When I switched to the Yoga in early 2014, NW was winding down, and I didn’t get the chance to post about it. Now that I’m finally switching away from it, I wanted to put down my thoughts.
Really, all I wanted in 2013 was a thinner and lighter convertible tablet: the ThinkPad tablet line had evolved from the lovely X200 Tablet to the horrendous X220 Tablet and X230 Tablet, and it looked like that was the end of it!
The last time I wrote about switching laptops, I was still trying to replace my ThinkPad X220 Tablet. Round one had been the X230 Tablet, which hadn’t provided any sort of benefit for the additional cost. Round two had been the Helix, which had been just too much of a gimmick. In early 2014, around the time Nonsense Wars stopped, I had finally been able to replace the X220 Tablet with the ThinkPad Yoga, which, despite the novel “fold-over” form-factor, was thinner, lighter, faster, and most importantly had a 1080p screen.
The problem I’ve had with convertible tablets is that the digitizer experience has only been getting worse, and in my opinion this has been a trend since the TC4200. These days, even if you get a “real” digitizer (as opposed to some touchscreen crap) it seems like it’s just an afterthought. With the Yoga the pen was tiny, it wasn’t that accurate, the surface had poor feedback, and there were the infamous “black holes“. Mine didn’t black hole too badly, and I was only using the tablet to color so it wasn’t that bad, but still…
Eventually I bought a Cintiq! And these days I really don’t do enough digital drawing to justify either my Cintiq or a convertible tablet, so I decided that my next laptop could be of the traditional form factor. I hadn’t really been looking though: I’m really big on passive cooling and light laptops, and I knew that there were still very few, if any machines on the market that checked both boxes without excessive compromise (I’m talking about you, new MacBook (Air), with your one crappy port).
More than five years ago, when I retired my desktop Motoko, I thought I was done with desktops for good. Reasons for eliminating desktops from the “fleet” had ranged from size to dust to depreciation, but boy have times have changed. In early 2014 I replaced my T430 with the DC53427HYE, and that addressed all the previously mentioned concerns about desktops. In fact I even upgraded that to a better version of the same thing in 2015.
In late 2015 I started playing World of Warships, and ultimately became enamored with playing with all the settings turned up at 1080p. WoWS is not a particularly demanding game at 1080p, but I still needed to borrow my brother’s desktop with the Q6700 and HD6850 to max it out; my ThinkPad Yoga with the i5 u4300 can barely handle the *lowest* settings at 1080p. I was/am also in the process of playing Tales of Zestiria on the C2Q desktop. So, in the late summer of 2016 (now) after borrowing it for far too long, I finally decided to look at rolling my own.
Yes, it’s been three years since the last part was posted, but after quite a hiatus I suddenly felt like working on the Melvin, and as such she is getting a Part 4.
When I “completed” the model in 2013 I intentionally left off the deck railing because I thought it would be insanely fiddly to assemble and it would deform due to the flexing of the deck when opening and closing the ship (to access the internals).
But I decided I was finally up for the challenge of fiddling with the railing, and having run the ship multiple times since 2013, I had become confident that deck flex would not affect the railing. So I busted out some string and super glue and got to work.
A story about expectation.
This comic really didn’t deserve its own page, but I wanted to include it on the site so it’s getting its own post.
