Thomil's Random Ramblings

You’d be forgiven if you got a bit of a deja-vu when you opened this blog post. Another keyboard & mouse review? This seems familiar. Hasn’t he done one of those before? And honestly, you’d be right. I did one of those before, a little over two years ago . But you know, things change. Besides, after seeing how 2022 had turned out, I just needed a bit of retail therapy. Of course, it didn’t hurt that my company had brought back its WFH reimbursement yet again. My previous keyboard and mouse had been purchased under the influence of the COVID-19 lockdowns and as such, portability hadn’t been much of a concern. However, a lot had changed since November 2020. My company had returned to working from the office, whilst at the same time moving to a hot desk model, which meant that if you needed a foreign-language keyboard, you had to bring one in yourself. I need a German keyboard, and had helped myself by bringing in my large K780 keyboard from home. But given how bulky that thing is, th...

When you’re as much of a digital native as I am, you’ll likely have accumulated a dizzying amount of files that you need to store somewhere. From photos, to scans of important documents like house rental contracts, to files for your latest and greatest project, video or blog article, to all of the Luther accoutrements that come with living in the digital age, you’ll likely have gigabytes of stuff lying around either on your computer’s drives or in a cloud storage service somewhere. I know that’s the situation that I found myself being confronted with a while ago and between this splintering and the fact that prices were beginning to rise even for said cloud services, I decided to finally consolidate all these files on a single external drive that I could take with me wherever I needed it. But which drive to use? I had several external HDDs lying around at home, but these were rather large and not really mobile enough for my purpose. I’d looked at SSDs before, but in the past, the relat...

There’s a cast-iron rule in the IT world: Never change a running system. While I may not be the strictest adherent to that rule, I’ve generally subscribed to it when it comes to the productivity system that I’ve built up to manage both this blog and its German counterpart . That is using Todoist as my task manager, and OneNote for all my notetaking and brainstorming needs, with Rocketbook later thrown in for variety. Recently though, a new tool has popped up on my radar, one that on the surface promises to combine all the tools that I need into one effective package – Notion It certainly seems to be beloved by productivity gurus and entrepreneurs, but is it useful for a small blogger like me? Or is this new tool simply a bridge too far? If you know me, you’ll know that I had to try this out of course, all the more so since it is free for private individuals like yours truly! What is Notion? The trouble starts right here at the beginning, because it’s actually pretty hard to properly de...

One of the highlights of the past year in tech for me has definitely been the announcement of Windows 11. It may seem a strange thing to write for a formerly committed Apple head like me, but in a year where the latest MacOS release doesn’t really seem to qualify for a major version number given the insignificant nature of the changes, having an industry behemoth announce such a number of sweeping changes to their flagship product is really something else. Even if there was originally a bit of confusion regarding which of Microsoft’s in-house devices would get the new OS, it soon became clear that my own Surface Go 2 would be eligible for Windows 11 once it was released. A month or so after the announcement, I finally caved in and decided to register as a Windows Insider to get access to one of the beta release channels. As you can probably tell from the fact that you’re reading this blog post, the installation worked like a charm. Whether it's in light... ... or in dark mode, Win...

If you’ve spent as much time on the internet as I have, you’ve probably come across ads for Grammarly. They’re certainly a staple over on YouTube, second in pervasiveness and irritation only to those Chinese stolen-asset rip-off games that just won’t die! But I’m getting side-tracked here. In recent days, I’ve looked into Grammarly myself and I have to say, I don’t like what I see. In fact, I’d consider this service to be highly problematic, certainly from a writer’s perspective.  On the surface, Grammarly looks like a pretty useful tool. It ostensibly helps you detect errors in your writing and helps you avoid overly complex and intricate phrases, the latter of which should be more than familiar to every reader of this blog. In all seriousness though, I can see the basic utility in such a tool, particularly if you’re not someone who’s used to writing or if you’re someone who’s emails always sound the same, no matter whether you’re writing to your team, your manager, or your spous...

A few months ago, I wrote a rather rambling article outlining the supposed “Death of the Netbook” at the hands of an idiotic Microsoft, a thoroughly self-absorbed Linux community and the arrival of powerful tablets such as the iPad. In passing, I also briefly mentioned Microsoft’s Surface line-up of 2-in-1 devices, including the new Microsoft Surface Go 2. Well, a few weeks ago, I finally took the plunge and went for that particular device, taking advantage of a Black Friday offer. Delivery was frighteningly prompt, heads off to Microsoft and UPS for that, and I had it in my hand less than two days after ordering. As I was restricted with regards to the available budget, I decided to go for the entry-level model, which sports a rather pedestrian Intel Pentium Gold 4425Y processor with two 1.7GHz cores. This is supplemented by a measly 4GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC storage. These specs certainly don’t sound very impressive, similar to many netbooks back in the days, right down to the s...