Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How and why I stopped buying new laptops

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 288 posts

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#231

Post by glafa »

Tade0 wrote: post #100

I get the point the author is trying to make, but I think the environmental savings on not buying a laptop are miniscule comparing to all the other components of his carbon footprint. That flight from Belgium to Spain alone, which he likely took, was around 1,000 megajoules.

according to this article from the columbia journalism review:

“For 10 years I interviewed engineers and scientists about new technologies and renewable energies. And I kind of learned during that period that, well, it doesn’t really work,” De Decker tells CJR from his home in Barcelona. Around the same time, De Decker stopped flying, opting instead to travel by train, boat, or bike. Readers would sometimes remark that while the magazine preached an ethos of low-tech, it still relied on the most prominent of high tech inventions: the internet.

https://www.cjr.org/covering_climate_now/low-tech-magazine.p...

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#232

Post by tsjq »

bserge wrote: post #30

I too, try to get 2 identical laptops - if one goes down, the other can take over, if both break, I can most likely use parts from both to make a functional one, while waiting for parts to arrive or for the service shop to fix the broken machine. All because it can take freaking weeks in my experience, and they can mess up and not fix it at all... Of course, I only buy used/refurb, so they're really cheap - cheaper t…

> A desktop would be upgradeable for a good while.

indeed. the desktops at my home are a nice example of "Ship of Theseus" .

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#233

Post by rowanG077 »

Aeolun wrote: post #115
rowanG077 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that's in a dictionary and thus is not a random combination of words.

These two things are not mutually exclusive. The usage of these specific two words is just widespread enough to be entered into the dictionary.

They are not mutually exclusieve. I also never claimed that they are mutually exclusieve. I simply said it's wrong that claiming germany is cheating in this case. Because the word is in the dictionary and thus not an ad hoc combination.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#234

Post by schrijver »

Tade0 wrote: post #100

I get the point the author is trying to make, but I think the environmental savings on not buying a laptop are miniscule comparing to all the other components of his carbon footprint. That flight from Belgium to Spain alone, which he likely took, was around 1,000 megajoules.

Buying less things, especially new things, especially new electronics, is still one of the easiest lifestyle changes you can make if you want to lessen your ecological footprint. Especially since electronics have their own specific impact on the environment (and human living conditions) because of e-waste and the mining of precious metals.

It might not have the same impact on emissions as cutting out red meat, planes and automobiles, but it remains significant, and you can implement it in addition to these other changes (as glafa notes, OP doesn’t fly).

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#235

Post by scooble »

neilv wrote: post #181

After trying many models, I found the most practical overall for me is a ThinkPad T500 (highest-res tall-screen version, modded with a transplanted T60 keyboard, and the T-series CPU replaced with P9600 or P9700), and running Debian GNU/Linux with Xmonad. Bonus: at around $100 apiece, I can afford a few spares. The main downside is that it's noticeably vintage, which, given current industry ageism, isn't good optics…

I’m ashamed to say that this was a factor in upgrading from my venerable x200.

The one time I decided to try my hand at interviewing for a coding position, the interviewer gave me a rather sniffy ‘what is that!’ When it came out of my bag.

Doing onsite demos with a vga only vintage laptop also isn’t probably the best look.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#236

Post by pwdisswordfish0 »

scrooched_moose wrote: post #114
raunakdag wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone else noticed that when conversations about “we need x word for y concept” arise, the German language nearly always seems to be the one that has something similar or already present?

It's because the German language is highly compound. Take any descriptive phrase, remove the spaces, and you have a new word. In English, it'd be the equivalent of taking "make worse by improving" and turning it into "makeworsebyimproving". When I was learning German, we were taught the language has far fewer core nouns than English (4000 vs 20,000 is stuck in my head, but this is going back years), but then they bas…

As a German I’ve always found “verschlimmbessern” very clunky and awkward, but it is pretty widespread, so you get used to it. That’s usually not the case in discussions like this, for example the famous “Wanderlust” isn’t really a thing in German, although it is a feasible, natural sounding compound.

An English neologism might be something like “imporse(n)” or maybe “imperiorate”. Personally that sounds more sophisticated to me. “Imporsement” or “imperioration” could be the nominalisations (what’s the noun for “worsen”?).

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#237

Post by jbotz »

Just a small point of information... the author says the embodied energy of a laptop is about 3000 - 4000 Megajules. That turns out to be just about the average monthly electricity consumption for a typical American home.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#238

Post by krageon »

fastball wrote: post #200
kayodelycaon wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's weirdly-specific. Some people would prefer a larger screen size, for example. And some people need a larger screen because we don't run the highest resolution possible. I run my 24" 4k monitors at high-density 1080p. My 16" laptop screen is at 1536x960 or 1344x840. Anything smaller than a 16" MacBook Pro doesn't leave enough screen space to work with.

What is it you're doing that 13" can't cut it?

Small screens have small letters, small icons, etc. My eyesight is very good, but working on such a screen is uncomfortable after an extended amount of time (unless you lower the resolution significantly).

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#239

Post by lowtechmagazine »

bserge wrote: post #30

I too, try to get 2 identical laptops - if one goes down, the other can take over, if both break, I can most likely use parts from both to make a functional one, while waiting for parts to arrive or for the service shop to fix the broken machine. All because it can take freaking weeks in my experience, and they can mess up and not fix it at all... Of course, I only buy used/refurb, so they're really cheap - cheaper t…

Author here. That sentence will be deleted when the website regenerates, cause it doesn't seem to have the effect that I was aiming for. Thanks for pointing it out.

That said, I was impressed by the man's repair qualities. I asked him how he was going to repair my 2006 laptop without access to spare parts. He said he would just repair the fan by replacing the copper wire. Don't see that happening in an official repair shop. And he did it overnight.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#240

Post by pvorb »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #158
pvorb wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is really a bad example, but in general this is true for long German words. Often there's a similar combination of words in English, the only difference being that in German everything concatenates to one word and in English there are spaces between the words which describe the same concept.

> the only difference being that in German everything concatenates to one word and in English there are spaces between the words which describe the same concept Sure, but that's a purely orthographical difference, not a difference in the grammar of the languages. It's like saying that German is fundamentally different from English because in German, all nouns are capitalized, whereas in English, some nouns aren't cap…

Yes, I tried to say that the difference is really minor.

There's a tendency to combine words out of existing fragments in German. Verschlimmbessern might be an example for this. In English I see this less often and there are many more words that come from Latin or Greek.

Post reply on HN