Longest day of the year today, at least up here. Sun was up before 5:30 and it's still bright out now as I'm typing this around 9pm, and I spent a chunk of the afternoon doing something I almost never do anymore, which is sit outside with a laptop and actually get work done instead of just pretending I'm going to.
The laptop in question is a ThinkPad X220 I bought off eBay for $140 back in 2019, running Linux Mint because I never got around to putting anything fancier on it. Ancient hardware at this point, i5-2520M, 8GB of RAM I upgraded myself with a $22 stick, and a screen that is, and I cannot stress this enough, actually visible in direct sunlight. Matte finish, not glossy. Every laptop I've bought since 2016 has had a screen that turns into a mirror the second you're not in a climate-controlled room with the blinds shut, and every time I complain about this to someone they look at me like I've asked why cars don't come with hand cranks anymore.
I don't think that's an unreasonable thing to want. My monitor at my desk is glossy too and on a sunny afternoon it might as well be a rear-view mirror pointed at the window behind me. Manufacturers decided somewhere around 2013 that "looks better in a product photo" beats "usable outdoors" and we've all just quietly accepted it for over a decade now. Anyway.
Sitting out there for two hours, no notifications because the ThinkPad doesn't have any of my accounts on it beyond a text editor and a terminal, I ended up going back through old posts on this blog. Techpad turns fifteen this coming November, which is a genuinely strange number to type out. Fifteen years of me writing about whatever gadget or software thing was annoying or delighting me that week. I went and found the first real post, from November 2011, about switching from Google Reader to something called NetNewsWire because Reader's redesign had apparently made everyone furious. Google Reader doesn't exist anymore, obviously — killed it in 2013 — and NetNewsWire is still around, still free, still one of the few pieces of software from that era I still recognize the name of.
Reading back through fifteen years of your own writing is a weird exercise. A lot of it is embarrassing. There's a post from 2013 where I confidently declared that nobody was ever going to want to read long-form content on a phone screen, which, well. There's another from 2016 where I spent four hundred words complaining about a Windows update that broke my printer, and I remember that printer, and I still resent it a little.
What struck me more than the specific predictions I got wrong is how much of the day-to-day texture has stayed the same even as the actual products changed completely underneath it. I was annoyed by battery life in 2012. I'm annoyed by battery life now, just at a higher baseline of expectation. I was annoyed by software updates changing things I liked in 2014. Still annoyed by that. The nouns change, the shape of the complaint doesn't.
I don't really have a neat takeaway from an afternoon of reading my own archive, other than that fifteen years is long enough that you start to notice the cycles instead of just the events. Somebody somewhere right now is writing a blog post about how a new AI feature changed their workflow, and in six years they'll either still be using it or they'll have completely forgotten it existed, and there's no way to know which from the inside.
The X220's battery, for what it's worth, is a replacement I bought in 2022 for about $35, and it still gets close to five hours of real use, which is more than I can say for most laptops twice its price that I've tried in the last year. I'm not going to pretend that's some profound point about planned obsolescence or repairability movements or right-to-repair laws, even though it probably connects to all of that. I just like the machine. It does the thing I need a laptop to do, which is let me write, outside, on the longest day of the year, without me having to squint.
Going to go enjoy what's left of the light now. More soon.