If you’ve been following my blog for any period of time, or spoken to me about laptops in the last 3 years, you’ll know that I’ve been waiting for a 13 inch, all AMD laptop with USB4/Thunderbolt capabilities that I could use as a desktop replacement. The combination of open-source graphics drivers, performance, and battery life with ultimate flexiblity - the ability to become a competent gaming machine when plugged into an eGPU.

The ThinkPad Z13 Gen 1 is not that laptop. I think the X13 Gen 3 might be a better contender for that. What the Z13 is, though, is a quite nice ultraportable that ticks almost all the boxes I could want.

I’m a fan of Pine64’s products. I own a PinePhone, have tried out the multi-distro demo image, and have even bought a keyboard (which is, unfortunately, not terribly great - it has mushy keys and is unresponsive) for it. I haven’t been able to replace my Android phone just yet, but when the PineTime was announced, I told myself I’d wait a bit for the platform to mature, then give it a shot.

In the meantime, I bought a FitBit Charge 4 (this was 2021-ish) which I used for about a year until now. The main features I liked from that watch were, in no particular order:

• Sleep cycle tracking
  • automatic sleep tracking, just keep it on your wrist and go to sleep. It sometimes detected me as sleeping while watching a movie, but other than that, very solid detection.
• Heart rate and calorie tracking in the app
• Small footprint, comfortable to wear
• Notification support (very hit or miss imo)
• It’s a watch and tells the time, of course

So, a bit ago I decided to give the PineTime a good solid test. At currently $27 plus shipping (!!) for a sealed watch, it was a clear next step, especially since supporting FOSS and data privacy are top-of-mind for me these days.

I’ve been using it for a week now - here’s my impressions.

Times are tough and the year is already going by too fast. Put it all out of your mind for a moment and take a break. Take a deep breath, too, while you’re at it.

Hi there! Welcome to the first post in what I hope will be a series about neat music. This series will mostly focus on music and things related to my specific tastes as a learning DJ-slash-whatever who grew up listening to way too much electronic and Japanese music.

Quick note, not all of these are recent releases and I don’t think all releases in these posts will be. These posts are meant to be focused on what I’ve discovered recently and think is worth paying attention to now, and in the future. And obviously, it means I like it! I’ll try to include (DRM-free, if possible) US purchase links for everything I can, and streaming links for everything else.

Terminals are cool, tiling is amazing, electron sucks, DEs suck and KDE is for psychopaths.

“Want to come check out my neofetch? Where are you going?”

It’s been 3 years since I switched to running Linux full-time on both my desktop and laptop. Of course, the first year or so was marred by a sub-optimal experience with an uncooperative set of laptops, trying to get them to do things they just weren’t designed to do.