodology I used down at Lake View.

I’m still using my old Windows 10 Thinkpad for the cataloguing exercise – after all, all I need is a browser but I’m mindful of the fact that technology creep may break things I’ve already configured a refurbished Windows 11 Acer Travelmate ready to use as a substitute cataloguing machine.

The only reason I havn’t changed over is that I like the slightly larger screen on the Thinkpad, but I should probably bite the bullet and change.

Talking of larger screens I had a win, successfully installing Ubuntu on J’s old iMac which has given me a big screen device for looking at images, which, coupled with the recycled workbench I put together mid year, has made the whole business of transcriptions and the like much easier than before.

And while I’m talking about installing linux on things, I successfully installed linux on an old Chromebook I’d picked up cheaply with the intention of using it as a distraction free writing machine.

My initial purchase of the Chromebook wasn’t one of my better decisions, I managed to pick a model that was too far out of updates to be truly useful, so nothing ventured, nothing gained I had a go at installing linux on it and have ended up with a robust little writing machine that’s proved incredibly useful with its excellent battery life.

The original distraction free machine continues to live on as a second documentation machine – it’s battery life isn’t quite as good as the Chromebook, but having rather more in the way of storage adding extra software when required is not a problem, unlike the Chromebook which is pretty tight for free space.

At the same time I installed linux on my old AMD Ryzen based laptop – I’d originally planned on using Bunsen Labs Linux on it, but the screen had an annoying flicker. Changing to Ubuntu was better but not perfect, but after some digging I located some Lenovo drivers for Ubuntu and that fixed the problem.

The machine now sits happily on my recycled workbench.

Somehow, I seem to have ended up with rather more linux machines than is totally sane, and it’s probably time for a cull, especially given that I’ll doubtless be moving my remaining Windows 10 machines to linux sometime in 2026.

On the other hand they all have their uses, as I found when I discovered that the old laptop I’d put in the studio before we turned into a shared workspace still had a working CD drive allowing me to recover data from an old CD for J.

As for the rest, I’m still using the Lenovo Ideapad I bought back in 2022, principally as a machine to take away with me on an overnight trip. Battery life is still good, and the ability to use it in tablet mode saves having to take an extra device with me. The only problem is the lack of ports, and if there’s going to be any photography involved I either take the HP laptop I bought for our 2024 Tasmania trip or a linux based laptop.

Much to my regret, I have ditched my old pandemic era Huawei tablet – even though the hardware was still reliable it was too far out of software updates to support the current versions of the applications I use.

I still have a soft spot for Android tablets though and replaced it with one from Honor that works well and does the job

At the same time I ditched the dogfood tablet. Basically after nearly five years of use it was too old, too slow, but had done its job and done it well. At the time being I’m using the little Lenovo M8 I bought last year as an e-reader among other things and that’s working out well.

So, as regards hardware it’s been a year of incremental change, as I expect next year will be, with more linux and fewer machines (possibly).

I did make some changes to my use of social media despite having sworn off it a couple of years ago.

I rejoined Facebook because a lot of local history societies use it as a means for communication, and there was material out there I wanted to take a look at. In the month or so I’ve been back on Facebook it’s been useful, even though I’m still mostly lurking.

At the same time I joined pixelfed as a way of sharing photos that wasn’t Instagram, and that’s also working out well.

So there we have it. No dramatic changes, a few successes, and perhaps a bit more linux than last year …