They last forever, really. I updated Mitchie’s new notebook to the latest version of Windows 10 which took all morning and even half of the afternoon. They seem to use some sort of throttling, because neither the CPU was busy, nor was the RAM full or the disk really the bottleneck. And if you’re used to the speed and elegance of a modern Linux machine (even with my already ‘ancient’ Debian stable), then you fall asleep when you have to wait for Windows…
Anyway, hers was finally done, and so I checked mine which updated faster (I do it more often, on Mitchie’s machine it was the first time ever, with a quite old boot image of Windows 10). Still, an out of the box Linux install *and* update is way faster – tho it also brings in much more software compared to a bare naked Windows.
So here’s a screenshot from my own machine – on which I use Windows occasionally only, when I need my camera makers’ raw converter or the control software for my audio interface and such:
Today is Mitchie’s birthday, and it was time to get her a new notebook. The challenge was to find the right one, because pretty much nothing of the machines currently on offer fitted exactly the criteria of what she wanted and needed.
So in the end it became clear that we had to go modular – or better known as finding an offer of ‘built to order’ – pretty much as you would configure a car.
Not all vendors offer that, and even of the ones who did, no one really had the machine for her. Which means that part of the build had to be done by ourselves – not a big problem, because I’ve done this professionally in the past.
So this is what she got for her birthday today:
This is a Lenovo Thinkpad L380 Yoga, which I ordered for her with Windows 10 Pro, an Intel Core i5 8xxx (8th generation) CPU, 16GB RAM, and the smallest SSD drive on offer which has the size of 128GB. And that one (with Windows on it) I took out right away, and replaced it with a Samsung 970 EVO NVMe drive with 1TB capacity. The other SATA drive with 128GB will be put into an external USB2/3 casing.
On the blank Samsung SSD I installed Windows 10 Pro first, and then Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. For Windows I had to search for a WLAN driver, with Ubuntu everything worked out of the proverbial box – including the Wacom pen which comes with that ‘Yoga’ device with its 180 degree rotatable touchscreen, which turns the machine into an artist’s tablet, and with a touch-sensitive pen as the cherry on top.
So that is what she/we wanted: a not too big (13.3″) device with a not too fast (i5) CPU, but with enough RAM (16GB) and hard drive (1TB), topped with a touch-sensitive full HD screen and even a pen. The cost? About half of a readily-configured machine which would have had everything except one thing or the other (and definitely not two operating systems, but that’s a story for another day. I’m waiting for the first vendor to offer – legally of course – machines with Apple, Microsoft, and Debian preinstalled).
It’s a nice machine. Especially with Ubuntu instead of Windows (which we need once a year for tax declarations – and the machine itself is tax-deductible of course). It even feels nice, and in no way cheap (which it wasn’t).
Al is a legend of a recording engineer, and he recorded and mixed them all, his story is totally worth the time even if you’re not a technical person or interested in how music is produced – the list of artists alone, and what he says about them is so remarkable.
He mentioned that he recorded Sir Paul McCartney’s “Kisses on the bottom” album which is in my opinion a super classy jazz album through and through – the title track alone leaves no doubt as soon as you hear that double bass on it.
But I wanted to show you another example of Paul (and this is also for my brother who likes Mrs. Krall) and orchestra, recorded and mixed by Al Schmitt, and later put into an official video with two others. First, Sir Paul:
Then, the awesome official video:
So nice. I love seeing and hearing pros at work 🙂 And Al Schmitt’s book is on my Amazon wishlist, even if I won’t ever sit in front of a 72 track SSL console or put 200+ tracks into ProTools…
Found an awesome track with percussion, drums, and vocals – and even a nice story, and who could resist that? So I added some simple low notes to it:
This track is embedded with the friendly permission by the creatives on wikiloops.com.
Left the door wide open for additional musicians, and played it simple in G major. Oh, and I added a BassFX track with that nice TAP EQ and Flanger/Chorus (all of which come included for free with Linux music stuff). List of musicians, so far: