Friday, December 17, 2021

Truck Search

I have seen a couple of Ford F-150 trucks show up online recently, so I wanted to go sit in one and make sure I didn't find the truck incredibly uncomfortable, so I decided to go to the Ford dealer in town and sit in a few before I had one shipped up from somewhere just to find out that my knees were in the dash.

The first one was their "courtesy" vehicle.  It wasn't bad, it was reasonably comfortable.  The seats were softer than my Toyota, which might be a good thing (my Toyota feels great when you get in, but a few hours later you are in misery).  The steering wheel isn't in a great location, but it is an improvement over the Toyota.


This was the only thing that bothered me.  I don't understand the reasoning for it either.  I am hardly the only person that rests their arm on the window sill, and doing that in this truck is obnoxious.  I think I would get used to it, it was more obnoxious than uncomfortable, but this is still a really silly design decision.

I sat in a couple different ones, since Ford has at least a dozen different configurations.  This one wasn't bad either.


The second one I sat in was even the same year as the ones I saw online.

I looked at another one that was a slightly higher trim level and was surprised to see that it didn't have a bench seat in it.  It felt like I was sitting in a compact car, so bench seat is a requirement too it appears.


Just out of curiosity, I went and "measured" the usable length of a "standard" bed these days.  They have gotten shorter again.  Either that or my wingspan is longer than I thought (I think it is just over 6', maybe 6'1").  I was too lazy to rummage around and get the tape measure out of my truck since it wasn't really important, 8' box is a requirement.

Much to my surprise, I actually saw a truck on their lot that was configured the way that I want it, other than I don't need the plow. 

It had an extended cab, 8' box, 4x4, 5.0L V8.  It was a 2019, so it wasn't too old or anything.  It had a tow package of some sort on it.


The mirrors on it were kind of small.  

I tried to look inside, and at least confirmed it was a bench seat. 

Unfortunately though, I went and looked up the price this morning, and they want more for that truck than a brand new one.  Add in the fact that Monadnock Ford has a very bad reputation, and I think I will pass.  

Just because they had one unlocked, I also went and sat in one of those $80k trucks (a fully loaded F150 Lariet), and it was surprisingly uncomfortable.  It almost felt like the seat wasn't level, and it was too constricted, just like the other non-bench truck I sat in.

For completeness' sake, I also went and looked at the GMC dealer which didn't have anything unlocked, and also looked at the Dodge dealer.  I only found one Chevy unlocked.  It was awful.  The middle seat dug into my leg because it was fixed, it didn't move with the driver's seat.  

I didn't get a picture apparently, but the Dodge I sat in wasn't very good, it was notably inferior to the F150.  It looks like Ford is the frontrunner for the next truck.  Assuming I can find one. 

At this point, I probably won't post for the rest of the year since my traveling begins this weekend.  Merry Christmas everyone.

Tuesday, December 14, 2021

New laptop review.

This is just a review of my new laptop.  (UPDATE - The Handbrake results have been posted)

Laptop features

Display:  The built-in 1440p display looks pretty nice.  If there is backlight bleed, I haven't noticed it.  I don't have good enough eyes to know if the color accuracy and stuff is good.  The display itself looks pretty sharp.  I expected that I would have trouble reading such a high definition screen that is so small, but thus far I haven't needed to up the DPI scaling or anything; it has been usable as is.  That said, I would have preferred a 1080p panel.  The only major gripe I have is that I don't particularly care for center hinges.  This one is only just barely strong enough to hold the display now, in five years I have doubts about whether there will be enough friction to hold the lid from falling over if the thing is touched.  Historically center hinges have not held up well.  Time will tell.  I don't tend to open my laptop from the corner, so I am hoping it won't get torqued over time.  My older laptops (ye old ancient Dell Latitudes) had actual latches in the middle, so I tend to open up laptops from the middle.

Keyboard:  I personally don't like chiclet keyboards.  That said, there is decent throw to them (a little more than your average laptop), and there is at least a little feedback, which is nice.  They put the Ctrl and the Fn keys in the correct order (my Lenovo drives me nuts that the Fn key is the bottom left, not the Ctrl).  There is a numpad, but they cut off the rightmost column of it (the -, +, and Enter keys).  They have a minus and a plus above the / and *, but that makes the numpad feel unnatural.  And I don't understand why; there was plenty of real-estate to make the keyboard a key width wider. But instead they turned what could have been a really nice (for a chiclet) keyboard into something that is kinda meh.  

Touchpad:  My what a monster.  It is bigger than my hand.  If anything, I would say that this touchpad is too big.  Includes multi-touch and stuff like that.  I kinda wish there were physical buttons, and there is plenty of touchpad that I would have felt ok sacrificing some of it for them.  The touchpad is so big that I sometimes have trouble finding the right side to do a right click.  It has corner buttons to disable parts of the trackpad, so you can easily disable them if you are using a mouse (so you don't get errant clicks from your arm or palm sitting on it).  You can disable the right half, or the entire thing.  I think that is backwards and it should have been left half or the entire thing.  If you are gaming with a mouse, you typically are still using wasd to move around, which means your left hand is still on the keyboard, meaning the left half would be better to disable.  It is still the nicest touchpad I have ever used though.

Power/Battery: the 240W brick is a big boy, but not as big as you might think (I had a picture of it in the previous post).  It would be nice if it had an LED on it indicating it was powered.  It may not seem like a big deal at first, but their decision to pick a brick with a right angle connector on it is stupid and blatantly wrong when the power port is on the back.  Right angles are nice for laptops who have all their ports on the sides; on the back though it is either putting the cable in front of an exhaust port (bad for a performance machine that is likely thermally limited), in front of IO ports (good luck getting that Thunderbolt cable plugged in with it the other way).  Or it is pointing up and if you open the screen too far it pushes the power cord out (already happened twice).  The battery itself is small (66Wh) which combined with the hardware inside results in a poor battery life, though not as bad as I expected.  Windows claimed when I was downloading stuff it would get 3-4 hours (three hours until I dimmed the screen a bit), which is actually more than I expected.  While gaming that battery won't last a half hour (the GPU alone slurps 140W, more than twice my entire Lenovo) but while gaming I just need it to act as a UPS.

Misc: It is refreshing that the laptop didn't come with any bloatware on it at all; just a single manufacturer app to tune fan settings and the like.  No antivirus BS and trials and stuff.  The app was a simple, not flashy design that is more function than form, which is refreshing.  That design extends to the chassis as well; there is no branding on the laptop, not a lot of flashy RGB crap (which I don't like), just a sticker you can put on if you want it for the lid.  The casing feels fine, and I don't feel like it is going to break if I hold it by the corner.  When I was benchmarking it got up to 75C, the fan profile tuning needs some adjustments, but that was as hot as it got.  Benchmarks don't take long, but I didn't feel the heat permeating through the keyboard or touchpad, though I am not sure I ran it hard enough long enough to do that.  Just browsing the internet the fans are real quiet, and it doesn't get terribly hot. 

Performance Comparison to Tower:

Real World: this perhaps isn't fair, but both sides have disadvantages.  The laptop is Win10, which is slower than Win7 by quite a bit.  My tower's Win7 install has 9 years of cruft in it though, so it might be a bit more fair than it seems on its face.  Both are snappy, though perhaps the laptop feels a little bit more snappy, and is perhaps mildly more responsive.  I assume this is Win10 trying to scan it or something, but when I was installing stuff, the installs were much much faster to open and run on my tower, despite the disk advantage in the laptop.  In this regard, while the laptop is a minor upgrade, the desktop is still really good and has held up well in the past decade.  My disdain of Win10 is the main reason I would consider this a push.

Benchmarks

Handbrake

The test video was a 19GB 1080p blu-ray rip using the same settings on both (the settings I would use to compress a video for my library).  The encode took under 2 hours (1:50), which is better than the tower.  I don't have exact numbers for the tower since the latest handbrake doesn't run on Win7, but historically the tower took around real-time (meaning a 3 hour movie took 3 hours to encode).  The old desktop would take 

This is a CPU-centric real world test, and the laptop was an estimated 20-25% faster, which was far less than what I expected.  Intel hasn't made major strides with their strides with their CPUs in several generations, but even just minor improvements I would have expected more from a 9 generation jump.  

It is worth noting though that Handbrake on Windows 7 was able to use all my cores at maximum speed, but the laptop rarely had all the cores of the CPU at maximum clock and floored.  This is an odd thing that someone more familiar with the tool would have to answer.  It definitely should not have been IO bound with an NVME (see the following benchmark) and the RAM is much faster, so I am not sure why it wasn't able to floor the CPU.

CrystalDiskMark 

In what should surprise no-one, a modern PCIe4 NVME drive is almost an order of magnitude faster than my 840 Pro which got curb-stomped while its lunch money was being stolen.  Matt said those speeds were decent for a Gen4 NVME drive, but not top of the line.  Regardless it is a massive upgrade and I am not disappointed.  It is a latency upgrade too, though I don't have a good way to benchmark that.



Furmark

A pure GPU benchmark, the laptop is just under 50% faster.  While that is a sizable increase, it is far less than I expected.  Given online benchmarks, I expected the laptop to be double the score of the tower.  Furmark has a reputation for pushing video card's power systems to their limits though, and the laptop has more of a power wall than my old desktop where the AMD Radeon R9 390x sucked down so much power it tripped the overload alarm on my UPS when running.

89fps, 5356 score on the tower vs 130fps, 7806 score on the new laptop



Unigine Benchmarks

There are three benchmarks in this suite: Valley, Heaven and Superposition.  The laptop is 100% faster.  While that is sizable, it is about what I expected.  Also of note is that my laptop came in around 10% slower than Matt's mid-range PC (Running a Ryzen 5600x and 3060ti), which is almost exactly what I would have built had I gone with a new tower instead. 

Valley: 67.8fps, 2838 score on the tower vs 134.6fps, 5632 score on the new laptop
Heaven: 68.5fps, 1726 score on the tower vs 158.2fps, 3984 score on the new laptop
Superposition: would not run on the tower vs 47.5 fps, 6347 score on the new laptop vs 51.6fps, 6895 score on Matt's machine.

Conclusion

It isn't unexpected that the laptop is faster; there is 9 years of CPU and RAM difference, and around 5 years of GPU different between the two systems.  The main reason for upgrading though wasn't performance; it was modern technology support (things like USB3, which my tower only kinda supports, NVME, newer PCIe, etc).  My tower was due for an upgrade.  Despite the obvious speed advantage, you can really see the difference in the disk speed and the Unigine benchmarks.  While I could have upgraded my current tower (put a more modern video card, NVME secondary drive, and a new USB controller) in the desktop and eeked another couple of years out of it, the timing was right.  

There were other considerations to the upgrade as well because simply put: the performance of the tower was still adequate for its usage despite being obviously slower.  It still played games at the LAN just fine, I still ran everything at max or near-max settings.  Its boot times and load times were okay.  The fact that it still ran Win7 was a bonus to me.  The performance of my tower, while it looks really bad in the data above, is still decent for modern usage.

This brings me to the primary reason that I upgraded it: as I have begun traveling more, I will want to be able to bring more of my stuff (and life) on the road with me.  This laptop will enable me to have more than just a portable web browser when I am traveling, I will have access to everything (except for the network storage I have which wouldn't go with me).  On the last trip to SD, I just copied a large chunk of my media onto a couple of flash drives and that was adequate to fulfill any entertainment and media needs I had while on the road.  I could easily install a second drive into the laptop and use that instead.  The performance of laptops has gotten far enough that I expect this laptop will be adequate for years to come.  One could easily argue that my current laptop sufficed for the last trip and they aren't wrong, but this opens doors that laptop couldn't and it means I won't have multiple things to maintain, it is just unplug the dock and my whole computer is with me.  I won't have to spend three days transferring data around before going anywhere.  The takedown on a laptop is just yanking a plug once I get a dock for it.  I only used to need to do that once a year for the LAN.  Now I can do it when I go on the road.  It still has adequate battery life for when I am using it as just a portable browser.  I almost never sit at my computer for more than three hours at a clip when I am not at home (where it will be plugged in).

Overall, I am quite happy with the purchase, even if it was an expensive one, and with a looming vehicular and house purchase some might think now was not quite the best time which is a very reasonable position.  Still, despite the current chip shortages and the like, I didn't get pillaged on it. I think going with a laptop was worth the roughly 10% hit on performance and 25% on cost (The laptop was 2300, and the ITX tower build came in at 1800 or so, most of which was video card).  Personally, I am not sure how many more years my tower would have been viable even with upgrades (which would have cost 4 figures if I replaced the video card), and waiting until after the dust settled on the house would have pushed the timetables out another 3 years, maybe 4 (I assume after I buy the house the first year will be getting furniture and stuff for it).  Add in the immediate benefits a laptop has to my increased traveling the next few years, and I felt like while this was not an ideal time, it was the best in the foreseeable future.  

Monday, December 13, 2021

Icy weekend

Friday was a night of gifts.  All my holiday packages arrived.  The tiny home doesn't have enough space to unbox a bunch of things though.  

One of the things that came in was my new laptop.  I did a quick size check and it fits in my backpack.  Barely.  It is a 17.3", while my old one was a 15.6".  I will probably write up a review for it at some point this week.  


I also went out shopping on Friday like normal, and found a couple of interesting things.  

On Saturday, while my family was dodging tornados, I was getting iced in.  We got about a quarter inch or so of ice.  I accomplished pretty much nothing but chores (and some games) on Saturday until the evening after it had switched to rain and melted the ice off.  At that point I took the laptop and made a McDonalds visit to get it set up.  Apparently McDonalds' free wifi is faster than the internet we have at work, which is just a wee bit sad.  

I also got a few other things tested.  I upgraded my cooler to a portable fridge.  It pulled down surprisingly quick for something that only draws ~35W.  It pulled down in well under an hour, though I will have to keep an eye on the overshoot.  I set it for 35 degrees, and it shot down all the way to 31.  If I had vegetables, that presents a possible freeze risk.  It has a disappointingly large hysteresis band, meaning with it set at 35, it oscillated between 31 and 35.  I was planning on using it at work to store salad makings and stuff for lunches when I am not traveling.  The fridge in the break area is normally too full to store more than a small lunchbox.  Hopefully the overshoot will be less of a problem when it is fully loaded.  For those curious, this is the kind of fridge that would be used in a camper van.  It isn't noisy, but sitting on the couch I could hear it when it kicked on.

I didn't realize that it came with an AC adapter, so the extra one I bought was unnecessary, though an AC to DC12V adapter isn't a bad thing to have and wasn't that expensive.  It is interesting to note that the 35W AC brick is the same size as the 240W brick for the laptop, though the laptop one is much heavier.  For comparison, the 65W adapter for my old laptop is the little Lenovo block at the bottom.

I also did a mac 'n cheese comparison.  The Hannaford brand one was bland, but the Cheetos one was runny.  They were both a buck and both mediocre.

Sunday I went outside and picked up branches.  There were a few that came down, but nothing too big.  I also moved the chains, and put a new shelf in the carport.  It is easier to reach, but still high enough that I could pull the tractor further in if I put a longer attachment on it.  It allowed me to clean off the working area in the corner, which was piled in parts and tools.  The chains got moved to the other side on an empty hook.  

The carport was one of my winter projects.  It was a nice easy thing that I could do in a day.  At this point, I am debating leaving the power center in the back of the truck for the winter.  The cap seals pretty well now, and weight in the back of the truck is a good thing in the winter.  Add to that I will be using it in March and early March it would be back in the truck again anyways.  It is also really easy to top off/maintain the batteries monthly when it is all set up, so I just have to plug in the charger.  The only real downside is it is basically the same as putting a toolbox in an already too short bed; I can't realistically get lumber, or at least not anything more than 8 foot.  That is probably not an issue in the winter though.  Because everything got thawed out, I decided not to put chains on the tractor yet.  It is supposed to be 50 by the end of the week.

Winter Projects:
  • Install chains and anti-gel in tractor.
  • Get power center out of truck.
  • Fix shed floor.
  • Review options for house (mobile home vs stick built vs modular)
  • Put up more shelving/hooks in the carport

Monday, December 6, 2021

Kind of a lazy weekend.

I didn't do much over the weekend.  I went to a party on Saturday, and made a cinnamon roll cheesecake for it.  It was delicious, but man cheesecake is a lot of work; it took several hours of prep time and a couple of hours to cook.

Sunday I at least decided to drag myself outside for some work, though I didn't roll out of bed until well past double digits...  It was warm enough that the ground had started to thaw a little bit, so I smoothed a couple of the spots in the driveway that had gotten roughed by my not-so-limited-slip rear end in the truck.  Hopefully this won't be a major problem going forward.  The gravel didn't get packed enough before the ground froze.  

I also walked around my lot a little bit.  Not all the snow had melted off yet.  Most of it is gone now that we had rain last night, but snow is still in the pretty stage.  

I also went up to the shed with the intent of working on it, but ended up spending a half hour sweeping it out again.  This time I pulled the damn bag of insulation out of the shed, so the mice that want to live in fiberglass can make their mess outside.  They have consumed several feet of the fiberglass.  I will throw it away next time I go to the dump.  

After cleaning that out I started pulling out my winter stuff.  I got my snowshoes out.  

I also noticed when I was pulling out my winter boots that I had a tote that I didn't know what was in it.  I pulled it out and it was mostly spare computer parts that I didn't even know that I had.  

That reminded me that I had another tote of computer parts that I also pulled out.  I haven't opened this tote in the 5 years I have been up in Sullivan, and at this point most of what was in it is hopelessly out of date.  Most of it was out of date when I moved to NH 7-8 years ago.  There were some interesting antiques in there.  I will probably scrap all this stuff, since at this point I have decided that I am going with a laptop for my next computer.

I am not sure why this was on my phone, but I for whatever reason had a picture of a llama on my phone.


In the end while I cleaned out the shed again, I didn't get the floor started.  I did do a little bit of research and started to develop an itinerary of my next trip.  Greg (the host of the party on Saturday) is from Texas and he basically said just keep on driving.

Winter Projects:
  • Install chains and anti-gel in tractor.
  • Get power center out of truck.
  • Fix shed floor.
  • Review options for house (mobile home vs stick built vs modular)
  • Put up more shelving/hooks in the carport