Assembly and setup

Setting up the cabinet was a relatively painless experience.  The assembly in particular was fairly easy.  The cabinet comes in one box and the only tools required are screwdrivers.  All you really need to do is assemble the base, which is essentially an empty box.  The top of the cabinet, which contains the monitor and all the electronics,  comes pre-assembled, as does the control panel.  So the assembly process is essentially:

1. Put together the box for the base.
2. Put the monitor box on top of that.
3. Put the control panel on top of the base as well.
4. Plug everything in.
5. Screw everything down.

That's it.  There really wasn't much to it.  This was simpler than most pieces of furniture I've assembled.

The more annoying part was the software setup.  This wasn't difficult, but it involved connecting the cabinet to my WiFi and creating an account with AtGames, both of which are awkward without having an actual keyboard to work with.  The account signup was also a little weird in that I initially wasn't sure that it actually worked.  It did, so I think it was just a UI issue, but it was still a bit strange.  But for the most part, it was no big deal - just going through the setup wizard.

One thing that's worth noting is that the Legends Ultimate doesn't actually take up as much room as you might think.  I can stand at the controls, stick my arm out, and reach the back of the cabinet.  Since it's using a modern LCD display, rather than a vintage CRT, it's fairly compact.  That means it can be tucked into a nook or corner with relative ease and not end up dominating an entire room.  

Navigation and UI

The ALU has a...quirky UI.  I assume that the reason for this is so that they can re-use it across products.  While the ALU has a trackball and spinners in addition to the joystick and buttons, the ALU Mini (a smaller, single-player version of the ALU) does not.  So the UI is designed to be used with just the joystick and buttons.

The UI itself looks nice enough, and has configurable background colors and music.  The navigation is odd, though.  It uses a two-level carousel model.  The main display area has a carousel of games/options that you move through to the left or right using the joystick.  You can "zoom out" (with the Z button) to a text-based carousel that lets you scroll horizontally through the alphabet and then vertically between the available options for each letter.  This part is not super intuitive, but it's reasonable and it works.

Below the main carousel is a menu bar that lets you navigate the various sections of the UI.  This includes things like the built-in games section, the ArcadeNet section, the settings section, etc.  You use up and down to switch between the main carousel and menu bar.  The menu bar also has sub-menus that are accessed by pressing the Y button on the appropriate item.  To get back, you have to go back to that same item in the sub-menu and press Y again.  It's not that bad once you get used to it, but it's definitely a weird and unintuitive user experience.

Personally, I would have loved to see AtGames leverage the trackball to allow a more traditional point-and-click type of interface.  Maybe you could even facilitate scrolling with the spinners, who knows?  It's just kind of tedious to have to scroll through all the options every time.

Built-in games

AtGames advertises the Legends Ultimate as coming with 300 games.  However, as with any collection of 300 games, not all of them are good.  In fact, in this case there are some that you would just never want to play, like most of the Atari 2600 games.  (If you're too young to remember it, the Atari 2600 wasn't exactly great the first time around.  It was better than nothing, but it couldn't hold a candle to the arcade games of the time.)  And of course there are also plenty of arcade games in the mix that are stinkers.

And I should also mention that the built-in game selection contains a few duplicates.  By that, I mean it has both the arcade version and the Atari 2600 version of some games.  Which, of course, is pointless, because if you have the arcade version, why in God's name would you ever want to play the Atari 2600 version?  So the "300 games" claim is true, but a little misleading.

It's also worth noting that the game selection seems to vary.  It's not clear to me if that's due to release date or if the Sam's Club version just has different games.  But I've seen several variations of game lists, and I know that my unit did not include some of the games listed in some of them.  It did include all of the games that were shown on the cabinet, though.  It's just not clear how much you can count on any specific list.

The game selection - actually not bad

That said, it's not a bad selection.  There are a handful of "big name" classics that I was familiar with, including Centipede, Asteroids, Missile Command, Elevator Action, and Burger Time (one of my favorites).  But I've also discovered a number of games in the mix that I'd never heard of, but which are actually pretty decent (Boogie Wings springs to mind).  It takes a while to explore them, and I haven't even gotten to all of them, but it's a decent variety and there are definitely some fun games in there.  I'd guesstimate that most people can probably find at least a dozen games they like, probably more if you're adventurous.

I also found several games games for platforms other than the Atari 2600 collection.  For instance, there were a handful of NES games including R.C. Pro-Am and Battletoads.  There were also a few that appeared to be for the NeoGeo or possibly Sega Genesis  There doesn't appear to be any pattern to the choices, at least that I could see.  I assume it's just "what was affordable to license".  

Incidentally, the "extra" controls are a nice addition for some games.  It's very cool to be able to play Missile Command with an actual trackball.  Likewise, playing Tempest with the spinner is a nice touch.  And, of course, I mentioned the pinball buttons in the last post.

Speaking of which, my version of the ALU came with four built-in pinball games.  They're all from the "Natural History" series, which is apparently an AtGames original.  I'll have more to say about pinball below, but these are actually quite good.  The only problem is that they don't always run.  Sometimes the work fine, and sometimes they crash, trigger a "no input" screen, and eventually restart the unit.  Apparently that is a known issue, or was at one point - I seem to recall mention of it in some firmware release notes, but it still happens.  I find this very disappointing.

ArcadeNet service

In addition to the built-in games, AtGames has their ArcadeNet service, which allows you to download additional games.  Their website claims that there is both a free and paid tier for this service.  I got a 2-month free trial with the ALU, which recently expired, so I've now seen both.

That said, I'm not really sure what they meant by a "free" tier as described on their webpage.  From what I can tell, that just means you can browse the available titles.  It doesn't seem like you can actually play anything with it.  So maybe that page is just out of date.  (Note: Out-of-date web pages seems to be a pattern for AtGames.)

It's worth noting that the 300 games that come with the Legends Ultimate seems to account for nearly all the games in their library.  When I browse the ArcadeNet games from my ALU, nearly everything is pinball.  There's only a handful of other games available, none of which looked interesting.  And while the ArcadeNet page does have a list of games on it, not all of them seem to be available.  I browsed through some of them and found several (e.g. Metal Slug) that were not preinstalled on my ALU and were not listed for download in the ArcadeNet UI.  So apparently that list is out of date.  (See what I mean about a pattern?)

That said, I actually have downloaded a number of pinball tables from ArcadeNet.  They appear to have most of the tables from their "pinball packs" on there, and I've found them all to be very good.  As I mentioned in the last post, my unit came with the side-mounted pinball buttons (which you wouldn't think makes much difference, but it really does) and I've really been enjoying them.  I particularly like the Zaccaria tables, as they have a nice background ambiance and have some "updated" versions of classic tables with some more modern features.  Some of the tables are a little slow to load, and slow to get back to the menu when you exit, but the play experience is very good.  (Note: if you have the pinball buttons, you'll want to change the "pro mode" setting to "side" to make them work as expected.)  I've occasionally had some slowdowns or stuttering on some tables, but that's pretty rare.  For the most part, they seem to run very smoothly once they're loaded.

However, I did not resubscribe to ArcadeNet when my free trial expired.  While I like the pinball tables, and having the leaderboard integration is cool, the price of $20/month seems high to me given what you get.  And while this page advertises "6 months for $60", which seems more reasonable, the actual purchase page says it's $100 for 6 months or $180 for a year.  (There's that out-of-date info again.)  That comes to $15/month, which is better, but it still seems high.  When you consider that they offer "pinball packs" for $30 or $50 that include between about 4 and 25 tables, the math just doesn't work.  So instead of resubscribing, I just spent $50 on the first Zaccaria pinball pack, which included 26 tables, which should hold me for a while.

Bring Your Own Games

One of the really nice things about the Legends Ultimate is that you're not limited to the AtGames offerings.  They have a "BYOG" feature to "Bring Your Own Games".  There are actually three variations on this, of varying usefulness.  Let's start with the best first.

BYOG - Loading UCE files

This is a fantastic feature.  As mentioned in the last post, the ALU has a couple of USB ports.  You can use these to access external games.  Turns out it's really easy.  All you have to do is get some games packaged in UCE format, load them on a FAT32 formatted flash drive, and stick it in the ALU.  It will pick up the drive and add a "BYOG" item to the system menu where you can access them.  (You might have to run their AddonX utility on it first, I'm not actually sure.)  They don't get all of the bells and whistles that are supported for the built-in games, but they support enough and work just fine.

I don't really know much about what the "UCE format" actually is.  From what I can gather, it seems to be a folder containing various metadata such as images for the UI, the game ROM, and possibly a the MAME core needed to play it.

Much of the documentation I found around this was focused on installing CoinOpsX on the ALU.  CoinOpsX is another MAME front-end for managing and playing your games.  Apparently it used to be available for installation on the ALU from AtGames online store, but at some point they removed it and broke compatibility.  However, it turns out that you don't actually need CoinOpsX to run external games.  It may offer a better UI - I haven't used it, so I can't say - but it is not required, so no need to worry if you can't figure out how to install it.

On-the-go (OTG) mode

The next best option for playing your own games on the ALU is the "on-the-go" mode.  This is essentially just plugging a PC into the ALU.  You just need an HDMI cable for A/V and a USB cable for the controls.  Your PC will detect the control panel as a joystick of some type and the screen as another monitor.

The nice part about this is that it's easy to use and extremely flexible.  Since the ALU effectively becomes a monitor and a controller, you can play pretty much any game your PC can run.  You may have to go into the menu to switch to OTG mode, but it's a pretty simple process.

The less nice part is the controller setup, which I still have not figured out.  To be fair, I haven't put much time into it, but the point is that Windows didn't configure the control deck as transparently as I would have liked.  The nice part is that it picked up the spinners and trackball.  However, the button and joystick mapping didn't work as I'd have hoped.  It turns out that Windows detected the joystick not as the main joystick, but as a POV hat, which is...less than helpful.

You can apparently fix this with a tool called X360CE, which stands for Xbox 360 Controller Emulator.  This allows you to make your joystick mimic an Xbox 360 controller, which nearly any modern game can handle.  However, I have not yet managed to make this work.

Legends Link streaming

The last option is their streaming solution, which was apparently called Legends Link.  I say "was" because this option apparently no longer exists.  However, they have not removed it from their website.  (Again with not keeping things updated.)  Instead, they've left the page with a broken link to the installer and this blatantly broken info box:

That's right, for the low, low price of "$ monthly", you too can have zero hours of streaming and zero persistent storage!  What a deal!

For what it's worth, I was able to find a version of the Legends Link installer on archive.org.  I tried it out and, as you'd expect, it just flat-out doesn't work.  I put in my info, clicked the "connect", button, and waited forever while it tried in vain to connect to the server.  After a few tried, I gave up.  It's a joke that they still have this on their website and in their marketing material.

Bottom line

Pros

• Cool cabinet with relatively low profile that's very easy to assemble
• Good controls, including specialty controls (trackball, spinner, pinball buttons)
• Reasonable price point (especially from Sam's Club)
• Decent built-in game selection
• Easy to expand with additional games
• Really good selection of pinball games available at reasonable prices

Cons

• The AtGames website is an unholy mess of bad information
• Boot-up is slow
• Game loading/unloading is sometimes slow - usually for pinball (most arcade games are fine)
• The subscription service is a bit overpriced for what it offers
• The main navigation UI is serviceable, but a little clunky

Recommendation

Overall, I'm quite happy with my ALU.  It's not perfect, but it offers a good gaming experience, a decent game selection, and enough expandability to fill in the holes.  I would definitely recommend it.  If you have the time, money, and inclination, I'm sure you could easily build a custom MAME cabinet that offers a superior experience.  But if you're looking for a "product" rather than a "project", I think the Legends Ultimate is a good solution.

In the spirit of reciprocation, she wanted to get me something nice for Father's Day.  So I suggested a couple of things and let her choose.  She picked the cooler of the options - an AtGames Legends Ultimate Arcade cabinet.

I'd been eyeing arcade cabinets for a while.  Of course, I'd considered building a custom MAME cabinet myself, but to be honest, I didn't really want a construction project, just the end result.  I'd also looked at the possibility of just buying a cabinet, but they tend to be a little pricey.  For instance, I'd seen some custom cabinet builders selling just the cabinets (not electronics) for around $1,000.  To be fair, they were very nice cabinets, but that seemed a little much.  Also, I'm not particularly interested in putting together just the electronics either, so it would still be a little bit of a project.  So I wanted to go with something pre-built.

One option that I originally considered was the Arcade 1Up machines.  I'd seen these in the local Walmart and they actually looked pretty nice.  The design was very authentic to old-school arcade machines and they were very reasonably priced, with some of the units being as low as $300.  However, they also aren't full-size, so to be able to play the games standing up, you need to either build or buy a riser for another $60.  They also come with a limited selection of games, usually a dozen or less.  And even if you can mod them to add more, the controls are really only designed for the built-in games, so you're limited in what you can do.

The Legends Ultimate does not have such limitations.  My introduction to this cabinet was actually playing an older version of it at the Strong National Museum of Play.  They have one in the retro arcade that's free to play, and it seemed quite nice.  It had several classics that I enjoy (including Burger Time and Elevator Action) and the controls were very good and flexible enough for a variety of games.

(Correction: After going back and looking closer, it turns out the unit at the museum wasn't from AtGames.  The Strong actually had the Chicago Gaming Company Arcade Legends cabinet.  That system has been discontinued, but it was very similar to the ones produced by AtGames.  When I Googled it, I just put in "arcade legends" and the AtGames website was the top hit, hence my confusion.)

For the record, if you're considering this cabinet, I would recommend getting it from Sam's Club, which is what we did.  When I first looked it up, the list price was around $550.  However, since then it has gone up to $900 on their website.  But when my wife ordered it, Sam's Club was still offering it for $550.  And it seems AtGames has a special deal with Sam's Club to include some extras in their version.  So I got 2 free months of their  premium ArcadeNet service as well as the pinball button attachments that you can see on the side of the cabinet.  I've been enjoying those more than I thought I would.

I'll do a separate post with a review and break-down of my experiences with the Legends Ultimate, but so far I'm enjoying it.  It's got a decent selection of built-in games (they advertise 300 games, which is...technically true), good controls (including a trackball, if you want to play Centipede, and spinners for...I don't know what), and a fairly decent selection UI experience.  It's also expandible, with a very subtle expansion panel in that metal strip between the controllers and the screen.  In fact, you can see that I have a flash drive plugged into that panel.  They have a very nice BYOG (Bring Your Own Games) feature which allows you to load up a drive with games in UCE format, plug it in, and they just show up.

So I'm happy.  I've got a nice selection of vintage arcade games and a cabinet that gives me an actual authentic arcade play experience.  And, while it may not be an authentic design, I think it actually looks pretty cool.  And that counts for something.

This box has served me well for over a decade.  It holds a special place in my heart because I built it myself from parts and upgraded it over many years.  The oldest part, by far, is the case.  I'm not 100% sure when I got that, but I think it might be the replacement for the broken one I referred to in this post from April 2005.  After that, the motherboard and CPU are quite old - I got those in September 2010.  The rest of the pieces are probably newer, but I don't really remember when they were replaced.

Now that I look at it, the specs on this box aren't actually that bad, even by modern standards.  Granted, they're still sub-par for anything made in the last five years, but it's still got enough horse-power to do useful work.  It's got a 4-core processor, the motherboard is maxed out at 8GB of RAM, and it has just over 4TB of storage.  As a media server, it actually works just fine.

But on the other hand, you can also tell its age just by looking at the hardware.  For instance, that PCI card near the bottom is a sound board - a relic from the bad-old-days when Linux users needed to actually care about what kind of sound cards they bought if they wanted audio to work properly.  You can also see an internal media card reader in front with a crap-ton of slots - another relic from before everybody had settled on SD and microSD.  And you can't miss the two DVD drives - a DVD-ROM drive and a DVD+RW drive.  One of them is broken, but they're so irrelevant by this point that I no longer remember which one.  And we can't forget the serial, parallel, and PS/2 ports.  I don't even remember how long it's been since I used a PS/2 mouse or keyboard.  (For those too young to remember: "PS/2" is for the IBM Personal System/2, not PlayStation 2 - though that's old now, too.  And while I still have a PlayStation 2, I never has an IBM PS/2 - we had a PS/1 instead!)  The pictures also don't show the VGA-to-HDMI dongle I had to use for video to get it to connect to my main monitor, which never really worked well anyway.  When everything was plugged in, the back panel was actually kind of a disaster area.

Of course, just "being old" isn't really enough reason to get rid of a perfectly good box.  Like I said, it still works.  At least for now.  But it's been plagued by occasional stability issues, particularly when I tried to do anything that involved graphics (e.g. playing Battle for Wesnoth, which isn't exactly the most graphically demanding game in the world).  It would occasionally just lock up for no obvious reason.  It's also a big, clunky box that's kinda loud and generates a lot of heat.  And most of the components are old enough that it doesn't even make sense to try and mitigate these short-comings.  It's cheaper and easier to just buy a new box and slap my preferred software on it.

So I ended up buying this little guy, which I'm dubbing "TallgeeseMkII" - that was the version with the blue trim in the cartoon.  Since it was Prime Day, I actually ended up getting the model with 16GB of RAM and the 512GB disk for about the same price.  It's got considerably more horse-power than the old box and the case is actually smaller than the external 3.5" drive enclosure I'm using to house the 4TB data drive from the old Tallgeese.  The entire setup will fit comfortably under one shelf of my new desk (which is another post).  For context, I included my Huey Games Droid Assault "cassette" (actually a USB drive, but shaped like an old-school cassette tape) and the wood-block panda painting my brother did for me.  For context, he originally started doing them that size because they were being sold out of repurposed vintage cigarette machines.  So yeah, significant space savings here.

But as I said, the old Tallgeese lives on, at least in the form of its data drive, which was relatively new and still perfectly good.  I also pulled out the OS drive, since that was still good and it's easier to just stick that in a USB enclosure to grab any config or files that I need than it is to get them from backups.  I doubt I'll be using it for much else, though - while it is an SSD, it's only 120GB.  But some of the files from it will live on, so I guess that counts for something.

This one was a long season.  It's been a while since my last phone upgrade - almost exactly four years, actually.  My previous phone (and my wife's - I generally get us the same thing) was a OnePlus 5 which I bought in September of 2017.  It was a really nice phone and, to be honest, I didn't really want to upgrade.  I mean, why spend $500 on a new one when the one you have is perfectly fine?

However, this time I didn't have much choice.  A month ago I got a text from Cricket telling me that my phone would stop working on their network in February.  Apparently, this is due to the retirement of their 3G network.  For your phone to keep working, it has to support "HD Voice".  Of course, I had no idea what the heck "HD Voice" was, but a quick search revealed that that's just AT&T's nicer sounding term for VoLTE (Voice over LTE).  And, sadly, the OnePlus 5 does not support VoLTE.  At least, not out of the box.  In a previous version of the firmware, there was an experimental setting in the debugging utility that allowed you to enable VoLTE and voice-over-WiFi, but that seems to be gone now.  And, frankly, I'm not really comfortable with the idea of downgrading the software on my primary communications device so that I can rely on an experimental feature.  Seems like that's just asking for something to go wrong.

So I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade.  I really loved the OnePlus 5, so I wanted to stick with OnePlus.  And as luck would have it, the 8T happened to be on sale.  

When I got the OnePlus 5, one of the "criticisms" of it was that it was grossly over-powered.  I forget what the processor was, but the model I got had 8GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage.  So it was closer to a decent-quality laptop than a typical cell phone.  And the OnePlus 8T is pretty much the same - my model has 256GB of storage and 12GB of RAM.  So my wife's phone now has more RAM than her laptop.  Is this necessary?  I don't know - maybe not.  But with the OnePlus 5, I noticed that I never had problems with it feeling "slow".  With my previous Samsung Android phones, that did become an issue after a few years, but the OnePlus had enough horse-power to handle anything the app store could throw at it.  So I figured it would be nice to continue that trend.

There's not really much to say about the OnePlus 8T itself.  Like the OnePlus 5, it's really nice.  It runs the same Oxygen OS, so there's no difference in the UI.  And OnePlus's "Clone Phone" utility made it pretty simple to copy apps, settings, and data to the new phone.  (It didn't get everything, particularly in terms of settings, but it got enough.)  In terms of the hardware, the big changes from the OnePlus 5 are:

• The lack of front-facing "buttons".  Whereas the OnePlus 5 had reserved space at the bottom for the fingerprint scanner and dedicated virtual buttons, the displayable area on the 8T includes the entire pane of glass.  For navigation, you can either use virtual buttons along the bottom, or gestures (which seemed annoying and counter-intuitive to me).
• Related to the above point, the front camera is in a cutout in the screen.  That's different.
• The rear camera is friggin' massive!  Four lenses and two flashes.
• The fingerprint sensor is under the screen.  So you can actually just put your finger in a certain spot on the screen rather than a dedicated spot at the bottom.  The fingerprint scanner on the OnePlus 5 never really worked all that well for me.  In fact, when I had a screen protector on the phone, it basically never worked at all.  But the one on the 8T seems pretty good.  Having a screen protector does interfere with fingerprint detection, but not so much as to make it unusable.

So far, I'm liking the new phone.  It's very much an incremental upgrade to the OnePlus 5, but that's not a bad thing.  I wasn't looking for anything revolutionary - just a comparable phone that would work on a modern network.  And I got that, plus a few bells and whistles.

After going back and forth a bit, I decided to pick up this on sale for $170.  It's a 27-inch ViewSonic HD gaming monitor.  This is by far the largest monitor I've ever had and the picture quality is quite good.  It's nice to have a monitor that's legitimately big enough to put multiple windows side by side and actually have them be usable.  It also has decent built-in speakers and a very nice adjustable stand.  The height can be changed quite a lot, it rotates easily , and can flip the monitor into portrait mode.  

Of course, this also necessitated some other purchases: a new KVM and VGA to HDMI converter.  My desktop is very old, so it only has a VGA interface, whereas the new monitor only does Display Port and HDMI.  And since the desktop only has VGA, naturally that's what my old 2-port KVM had as well. So I ended up getting a 4-port HDMI KVM so that I could hook up my desktop, work laptop, and home laptop all at the same time.  I also decided on a VGA to HDMI converter with an audio out port, so I was also able to get rid of the big, clunky speakers on my desk (which I seldom used anyway).

I'm pretty happy with the new setup.  Having a good monitor is awesome - especially for playing Halo (but that's another post altogether).  The lack of external speakers compensates for the desk space taken up by the new monitor, so I don't feel at all cramped.  I also like that the new KVM has USB hub functionality, unlike my old one, so it only needs one USB port.  This makes it a simple 2-plug process to "dock" my laptop and use the big screen.  And with the extra ports, I also have the option of just leaving it hooked up and being able to switch from "work mode" to "play mode" with the press of a button.  That also means I can easily use my UHK with my laptop, which rocks.

The old laptop

My previous laptop was a Lenovo IdeaPad U310 that I bought almost 8 years ago.  I know because I looked up the blog entry.  It's actually still in pretty good shape, which is why I haven't replaced it.  It already had decent horsepower (a Core i5, upgraded with 8GB of RAM) and I upgraded it with an SSD about three years ago, so it still performs reasonably well for my purposes.  In fact, my son will be inheriting it so that he has a non-school laptop he can use. 

On the other hand, it is 8 years old.  And while it still works well, it's starting to show its age - the screen hinge is starting to wear out and the WiFi adapter is unreliable.  On top of that, I've been spoiled by having relatively good laptops at work, so I kinda just wanted something nicer.

While the IdeaPad is a solid laptop, it's not particularly fancy.  It's an ultrabook, but a low-end one - I only paid $650 for it in 2013.  It's got decent build quality and a touch screen, but that's about it for amenities.  No keyboard lighting or stylus.  The screen is workable, but not great - the main problem being that it has a very narrow viewing angle.  It's not particularly light (about 3.7 pounds according to Lenovo's specs) and it tends to run a little hot when under any kind of load.

The new laptop

I looked at several of the laptops on Prime Day special, but after going back and forth several times, I eventually decided not to compromise and just spend a little extra money on something nice.  I eventually settled on an Acer Spin 5, which was on sale for $880.  Normally, I'd be too cheap to spend that much, but I figured that as long as I was getting a new laptop, I might as well make it a noticeable upgrade.

And in terms of features, this is a significant upgrade.  Of course, being a new system, the Spin 5 has more horse-power, with 16GB of RAM, a Core i7 processor, and a 500GB NVMe drive.  However, it's the other features that are what make the big difference for me.  For starters, the Spin 5 is a convertible, i.e. it has a 360 degree hinge and can fold into a tablet mode.  (My wife's Dell Inspiron 7000 is also a convertible and I've always thought it looked like a cool capability.)  To complement that, it comes with a nice powered stylus that stows in the body of the laptop.  The keyboard is backlit (which I didn't used to think I cared about, but really does make a difference when you want to work in low light) and the touchpad has an integrated fingerprint reader that you can use to log in with Windows Hello (which is a dumb name, but whatever).

The screen is very nice.  It's a 13.5" IPS display with a 3:2 aspect ratio and very thin borders at the edge.  This actually feels much bigger than the old IdeaPad, even though it has a 13.3" display, but at a 16:9 aspect ratio.  I actually think that this alone may have been worth the price.  The increase in vertical screen space is immediately noticeable and makes the laptop much more pleasant to use, whereas the smaller display on the IdeaPad often felt a little cramped. 

I'm also enjoying the ultra-portable aspect of the Spin.  It's very thin and only weighs about 2.6 pounds.  That makes it very easy to carry around and keeps it from feeling unwieldy in tablet mode.

I've only had it a few days, but so far I don't have many complaints.  I do find the fact that home/end the function key for page-up/down kind of annoying.  Especially when print-screen and pause/break (which I use much less frequently) both have dedicated keys.  I guess I'll get used to it, but it's still dumb.  I also didn't like that, for the top row, F1-F12 are the function keys and the media features are the default.  Luckily, that's easily fixed with a BIOS setting.  One other minor weirdness is that the 3:2 screen means that the system is a slightly weird shape for a laptop.  I mean, it does fit into the bag I use for the IdeaPad, but just barely - it's got plenty of room on the sides, but it's almost too tall to close the bag.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the Spin 5 so far.  I'm still getting the software set up, so we'll see how it performs with some regular use, but I don't anticipate any problems.  And I'm already using the tablet mode for casual web browsing and finding it just as handy as I'd hoped.  I don't think I'm ever going to be able to go back to a cheap laptop again.

I moved my desk from the basement upstairs to what was the spare bedroom (it's actually not much of a bedroom anyway - just barely big enough for a queen-sized bed) and moved the spare bed down to the basement.  This was a major improvement over the winter, as the heating situation in the basement is not great.  It also gives me a lot more natural light, which is just makes things more pleasant in general.

In terms of hardware, things are much the same, but with some minor changes.  As you can see, I kept my old monitor setup, with my crappy old monitors.  Not because I'm particularly attached to them, but just because it's convenient and I don't have a lot of desk space to work with.  I also have my trusty Ultimate Hacking Keyboard, which I still love.

I did get an upgraded laptop - still a ThinkPad, so you can't really tell the difference, just a newer model with more RAM.  I also added the tablet I got myself for Christmas (in lieu of exchanging gifts, my wife and I decided to upgrade our tablets), a Samsung Galaxy Tab 6 Lite.  It's actually a fairly nice little tablet, especially for the $250 price tag.  It's also really nice as an additional screen to play videos, podcasts, or music in the background while I work.  That way that stuff doesn't get in the way as it might if I put it on my computer (and it also doesn't have to go over the VPN). 

I've also upgraded my trackball from a Logitech Marble Mouse to a Kensington Expert Mouse.  This was actually necessitated by the fact that my Marble Mouse was really old and the left-click button finally started to die.  I've actually wanted to try an Expert Mouse style trackball for a long time - pretty much ever since I've been using left-handed trackballs.  But until relatively recently, I was too cheap to justify spending $100 on a trackball, so I settled for the Marble Mouse, which is much less expensive, but still good.  However, this time I decided to give the Expert Mouse a shot.  There aren't really that many choices for ambidextrous trackballs anyway, so why not get a nice one?  And so far it is pretty nice.  The large trackball takes a little getting used to, but it controls well enough and is fairly comfortable with the wrist rest.  It's got a scroll wheel that's nicer than the buttons on the Marble Mouse, and the configuration software works pretty well.  The Expert Mouse actually has four physical buttons and the scroll wheel, compared to the four buttons total (including scroll) on the Marble Mouse, and will treat clicking both top or bottom buttons at once as fifth and sixth buttons.  That's nice because it actually gives you a little more slack to do something useful with the extra buttons. So I have the top buttons configured for universal scroll, copy, and paste.  However, I did find that there's not way in the UI to control the concurrent-click detection time, so using the click-both feature on the bottom two buttons (right- and left-click by default) doesn't work well - it's easy for it to confused and do things like swallow double-clicks.  Still, I'm happy with the change.

Right now I'm quite happy with my home office.  The hardware and desk space situation is good; I get plenty of sunlight, but due to the angles the sun never shines straight in the window; and I can even open the windows and get some fresh air!  And this is a good thing, because I'm going to be in it for a while.  My company isn't planning to require anyone to return to the office until at least October.  The offices are currently open with various COVID restrictions in place, but non-essential employees are returning on a purely voluntary basis.  And so far there aren't that many people in the office, so unless working from home is a problem for some reason, we don't really have much of a reason to go back.

I guess we'll see what happens toward the end of the year.  I know a lot of people are rooting for a "part-time office" model where we could go into the office two or three days a week for meetings and work from home the rest of the time.  So far there are no plans for that model, but I find it appealing as well.  My team was already distributed across two offices, so just having everyone work from home wasn't really that disruptive to us.  In fact, it might actually be easier in some expects, since while it does take away the in-person aspect, it also takes away the risks associated with that in a distributed team.  Sure, we can't have spontaneous, ad hoc conversations, but we also are less likely to leave important people out of those spontaneous conversations. I experienced that several times in a previous team where we had one remote person, who we would frequently forget to include in or notify of decisions we made in those spontaneous discussions.  Instead, we just have the conversation in the Slack channel and everybody can see it and join in if they want.  

I've also recently taken to watching the odd retro gaming video on YouTube.  In particular, I'm kind of fascinated by speed-running.  Several months ago I stumbled upon this video of a Dragon Warrior speed run in less than half an hour.  I loved Dragon Warrior as a kid, and I remember spending hours and hours grinding so that I'd be at a high enough level to move on to the next area.  But this run used random number generator (RNG) manipulation to control the "random" actions of the game and basically beat it over lunch.  I find the amount of work and investigation that goes into this type of thing truly impressive.  (Though I can no longer remember what it's like to have the free time that you'd need to do this.)

Anyway, while I'm watching these videos on my tablet or phone, my son will sometimes sidle up and watch them over my shoulder.  So he knows about and is interested in various old-school games.  He even sometimes watches me plays them or takes a turn playing them on my phone.  He's also been getting more interested in games, coding, and computers in general lately.

So this year, we got him a DIY project for Christmas - a retro gaming console.  Or, more specifically, the components to build a retro gaming console.  This consisted of a Raspberry Pi 400 CanaKit and a couple of IR wireless controllers.  I walked him through assembling the hardware, showing him what the components were and what they're for, and took care of flashing the microSD card with a RetroPie image and getting some games onto it.

Overall, this was actually a remarkably easy process.  The CanaKit comes with all the hardware you need, except for controllers, and it's pretty easy to up together.  I don't think I even needed any tools.  The controllers I got were advertised as working with Raspberry Pi and "just worked".  Even installing RetroPie was pretty painless.  The process was fairly well documented and required minimal configuration.

So now we have a nice little retro gaming console.  RetroPie works well and has a fairly easy to use interface (it even has some instructions for controlling it with the gamepad on-screen).  My son hasn't had much problem with it so far.  In fact, we beat Contra together this afternoon.  We used the Konami code to get 30 lives, of course.  I can't imagine playing without it - I'd almost forgotten how brutally difficult early video games could be.

This week my wife wanted a USB thumb drive so she could take some documents to her mother's house and print them out using her printer, because ours is a pain in the neck and it's out of ink.  Well, the good news is that I had two drives handy!  The bad news is that neither of them did anything when I plugged them into her computer.

Of course, it turns out that, at some point, I'd used both of these as bootable drives for a something Linux-based.  This means, of course, that Windows can't read the partitions, so it can't write files to them.  In fact, when I plugged the drives in, nothing happened - they didn't even show up in Explorer.  So I had to fix them.

Well, the first one was pretty easy.  I just used the "Disk Management" console (a.k.a. diskmgmt.msc).  Using that, I was able to see the disk and it's partitions.  It was then a simple matter of deleting the existing partitions, creating a new one, and formatting it.  Then Windows found the drive just fine.

That didn't work so well for the second disk.  The drive showed up with an EFI partition and a lot of unallocated space.  I tried to create a partition in that space, but it didn't work.  So I eventually ended up downloading Rufus.  This is a handy tool that I've used in the past to image USB drives with ISO images.  Well, it can also do a plain-old reformat of a drive.  I just selected "unbootable" for the boot image, GPT for the partition type, and told it to format.  Rufus successfully blew away the entire drive and gave me back a fresh, working USB drive.

So the process wasn't too bad.  It's just a matter of realizing what's going on and getting an appropriate tool to fix it.

This time my task was to fix up an old laptop for my son.  After a month off, it's time for him to get back to doing some school work.  He functions better when he has a regular schedule and the whole learning-from-home coronavirus pandemic thing really threw him for a loop.  So it will do him good to get back to a little Reflex math and Lexia reading, in addition to doing some writing on the computer.  (He hates writing, but seems to tolerate it better when he can type rather than print.  Plus he likes the "learn to type" program he was using.)

Well, to do that he needs a computer.  He was using the school laptop that he used in the classroom (you know, back when kids were allowed to go into the school - we still don't know for sure if that'll be a possibility for the fall), but we had to return that at the end of the year.  And since neither I nor my wife wanted to sacrifice our laptop to the cause, we decided the easiest solution would be to fix up the old MacBook Pro I had sitting on a shelf.  It's a 2010 model that we hadn't used in several years, but it was still functional.  It also had the benefit of being a retired web development laptop, so it had a decent amount of horsepower.  This may serve us well if he has to do distance-learning from home in the fall, because the school laptop he was issued was hideously slow.  It basically had the memory to run Windows 10, whatever central management software the school had installed on it, and just barely enough left to run one actual user application.  Any more than that and it started thrashing like crazy and ground to a halt.  And don't even think about letting it go more than a day without a reboot.

Anyway, shortly after setting about this task, I realized this laptop would need some hardware work.  There were actually two things wrong.  The first I already knew about: the trackpad was broken.  It tracked finger movement, but it wouldn't click, which made it fairly useless.  You could sort of work with it by turning on the "tap to click" setting, but that was highly limited and painful at best.  However, I figured that problem would be solved with a USB mouse.

The second problem was more immediate.  While creating an account and figuring out what to do software-wise, I realized that the bottom of the Macbook wasn't flat.  In fact, one side of the bottom panel wasn't even flush with the rest of the case.  At first, I figured maybe a screw had come loose, or that I'd opened it up for some reason and put the panel back on crooked.  But no.  It was the battery.

That's the battery that I took out of the Macbook.  In case you can't see in the image, it's bulging to the point that the external plastic casing has started to break open.  It was actually putting so much pressure on the case that it was forcing it open.  So that had to be replaced too.

Fortunately, this was a much less involved operation than the Dell repair.  I don't know about the current models, but the 2010 Macbook Pros are built to be pretty easy to service.  No annoying plastic clips or other weird tricks needed to open the case - just take out the screws on the bottom.  I'm sure replacing the keyboard would be more difficult, but the battery and trackpad were pretty easy.  In fact, I was just able to follow the video below.

The only hard part was getting the trackpad out.  That's because one of the screws was hopelessly stuck and I managed to strip the head trying to get it out.  I eventually had to leave that screw in, remove the screws that fixed the support bracket to the case, and bend the bracket to get the trackpad out.  Then, after some struggle, I was able to work the stripped screw out with some pliers and a little WD-40.  I didn't have any other screws of the proper size, so I had to put the stripped screw back in the new trackpad using the pliers, which was a pain, but less difficult than getting it out.

All in all, it was a pretty painless repair.  The next part was just cleaning it up the software on the system.  The first thing was to upgrade OSX.  Since I hadn't used that laptop in years, it was still running Mavericks (OSX version 10.9), so I updated it to High Sierra (version 10.13), which is the newest one that supports the Mid-2010 hardware.  It's still two releases out of date (current is Catalina, v10.15), but it's better than nothing.  

The next step was removing all the old (and in some cases no-longer-working) software and upgrading the things that my son might actually need.  The two big ones were, of course, Chrome and Microsoft Office.  I also set up KeePassXC along with the Chrome plugin and created a password database for him to use.  He might only be seven, but it doesn't hurt to start instilling some basic security awareness.  Last but not least, I got a copy of MSP360 (formerly Cloudberry) Backup for Mac and set that up like the instances on our other laptops, so that he's all backed up.

So for an investment of a few hours time and about $110 in parts and software, my kid has a nice, working laptop.  I walked him through logging in, what applications are available, using KeePassXC, and the other things he needs to know for now.  It'll take a little practice for him to get used to it, since there's a lot there and he's never used a Mac before, but he took to it pretty well.  Hopefully this will be the beginning of a good educational experience for him.