Michael Graves

This author has written 1379 articles

Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 7: Upgrading WWAN from 4G LTE to 5G

My laptop, a 2019 Lenovo X1 Carbon, was ordered with the optional WWAN interface. At the time, the state-of-the-art was a 4G radio which I added to our Mint Mobile account. I only need to use mobile data occasionally, but it has proven very handy.

Several months ago I noted that it suffered very poor performance at a meeting off-site. This even as my mobile phone was working much better.

Earlier this week, while I was taking Stella to an appointment in another part of the city, the laptop reported being completely offline. It was wholly unable to connect via 4G. I looked at my mobile phone, which reported connected via “5G UC.”

Mint Mobile 5G UC

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NUC 11 Extreme: I’m Still Not a Fan of Fans

I shall try not to drone on about the passing of my trusty Airtop-PC. Suffice it to say, it’s truly dead now so I must move on. I’ve tried the laptop-as-a-desktop thing, and while it’s a good stop-gap measure, it left me wanting something better. So, I rather impulsively bought a used NUC 11 Extreme to try something that is at least different, if not better.

I’ve long been interested in the NUC line. The NUC 11 Extreme is built for gaming, with an i9-11900KB CPU, 64 GB of DDR4 RAM and an RTX3060 Ti GPU. It has good specs on paper. While a few years behind the cutting edge, it should handle everything I need to do. It’s certainly vastly better than the Airtop-PC from 2016.

NUC 11 Extreme Beast Canyon

However….there is a catch. This beast (it’s literally known as “Beast Canyon”) has no fewer than 6 fans! There’s a CPU fan, two large GPU fans and a trio of 90mm fans arrayed across the entire top of the case.

This is stark contrast to the Airtop-PC which was a completely fanless, dead silent, workstation. After almost ten years of zero fan noise in my office I’m not clear if this will be acceptable.

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Monday Morning: Snakes In A Drain

Snakes in a drain

This week started in a most inauspicious manner. Monday morning, as we were getting ready for the day, we discovered that the kitchen drain was clogged. Thinking that I had to get to work, Stella suggested that I could leave it until the evening. But I thought, there was nothing pressing on my desk, so might as well address the problem straight away.

The bathroom sink was draining freely, so it wasn’t a main line clog. We’ve had some experience with those in the past. The water in the sink smelled faintly of bacon grease, which implied the clog was close to the kitchen sink.

There was a time when we had quite a lot of recurring drain trouble. I had different plumbers out to snake the drain line at several times over a few years.

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Memory Prices Are Nuts!

About 18 months, Stella needed a new desktop computer. Seeking to be frugal, while still delivering performance, and minimizing the footprint on her desk, I settled upon a refurbished Lenovo ThinkStation P360 Tiny.

Lenovo ThinkStation P360 tiny i7-12700T P1000 32GB RAM 2TB SSD Wifi Windows 11

Specifications:

  • CPU: i7-12700T
  • GPU: nVidia T1000
  • Memory: 32GB RAM
  • Storage: 2TB NVMe SSD
  • OS: Windows 11Pro

For under $800, this little wonder was a really nice solution for her. It delivered quite a leap in performance from her old system. She makes considerable use to the Adobe Creative Suite, so a dedicated GPU is a real advantage.

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I’m just not happy with a laptop as my new desktop computer

Early in December I finally transitioned from my old Airtop-PC to the aforementioned Lenovo P14s as my primary desktop computer. Over the holidays I received a USB-C dock that also serves as a monitor shelf. That allowed me to reorganize my desk.

The laptop stays tucked away under the shelf. One USB-C cable runs to the dock/hub, which feeds the monitor, connects to Ethernet and the USB keyboard. A Logitech MX Master 3 BT mouse rounds it all out.

Mobile Pixels Aluminum Monitor Riser with Docking Hub

I have to power the laptop separate from the hub. The hub doesn’t provide the wattage that the P14 demands. Since I had a spare USB-C power supply, that was not a problem.

The trouble is, I’m just not happy with this arrangement. It’s not really a good replacement for the old desktop.

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Google TV Streamer: A Streaming Media Upgrade

Last month we observed the one-year anniversary of our forced migration away from our decades long love affair with Tivo DVRs. That transition, forced by Xfinity, also inspired our migration to AT&T Fiber. We will never again spend a dollar with Comcast or their kin.

No, we’re not bitter. Not in the least!

We have also had a couple of Tivo Stream 4K Android TV devices for several years. These initially overcame the fact that the Tivo DVRs had limited access to online streaming services. And the experience of using streaming services on aged Tivo hardware was less than enthralling.

Tivo Stream 4K

Over the past six months the Tivo Stream 4K that we use most often has exhibited a problem. It would lose its connection to the handheld remote control. At first, it appeared that the remote was going through batteries very quickly. When the batteries failed the Bluetooth connected remote would drop the pairing to the Tivo Stream 4K. I’d put in a new set of batteries, and repair the remote. Mostly that got things back to working.

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