Laptop Proliferation

I try not to talk about my professional life here unless it’s relevant, but I spent almost 30 years working in Information Technology. Working in IT meant I would collect things like cables, and connectors, PC parts, and on occasion, whole laptops. This collection of computer junk was in addition to my collection of ham radio junk. The last few years have seen a lot of changes that have caused me to move my junk more than once. Nothing tells you that you have too much stuff quite like moving all of your stuff. I am working my way through this pile of junk. The goal is to either get something working, or get rid of it.

One of the things that I have a lot of is laptops. I am from the old Unix school of “do one thing, but do it very well” thought. I don’t like to write school papers [or blog posts] on the same laptop that I play video games on, and I don’t like to do radio stuff on the same laptop that I program radios on. This means that in addition to the laptops that I use for other aspects of my life, I also have two laptops for ham radio. I use one for operating, and one for programming radios.

Why are there two of them?

Anyone who has used a handheld radio from China has probably had to load a sketchy radio app onto a PC. No, I don’t think that the Chinese government is spying on us through ham radio. As a former IT Professional, I have done a lot of work with janky software, and Radioddity is some of the jankiest software in existence. So rather than enable unsigned drivers on a laptop that I care about, I have an old Windows laptop that I use stricty for programming radios. It’s an old Core 2 Duo with 2 gigs of RAM. I got a stack of them from a friend, a UFOologist who buys pallets of old government equipment. I have interesting friends. It just barely runs Windows 10. I realize that not everyone is as fortunate as I am when it comes to computer hardware. Information security and privacy aren’t luxuries, but the time, skill, and equipment that they require often put them out of the reach of most people.

The other is an Evolve III Maestro 11.6" which is a cheap laptop, of slightly better specs. It’s the darling of ham radio Youtube because it runs off of 12v DC natively, meaning it is dead simple to charge it in the field from a battery or a solar panel. I have it running Ubuntu Mate currently, but I am going to upgrade to 73 Linux. The Evolve laptop is still a work in progress. It needs a GPS dongle (for positioning information) and a TNC (for digital modes) to be fully capable. My goal is to begin with a Software Defined Radio and an antenna for HF, and to then add the tranceiver, the most expensive bit, for the very last purchase. Somewhere in there I need to figure out how to decode digital modes with an SDR.

The other activity, adjacent to programming radios, is loading or flashing old mobile phones. I use older refubished smart phones as emergency phones with offline map and navigation apps. I am a big fan of OSMand for offline navigation. It’s not as good as Google or Apple for turn-by-turn directions, but it is great for loading tons of data onto an SD card for terrain information. I also seem to collect old smartphones as well, so I they too are on the “get it working or get rid of it” list. I will write more about that process when I get started doing it.

What about the others

One of my laptops has a screen that quit working. So I removed the screen entirely, and I use it as a kind of Intel PC variant of the Raspberry Pi 400. Except mine is bigger, more powerful and uses far more electricity, and can’t run Linux. It also gets super hot, which cats love. The fun thing about a laptop with no lid is that the keyboard is not protected from paws. My “decaptitated laptop” locks me out whenever a cat has tapdanced on the keyboard. I have it plugged into a damaged Dell monitor that fell off of a desk at a previous employer.

I have managed to donate a couple of laptops to friends who needed them. Those that remain, assuming I can get them working, will go to the Cincinnati Computer Cooperative.