You know the dilemma: you are going on holiday, want to take a laptop to potentially do a little bit of light work or even some browsing, but really worry about what happens when your expensive piece of aluminium from Cupertino is stolen (or, in my case, left on a train), potentially full of sensitive information (though to be fair to Apple, cracking a locked down MacBook is pretty tricky). The alternative is taking something with you that might be less disastrous to loose, so maybe an old machine or, in my case, the cheapest new laptop with a 14 inch screen one can find. Step in a large South East Asian provider of electronic goods and an unnamed seller of reasonably priced laptops. In this case a 14 inch laptop with an alleged Intel N3700, 16MB of RAM and 128MB of SSD for 160 Euro. At this price one has to expect a bit of subterfuge, and indeed the processor was a slightly slower (though newer) X5-E8000 and the RAM turned out to be 8MB, but hey, it arrived on time, had Windows 11 on it and worked. Windows 11 laboured a bit with a 9 year old processor, so Debian 12 came (as ever) to the rescue. LXQt runs smoothly, video/audio playback and streaming works well and all internal hardware instances are supported out of the box (so to speak). Work works (?), as its quick enough to let Firefox run the office applications in the browser (if Libre-Office is not your thing).
So yes, thanks to Linux it’s perfectly doable to use a light, cheap but underpowered laptop for the price of an Apple ac-adapter for work and (a little bit of) play. If it’s sensitive information you’re carrying around, the encrypted home folder will sort that.
Just don’t have ‘user’ / ‘password’ as your login credentials.
So, I have a soft spot for classic Disco. I know that admission (in the seventies’ US of A) might have me ending on a funeral pyle during a break at a National Football League game, but in 2025, I think it’s safe to admit this. I particularly like the Philadelphia, MFSB inspired sound of percussion, funk and a lush and generous orchestration, with its epitomy Dan Hartmann’s ‘Relight my Fire’. I remain steadfast in my opinion that this is the best example of how to use orchestration to enhance and add some drama to an already existing excellent song (though the Manic Street Preachers came close with ‘Design for Life’ and ‘Everything must go’ in a completely different genre). It’s also one of the best songs of all time, full stop. The Take That version pales in comparison and did the song no favour. I always fancied arranging this song for a live orchestra/band/choir, but unfortunately lacked both the talent and the cash to hire 100 musicians, singers and a recording studio big enough to put them all in.
Well, step up the orchestra and choir of the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht and arranger/conductor Chris de Bruin, who delivered this as project towards his graduation. While the arrangement doesn’t have the fluidity and perfection of Hartmann and MFSB (particularly the 11 minute version), the video of de Bruin’s project is just so joyful and catchy, that I haven’t been able to stop watching it. A true gem of the Interwebs.
And while we’re at it: their version of Barry Manilow’s Copacabana (arranged by the amazing Emma Wieriks) is just as good. You can feel the fun the musicians had while making this oozing through your screen and speakers.
Makes me want to throw in my day job and go back to university, studying composition at the HKU. Ironically, we recently visited Utrecht for the first time. What a beautiful place with a great quality of life.
Here’s a playlist from some of this team’s other works. Well worth checking out.
I recently moved house, and as usual during the whole rigmarole, one encounters bits and bobs behind cupboards, under beds or sofas or even in long forgotten, overgrown garden sheds. In my case, a laptop (or call it a notebook) fell of a tall cupboard while I was moving it around, trying to dismantle the bloody thing (the cupboard, not the laptop). I had completely forgot about its existence, as it was a purchase I made either early on in the pandemic, or just before, and a few doses of COVID-19 in the meantime obviously must have eradicated those synaptic connections responsible for the memory of this particular gadget.
The gift from above (yes, I caught it just in time) was a 2020 Pinebook Pro, a then inexpensive piece of technology by the fine lads from PINE64, who thought they could revolutionise the market for inexpensive gadgets by basing them on open hardware and software. In this case the thing was based on the original Pinebook, but with a little more ram and a bigger screen (and a metal shell). It came with a built in version of Manjaro on its tiny eMMC and had a micro SD card reader on which you could run alternative OSs on. The processor was an 6 core ARM Cortex-53, one of the most inexpensive CPUs, used in oodles of systems on a chip all around the world. I remember liking its looks, its keyboard and the fact that its built in Linux distro just worked. I took it to work to show my fellow geeks what 200 Euros would get you these days and worked away happily on it.
So far so, so groovy.
When I rediscovered the machine, everything was still working, but the repositories provided by PINE64 for their special version of Manjaro were obsolete, so a new OS needed to be found. 1 hour later, a little bit of hardware trickery, an exposed motherboard and some software tricks, and Armbian, the Debian distro for ARM SoCs was running with the latest kernel.
Everything that’s built in works out of the box: bluetooth, wifi, the sd card reader. It will never win speed competitions, and Firefox lumbers a bit, but Libre-Office and GIMP are running zippily, so what else do you need?
Thanks to those amazing technologists that keep Debian and the Linux kernel running, another machine has been saved from the local electronics recycling heap.
China Crisis is a band that these days only of people of a certain age – often already with grandchildren – remember. It’s the temporal equivalent of my grandfather telling me about Glen Miller. The ones that do remember them are usually those slightly nerdish fellows that were aware what was going around in the nether-regions of the charts: China Crisis’ most successful single in the UK was the moody ‘Wishful thinking’, peaking at number 9.
Their first three albums nevertheless all sold enough for two gold and a silver disc. Who would have thought. I never really followed them or got into them as a young person, but once I turned old and my body made the natural, genetic progression to Steely Dan devotee, my overall taste in music, sensitised by The Dan, changed.
When Walter Becker died, I looked up his Wikipedia entry and was surprised that he had produced more than Steely Dan and Donald Fagen: two of China Crisis’s albums were on that list. That sounded intriguing: a mix of Becker’s perfectionist approach to studio production and his peculiar musical signatures mixed with with the Liverpudlian spirit of China Crisis seemed an interesting mix, and indeed: ‘Flaunt the imperfection‘ is one of the best produced and (more importantly) beautiful albums I had heard in quite some time. The rest of their back catalogue from the eighties and nineties is not quite as stunning as ‘Flaunt the imperfection’ though still contains some beautiful songs. It’s nevertheless their 2015 album ‘Autumn in the Neighbourhood’ which is their crowning glory: crowdfunded via the now bankrupt Pledgemusic, its production is impossibly polished, layered and sound more like a Steely Dan album than anything else. Musically it sounds like the Becker-led ‘Flaunt the imperfection’, plus the odd steel guitar (which, btw, does nothing to ruin the moment as it normally would). Just more melancholic. Both musically and lyrically it seems the two remaining members of China Crisis are setting themselves an epitaph and are looking to the future with trepidation and a degree of resignation.
It’s nevertheless melancholy of the finest vintage and I can only urge you buy it.
P.S. Gary and/or Eddie if you read this: the best girlfriend and I think that Autumn in the Neighbourhood’s album cover is depicting Bonn in the 1960s. Please confirm.
I recently discovered the joys of Chinese online distributors. It’s not really my fault, but Germany’s leading technology magazine “C’T” featured one of their yearly robotic vacuum cleaner tests in last month’s edition, and for some reason the best girlfriend ever suggested contributing to the test’s best performer, the (admittedly amazing) Xiaomi Roborock S50 2. While it unfortunately sends architectural schematics of my groundfloor and my network details back to China, it really does an excellent job of cleaning the place and swallowing the crumbs and garlic pieces I seem to be distributing around the place. But vacuuming is beside the point here. Now that I am on the books of the Chinese distributor of the contraption, they keep sending me offers of more delicious technology, so I obviously had a look at their laptops. Browsing brands I’d never heard of, I came across the T-Bao Tbook R8.
The ad promised me a 15.6″ screen laptop for £156 pounds, with another 20 quid for shipping and insurance. A 15.6″ inch laptop for under 200 pounds? “Hell yes”, to quote Ed Milliband, so I pulled the trigger, and less than one week it’s here on my lap. First impressions are what I expected: a bigger version of my Pinebook, with a very similar feel to the plastic, keyboard and trackpad. A tiny ‘welcome’ piece of paper, no manual and a far too short AC adaptor cable with a universal plug. So far, so expected. Its hardware specs make it clear that this is no gaming laptop: 4GB of RAM, 64 GB of EMMC storage, an Intel Cherry Trail X5-Z8530 CPU (a recent Atom, as far as I understand), Intel HD 400 graphics, one 2.0, one 3.0 USB slot, a rubbish webcam, a micro SD card slot and headphone output. Nothing to be excited about. Have a look at an unboxing ceremony by those lovely people from OSReviews here:
64GB storage is – I am sorry to say – not a biggie anymore. While my Sinclair ZX-81 had 1kb ram -which I was perfectly content with for ca 1 week – 64GB pretty much covers your cousin’s wedding in pics and movies these days, so I was a bit sceptical whether I could turn this into a work – laptop. Nevertheless, it seems to work out ok: Windows 10, Office 2016, various small tools and – most importantly – my work related files on my iCloud drive – seem to need exactly 40GB. That leaves me enough space for potential updates and any additional media (Music/Movies) that can be stored on a SD card.
How does it feel working with it? Surprisingly good: the keyboard is a step up from the terrible Pinebook keyboard (though it does look remarkably similar) and is generously sized, though the keypad is, as expected, not great. This is not going to be such an issue for desktop work, as one would use an external mouse, but it will need some adaption to not impede workflows. Speedwise, I can’t complain: with Spotify streaming to my AVR, Outlook downloading bits and bobs and Firefox having 3 windows open, the CPU reports 63% load (though 80% memory in use). It nevertheless feels super-zippy and the display is very comfortable on the eyes. The Cherry Trail CPU has a very modest power consumption, so battery life is pretty good and will last you at least 4 hours while doing routine stuff. I have to admit that I haven’t tried any graphics – heavy applications (though I might give the GIMP a go later), but this is not what I bought the laptop for. The built-in WiFI is pretty rubbish, but a small a/c/n 3.0 USB wifi adapter has dealt with this beautifully. The DAC seems to be ok as I had loads of fun with my headphones on, listening to Spotify.
So, in conclusion:
Pros
Price, Keyboard, Screen, Power Consumption, Speed, Silent
Cons
Keypad, Connectivity, Storage, RAM
Is this the perfect low cost laptop? Undobtedly, yes. Find me a similarly handsome, zippy machine for this price, and I will eat my Pinebook. Is this the perfect laptop? No. It’s certainly no Power Mac (still my go to machine for all ‘professional’ work’), nor a Thinkpad, but for 156 quid with its great keyboard and limited, but acceptable functionality it’s a no-brainer.
Messaged from the Outhouse 