I’ve not mentioned it for a while, but decided to play “Battle of the Beats” on a local radio station and I’ve taken part in it about 10 times. Usually, it ends up with my arse getting whipped. I started playing it for the first time this year, just for a bit of fun. The radio station is known as “V2 Radio”, you can listen on DAB if you have one of those radios and on the south coast or online. https://www.v2radio.co.uk). Super friendly radio station and a lot of what is advertised is mainly around West Sussex and Hampshire in the UK, so bear it in mind. With Steve, he plays anything and everything, so you can listen in and put a request in.
Battle of the Beats is a part of the show where 2 listeners of the show go head to head, like during the day, they do Battle of the Businesses where the steaks are higher, in that you win free pizza for your team with knowledge. No prizes for Battle of the beats, but bragging rights. The idea is you present 4 songs, the person challenging has to give you either:
A year
A decade
An Open selection
Out of that, you pick 4 songs plus a backup in case of duplication and the audience votes who they like. Some couples get involved with the voting and some households get split. Obviously, some do better than other with their choices and some manage to stay on for weeks and weeks. The voting is easy, Whatsapp, email or calls, Steve or the DJ counts up the votes, the winner stays on for another week, unless its a draw, then the roles are reversed. Its basically a bit of fun. Some can take it more competitive than others, like my second week when I usually end up defeating to a listener, this time, it was the other way round.
You tend to get some surprises from some of the choices (see below), but I have tried in the past putting Dizzie Rascal and Kid Cudi together, I was told that was way too risky.
I started by challenging someone to the year 2008 for music, and I thought “Lets try something”, I thought it would be close, but not what I expected! My plan was to go for club beats, what you would find in a club, this is what I had
If you listen again (Follow this link: Steve Freegard – V2 Radio), it was aired on the 16/08/2025 from the 2 hr mark. Winner decided from the 3hr 15 minute mark.
If you listen to this link and listen from about the 2 hour mark, you’ll hear my selection. The votes? Well, landslide, you’ll have to listen, either way, I was on for another week. One of my friends (known as Steve the Taxi Driver) wanted to play against me and he was like “you better win!”
Oh I did!
So week 2, the year 1993. If you listen again, it was aired on the 23/08/2025 (2hr mark), winner from the 3 hr 15 minute makr.
Usually, I’d get my arse kicked, not this time! I predicted it would be a draw, Steve FG predicted a loss, Steve TD predicted he would lose. I think Steve TD was right, but my guess of a draw was in fact very close. I’ll give you a hint, it was 1 vote (later declared 2 votes) between us – out of 21 votes! He wasn’t happy, I was shocked. Really. Also, I wanted to replace Corona with Urban Cookie Collective – Key, the secret (Which probably would of got me more votes), but I think the artist repetition would have been a problem. I was told I couldn’t use it though.
Now comes week 3, which I am challenged to the year 2000, I think this could be one of those difficult ones to judge.
Me
Opponent
Rui Da Silva – Touch me (Gulty pleasure of mine) and was released 01/01/01, but was played from Oct 2000)
Of course, we have to have back ups, For me, I’ve chosen Alice DJ – Better off alone, which I am considering of swapping out DJ alligator project with either of those 2. I don’t know, someone comment? DJAP doesn’t get much air time, while Kylie does. I’m also trying to go for that EuroDance theme and as it has to be from 2000 or thereabouts, some of the ones I wanted to include like DeeDee is a little too late and adding an instrumental (Yomanda – Synth and Strings) was a little too early.
EDIT later: I changed Kylie Minogue for Ian Van Dahl. Tell me why, Do we build castles in the sky?
I think the voting might be close, Darude – Sandstorm is a very popular choice, I’ve had a landslide where ATB and Darude were both together and proved to be an incredibly popular choice.
Still, I don’t know the voting will go, but if I end up on another week, I’ll be shocked. If I stay on, the one thing I am hoping is an open choice, in that case, I know what I am going for already. Anyone want to challenge me on that? Or you could pick a decade, which I have an idea for 90s. All instrumentals.
If you want to listen to it, it takes place 21:00 BST (British Summer Time – we are still on that), on Friday evening – next show is 29/08/2025 on V2 Radio. (Links open a new window).
Edit 29/08/2025:
Ousted out by one vote! It was nerve racking, I knew it was going to be close. So 3 weeks, I think that was a good run.
This is quite a long post, but I thought I’ll give it my thoughts in the hope it will help someone. (image quality is pretty poor, I had the blind down because the day was a bit hot and my office faces south!)
I’ll start by saying that I hope this review is useful to someone as they are sold on AliExpress where I find some of my interesting equipment, I’ll also tell you what I think. My reasons for purchasing is related to a new position I took up in my own council as previously mentioned, to separate my data and if I am honest, I didn’t want to spend out too much for a device, so seeing a Pritom L8 for less than £50 looks very tempting, what’s it a good buy though?
First impressions:
When my local Evri courier finally dropped off the package, I was instantly greeted with a white bag with a bubble like surround to protect its journey across the seven seas. Well, it flew it, but you get the idea. First problem, green credentials = 0! Its all plastic wrapping to protect it from its bumpy journey.
Getting into it? Well, that was a different matter, the outer wrapper came off easily, the inner one?
Judge for yourself. Things aren’t looking hopeful already. I then was greeted with a nice glossy box. Ok, not as bad as I thought, took the shrink wrap off (green credentials = -1) and then lifted the box.
Well, isn’t this a bit unusual! Shipping the tablet in a case. I’ve heard of tablets and phones shipped with the case, but in the case? That’s another matter. The box was paper, which is good (green credentials = 0) and lifting the tablet out reveals more paper (green credentials = +1).
As for the manuals? Very thin on the ground.
On picking the device up, the one thing you will notice right away is how flimsy the case is, for the price point, its understandable, so a few millimetres here and there of material removed is forgivable. I guess most will end up in the hands of children (I’ll get on to this later) and it will be smashy smashy like Adam Smasher. So the price point is very appealing to parents who don’t want to buy and iPad which – spoiler alert, would be better. However, they would also be much more delicate in terms of use and wallet. So a 3 year old losing its rag and chucking it across the room in a fit of rage, its better to lose a £50 note than something costing 3 times as much. Not that I think it will stand up to that punishment – its not rugged.
On turning it on, it has a factory applied screen protector, peal and what I thought was one part, was 2 part! Nice, if only it was a little thicker. It feels thinner than a sheet of foil.
Build
All plastic! Seriously, plastic fantastic, nothing to write home but it has some weird shaping on the back. The case included is thin as a cheap rubber band, with about as much protection. Knocks, bumps, it will take, but a full on 5 year old tantrum? Probably not and I won’t have much hope for that. I don’t have kids, so I can’t tell. So far, its put up with my daily abuse of going to and from work and a little office work. The screen cover? About as rigid as a microfibre cleaning cloth! To actually stand it up, you had to use it one way, that’s it. Theres also some really weird decisions too. The case doesn’t allow access to the SD card slot, there is 2 speakers (apparently), a microphone on the side which I haven’ tested and 2 cameras. One front and one back – but wait, is there three?
You may of noticed there is a bump showing 2 lenses, ones fake, end of! I proved it because I covered both lenses with my finger and found the bottom one fake. It also doesn’t seem to have a flash either. It looks better than it is, but this is how manufacturers get you to buy their products. At least it has a full size headphone jack at the top of the device.
It also feels really weird at the back. The back feels smooth with the case but it doesn’t feel uniform with the back cover if you take the case off. Maybe the moulds are to cater for multiple tablets? The back looks like it should be a cover, but in fact one moulded unit.
The front? The screen you can clearly see where it is in the frame, its not pure black, but a gray which makes me suggest it uses the older TFT standard, which may explain the price of the tablet. The screen protector is a nice addition though, even it it cost 10p.
Turning it on
This is where I was shocked. It lies, it really does, but they are white lies. Its not Android 14, its 13. So that’s lie one, its one camera, not 2 on the back, but what else is there? Actually, it really isn’t bad. First impressions leave a LOT to be desired.
It started for me and it was slow as hell! No seriously, it was. It turned off, when I turned it on, I couldn’t press the next button on the Out Of the Box Experience screen (OOBE). It didn’t respond. Once I gave it a couple of seconds, I could and reacted normally. It was initially very slow through the OOBE screen, but got quicker and quicker.
Once I logged in, it still was slow, it was 5 minutes in by this point but slowly getting faster, for about half an hour. I was then greeted with possibly the most plain skin of Android. Android as it was intended! Oh, it also got hot, but I initially used a USB to ethernet adapter.
Oh yes, that was a nice surprise. I thought the USB port was for charging only, at this price point, the USB-OTG spec I was expecting to be completely missing, the first adapter didn’t work, but my second one did! So it supports USB-OTG. Good start.
It came with all the Google apps needed and it was geared towards children, you’ll get loads of questions about that at the OOBE experience, so the target audience is children. That’s good. Installing everything, I went for Outlook, Displaylink and a few other apps, geared towards work. They installed without an issue. Poked around in the settings, oh, its Android 13! But the listing was Android 14. It seems to be Android 13 which is Ok I guess. You have the option of extending the ram, this is actually virtual memory and is likely to wear out your storage quicker, so watch out for that problem. And you get the idea.
User experience No skin = nice, its actually pretty quick. I’ll be honest. I was expecting a slideshow! I was not expecting anything impressive but so far, it is pretty good. The screen actually was quite nice, it can be a problem in bright sunlight, but really, its not bad. Its got some surprisingly good viewing angles and it doesn’t have many noticeable problems from when I used it, except…
(No more shown as I am using Microsoft Launcher and to respect GDPR)
The navigation bar! Oh the navigation bar that has been there since the early Android days sucks! Why? Back works, menu works, multi tasking (square) doesn’t at all. So if you accidently close an app, you have to relaunch it. That is the only bad thing about this tablet.
Otherwise, the speakers are pretty OK, I bass isn’t great to be expected, but its clear to my ears (acceptable) and not a garbled mess. Videos play smoothly too and it didn’t get hot after the first initial use. Battery life? Forget it! Seriously. 4 hours if you are lucky.
On screen keyboard? Expect typos, its split by default, so that’s something to watch out for. But for the price? Its not bad.
(Pritom L8 top, Samsung Galaxy Tab A9 8.7 bottom)
Performance I’ve not tested, but as I didn’t want to mess up my council work with my personal work, I just went on WebGL samples and started the aquarium. Compared it to my Samsung and it actually held its own. Its nowhere quick but it did keep up, it really wasn’t horrible and the photo shows that.
Bluetooth works well, I had a keyboard connected and I had no issues, Wifi works on my network without issue and it can charge from anything, not quickly, its rather slow! It works, that’s the thing that really surprised me, there is soo many horror stories of tablets that really suck, this was one of them, so I thought. It really wasn’t’
Camera Samples
As for the camera, just one big piece of advice. Don’t expect much:
Moving objects? Camera lag? Yep, it has it all
Bright sunlight? Forget it!
So who’s it for? Anyone who doesn’t mind a cheap tablet for day to day work that don’t want to spend out for anything expensive. If you are hard on your equipment and tend to break things quickly or go into an area with high amounts of crime, this might be a good buy and no thief is going to want to touch it. Especially when you just do basic work on a tablet. Web browsing, content consumption, bit of word processing, maybe a spreadsheet, it will do it. No issues. Anything performance related? Give it a wide berth. I’ve not tried emulation yet, but it might actually deal with DOS emulation or retro gaming.
Just make sure you carry the charging cable. You will need it and a power bank. It also doesn’t have 3/4G, but has an SD card slot.
Would I buy another, surprisingly, actually, yes, it really isn’t bad for the price.
Reported specifications: Allwinner A523 Octo-core CPU (ARM 8xA55 cores at different speeds, 4×1.8ghz + 4×1.4ghz) Mali G57 GPU RISC-V embeeded controller (WHAT?) 4GB LDDR4 ram 64GB eMMC 8” capacitive touch screen
But the question remains, why is it so cheap? I spent many times thinking about this problem and then it raises more questions than answers. For a start, I’m not suggesting anything at all. In fact, it might be one point that is true and pushing their goods out. So lets start with a list:
– Cheap labour. Assembling these tablets in a factory with low labour rates maybe one thing, its not unknown, but a lot of companies do this, its why China has become so popular. However, the question is, how cheap is too cheap? And at what expense? What is their contracts saying? Are there any concerns about welfare in the factories to reach that price point?
For a fascinating look into how the factories operate, I recommend these videos, its worth a look and draw your conclusions. These were shot 10+ years ago, but even then, the welfare didn’t seem much of a concern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfyAjkPIYyc
Thin profit margins. Again, not unusual, but its not unknown for companies to build devices through a contractor en-mass where they build one long production run. But doesn’t seem to be the case with this tablet as it was built in June 2025. So may have a late production run. Considering I wrote this in August 2025, that’s about a month hanging on a shelf if not slightly longer
Drop shipping.
Drop shippers are notorious for having, no stock and having to sell products fast, because having products sitting in a warehouse for months on end is extremely costly. In fact, places like AliExpress and Amazon do charge for space after a certain interval. So if you can’t sell a product, you pay for the space it takes. Often again, you look at extremely thin profit margins because of the competition. In some cases, you’ll do anything to get rid of these products, even if it means making a loss because it’s not sold. Even then, in some cases, it’s a case of actually not sending out a small order, but a big one which is less costly than the storage space. That has happened to a colleague of mine
Cheap components. Now I’ve not mentioned the specs. It’s an 8” tablet, tablets of this screensize are not that common, they used to be, but not any more. I find them difficult to hide and 8” tablets fit into places where a larger one doesn’t, such as my trouser pockets. (Yes really). Now smaller screensizes should lower costs. The use of plastics rather than metal is the same and makes the device more rugged (yes really), then we come to the boards, these maybe repurposed boards, but I noticed the A523 chip fitted to this tablet, which was a surprise. Now CPUs or in this case SOC (System On Chip) changes a lot in the budget range when manufacturers try to break into the market and get known. This is actually an old hand called “Allwinner”, who back when Android was appearing was known to produce ultra cheap chips, the Allwinner A523 is no exception. What is surprising is that Allwinner didn’t really deal with much budget range SOCs for about 10 years, so its nice to see them back in the market. Many manufacturers were usually looking at Mediatek who really broke some ground and Spreadtrum who apparently are now UNISOC. Again, Spreadtrum is a name that appeared then disappeared. Allwinner isn’t exactly known for its friendliness to the OpenSource community however and there are controversies. On the other hand, VIA used to offer budget CPU’s but seemed to of faded into obscurity.
Questionable business practices
This is just one of those things you wonder “is it actually happening” kind of thing? The answer is, you don’t know, what happens on the factory floor. Often, the manufacturer of the device is ethical, but not necessarily the component manufacturer. Its not just workers rights that needs to be considered, what is going on in the background? Why are they cheap? Is it because there are other bad links?
Questionable Hardware hacks.
This is one I want to see for myself, I think I can possibly do it and find out, then again, all manufacturers are at it, some more than others. Does Pritom have a link to the Chinese Government? And that may mean, is it riddled with spyware? The answer is, until you do some sort of network diagnostics to inspect every packet, you really can’t tell. Its like the Huawei vs Trump scandal all over again. You can’t base a ban because you feel like it or you got dodgy proof, can you prove it? I can’t, I can only suspect it and until I get more information, I cannot confirm or deny. These days, the only real way to get away with something is to bury it so deep into the firmware, no one can detect it at the surface or takes specialist equipment to find it.
Safety concerns
Apart from the above, which I’ve covered separately, this is unlikely due to the way they work but there is one thing I am particularly concerned about. The mainboard, screen, cameras, shouldn’t pose much of a safety risk in normal use, but I don’t know if it is RoHS certified (Reduction of Hazardous Substances). Which, what is the case carrying? It maybe plastic, but is it painted? With VOCs? (Volatile Organic Compounds). The big one is the biggest concern is the battery to me. Will it turn into a spicy pillow or worse? Sounds far fetched but with lithium ion batteries blowing up everywhere in e-bikes and e-scooters, you have to wonder. After all, why did the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 (nearly ended up with one myself) have a high failure rate with batteries blowing up even after a recall? As long as this device doesn’t and is able to expand during a fault, its unlikely to blow up in my face – literally!
Regularity problems
Finally, I’m going to finish with something common with cheap products, they often have faked or missing regularity information, this seems to have it all, but if I do a FCC search for 2BNGZ-L10, comes up with this, some small discrepancies between the names and location: FCC ID 2BNGZ-L10 But more importantly, no products listed. The more you wonder.
Later addition (25/08/2025):
I wrote the post in early August and since, I’ve taken it to and from work, used it at work and kept upto date with the council. It’s performed pretty well in that retrospect and I’ve had next to no issues – except the battery life. It will last 3 days with occasional use, but drains fast if you use it too intensively.
However, the USB port doesn’t support HDMI out I discovered, not a biggie, so I used my DisplayLink Dock which worked without issues – proving it does support usb OTG.
How many times do you hear “if you see something not quite right, contact the BTP on the text number, see it, say it, sorted”.
I travel on the railways a lot and I have an eye for detail which does have some advantages, because you get to know what’s right and what is wrong. Plus I interact with the rail staff and occasionally, passengers. When you travel on the same line, day in, day out, thousands of times, you get a feel for things that don’t look right.
Today, I came across that problem. I’m writing this, because I would like to see more diligent passengers and just speak out. I’ve generalised everything, so it doesn’t come across as specific to a situation, its very relevant.
While on my usual train, I came across someone who smelt highly of a foul odour, nothing unusual, leaving London anyway, there is a lot of trouble further down the line, so usually, they get off at an intermediate stop, such a larger town. However, the smell and the dress code draws suspicions. I then watch them go to another coach on the train, to the quieter coaches which I ignore but the guard on the train, I make them aware of the individual so they don’t have any issues with them.
I think nothing more, until later on, when they are still on the train, miles away from London, something not quite right, especially given the apparent age, smell and dress code, hanging around by a doorway in the coach you are in. They look at you with suspicion, but don’t say anything.
Its not until I get off the train, after finishing talking to the guard, I then witness the same person again at the station I’ve got off, observe what they are doing and notice that they push their way through some barriers and walk out, despite being challenged by staff. So say nothing, look and walk away, out of the station.
Now this would have one suggestion to me and it shows, a little observation can get you thinking of something possibly more sinister that needs to be looked into. In this case, the length of journey got me suspicious, along with the age and there has been a lot to do with “county lines”. I can’t prove it, but I suspect it.
So what did I do? Report it as soon as I got home, via email. I would of reported it them at the time, but sometimes, discussing something with someone near to you which is what I did might encourage you to report something that would otherwise go amiss. If it doesn’t turn out to be true, its fine. But think of it this way, if you don’t say anything and your allegations are true, what could happen next?
God, 2 weeks have been a real problem for this site!
You may of noticed, I ‘ve had a lot of problems with this site, from Internal Server 500 errors (caused by running out of memory, not storage or bandwidth) to actually disappearing all together! I’ll explain.
I’m probably the oldest client on Cadence networks, this site is probably the oldest on their server and unfortunately, servers do have a limit to how long they can run before they give up. Thats the spoiler alert. So what happened?
Simple, it got old, but to get there, I had a number of problems.
Originally, I was trying to solve my Internal Server Error 500 as it was caused by this site getting a bit on the large side. It contains my previous WordPress account posts and media as well as modern stuff that shows off my abilities. Detailed in this post:
It worked for a week, very very well, I was keeping an eye on cPanel (which is the web hosting manager, basically controls my part of the site from a larger cluster with shared hosting) for the server information, made sure I wasn’t overloading it because – well it would be bad because if that happens, things break, unintentionally. Now I don’t know how many sites are on that server, but I guess there is a few and it is one server, known as whm0.
Now the last thing you want, is to knock not just your own site, but everyone else’s and you got to take some responsibility for that if it does, like I did. Set the PHP memory limit in WordPress to 128mb (I.e. allocate 128mb to this site for the sever side processing), checked, loaded up the site, checked, done. A week later… it broke – not just the site…
And every other site now was suddenly offline. To make matters worse, cPanel also allows you to have a mailbox connected to your domain. Its not bad, its not the best and it doesn’t live up to what Zimbra can do, it works, it does the job. I still think Outlook is the best though. Now if you have my world email address, which is tied to the domain, you then realise that this email account is tied to the same inbox that is on the site, which means, no site = no emails = bliss – or stress!
So, an email later, site back online. It lasts just over 2 days and cuts out, again! Gets reset after a support email, cuts out 2 days later and then gradually gets shorter and shorter, until it cuts out on a weekend and offline for 2 days which was 10-12th August 2025.
In the meantime, I try everything to reduce the load, thinking that I was the problem, poured over the logs, got my dad to do the same, nothing out of the ordinary, but cPanel was moaning that the storage devices (not hot how they work, but still) was reporting errors. It was the “/” storage area to begin with as cPanel runs Linux, so drives look different in Linux. “/” is basically the root directory.
So, I did more and more diagnostics with the same outcome, now I am having nightmares and what was making matters worse is that Jetpack was adding to it. Random notifications at 05:35 for a start saying my site is offline.. ARRGHHH! It started giving me nightmares. So I went more and more nuclear, until I thought “lets do one last ditch effort, back everything up and delete everything, how long will it last?”
The nuclear option then proved something.
A day later, the server shut down again, but I didn’t report it, I had then discovered that we are not looking at a software fault, but now, a hardware fault. Then the next problem, “/mnt/backup” was showing errors! Yeah, the server was dying a slow and painful death. It got replaced this morning for something better. Plus they had issues with it for some time.
So, to qtp, thank you for your services, sadly though, its time to put you to bed. Good night.
In the meantime, they’ve upgraded me to a server with 2 extra cores, so it should be slightly quicker. However, I just can’t believe everything happened coincidently at the same time as I was sorting another issue out. I guess that is the irony of life. Hopefully, I’ll rest easier tonight – oh, I got to setup Jetpack on my tablet again, the Samsung Tablet anyway. I got a review coming up, involving it, but not as the main star. I went out shopping on payday for a new tablet, the cheapest one I could find on AliExpress without being too cheap. I couldn’t find any indepth reviews, so its time to put my thoughts on it. The reason is also slightly more interesting as I have a draft post and I plan to talk about it more in the future – I also need to update my CV with the new task.
Yes, I’ve gone down the political route, actually, I’m Apolitical, in that I don’t support a political party of any shape or form – but representing my views at a local parish council about local issues. I’ve been “co-opted” for about a month, in that I am elected by the councillors and not the members of the public and I got elected in by a large majority that really shocked me.
I’ll be talking about that in time to come and what difference I have made as I plan to do something for the better. I should point out, being a councillor, I can’t act on my own, but I can act as a body for decisions, although there is things I will be bringing up and I have a notepad for that, this is also where the tablet comes in as I have a council email address and as my inbox is subject to FOIA and SAR which is similar to my current employer – I don’t want my personal data mixed in with public data and vice versa as for a start, you got a number of laws to consider, that being the Data Protection Act 1998/General Data Regulation Act 2016 (which pretty much replaces the DPA 1998, even though I find out we call it DPA 2018) as well as Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) and Local Government Act 2000 or there abouts – I’m not 100% on this, but you get the idea where I am coming from. Considering FOIA needs to have a pretty good excuse for not having something, but at the same time, you have to adhere to GDPR/DPA which can be a fight between what’s right and wrong. You can’t just say “you don’t have it”, “why don’t you have it?”.
Hence my desire to review it and why I brought it. If you are wondering, I got a PriTom L8 tablet. 8 inch, £50 with savings, well was a little cheaper than that and so far, for the purpose I brought it for, its Ok. I’ll explain more and my concerns with it hopefully in the future. Lets say, it was a surprise in both ways. Particulary when I pitted it in an aquarium WebGL test with my Samsung Galaxy Tab A9 8.7.
They went live on the 01/08/2000 to promote what was Trainz Community Edition. I joined the forums on the 14/08/2000 looking for a train simulator that was more engaging than what I was using, that’s when I discovered after many hours of trawling through search engines (I can’t remember which one I used, Yahoo maybe? Google wasn’t on the horizon). For those in Trainz, if you noticed, my KUID author number (Koolthingz Unique IDentification) is actually a very low 30051. Yep, that low.
Auran as it was back then, had a LOT of big plans for Trainz, digital downloadable content was thought of way back in 2002, but didn’t happen until much later. Despite being in the community for a long time, I’ve also only met 2 employees from Auran, I wonder what they are doing now? Ironically, that was in London Victoria way back in 2004. I should really visit n3v, but getting to Australia is a bit more difficult and possibly requires a long stay.
One other thing, I was actually 14 when I joined, I’m now nearly 40! How time flies.
Of interest, I’ve got a draft blog post as I write this of a very rare version of Trainz that I plan to update in the future, let’s just say this, its rare as it never was released. The NDA has long expired, so I don’t think I’ll come to any disrepute over it. All I will say is, that you will be surprised, it was talked about, it exists but never made it to market, it was abandoned almost just before it was released. I think it’s because the Apple Mac’s were going through their second transitioning stage, I can’t remember the exact reason why the plug was pulled. I also still retain the computer I was testing it on as well, it’s on the shelf of shame in my room, untouched from when I played with it years ago in 2 forms. Again, if I get a chance to talk about it and spend some time in my really packed diary to finish the post, I’ll explain more.
Hopefully, I’ll finish it before Trainz turns 25 and it will be interesting to see if n3v still has the original source code, I don’t think they do.
Even better in an environment that bans computers. Understablable for safetybut sometimes?
I came across this YouTube clip:
Not mine I have to say, but, I looked at it and I thought “Hold my Pepsi one minute, there’s smaller still!” I don’t own a GPD Pocket PC sadly, I’ve always wanted one but never had the cash to buy one new or used. The Pocket 3 or 4 is on my wish list, but still.
I owned a OQO Model 01 (which is 5.5″, that was tiny and slow!), I still own a OQO model 2 but not the much more rarer 02+ and the GPD Micro PC which is a 6″ screen. This is what it looks like with my Apple iPad 8″ 2021.
Dinky isn’t it? Even my trackball is bigger than the laptop!
Better, it has an upgradable SSD! I’ve done it, it takes a SATA 2242 SSD and it has a few interesting tricks. Did I tell you I brought 2 of them? One as a spare. You may wonder “but is it usable?” Actually, yes it is, 3 hour battery life, its silent, you can downclock the CPU to 6W or upto 10″, charges off a phone charger or even a computer USB port, the keyboard is teeny tiny, but it works and I’ve used this one a lot! You can also toss it anywhere you like. The big question is, why buy it? Pull up a chair, its going to be interesting.
I brought this in November 2020 or so. My previous job, I had a big problem as I had to work during COVID and I was running out of tasks, so I stayed out the place and kept having issues with others, I can’t talk about it too much on here, but one was a bigger issue. So a manager asked “why don’t you take your laptop with you?”, “Ok then!” So opened the floodgates in between duties. No more spoken about it until the world started opening up after COVID and I was doing a lot on the computer, using my home one remotely, building models, interacting, setting them up. Hundreds of things, until one day, they tried to withdraw it. Yep, stop me taking the computer with me.
Thats when the fun started. They wouldn’t let me, so I started having more fun, tried phones to begin with with a keyboard and mouse, wasn’t any fun over a remote connection, so I went one better, get a local computer, scoured the internet and then came across the GPD Miini PC for about £230 on eBay. PERFECT! Brought it, took it with me to work the day after I got it and was like:
“They can’t stop me taking my laptop now! :)” with my GPD poking out of my jacket pocket. The best bit is, they didn’t even notice it!
My colleague I was talking to was laughing his head off. Management didn’t find the funny side of it, but I persevered and kept going and occasionally, I still use it. (Oh, then they cut the Wi-Fi to the station by ending “the cloud” contract and I had to rethink things, so an 8″ tablet made a return with a SIM card).
Interesting problem, so I go to work on my first day, don’t have my work laptop and I walk in with my Chromebook. Ask my new boss to send me the copy of the workbook and he didn’t mind me using my personal laptop. Think about that for a minute. Plus I’ve admitted using my personal laptop in the past at work and no one minded as long as it was work related, which at the time, was, to keep up to date as I didn’t have a work phone or IT login.
Whats it like to use? Well, light, fits anywhere, if you lose it, you won’t notice, if you carry it, you won’t notice, it turns heads and it is pretty capable. Oh, and has more I/O than your equivalent MacBook. It is really capable and I mean capable. You can game on it, GTAV works on it at 800×600 resolution and the fan on and that gives you an idea.
I/O wise, it has 3xUSB 3.0 ports, a serial port (who needs one of those these days? Oh I do), HDMI out, USB-C for charging and supports everything bar thunderbolt I think, my Dell WD-19 dock worked as shown below, TF card, a headphone jack, an Ethernet port, some screw holes to mount it on and I think thats it. It also has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Somehow, GPD also installed a blacklit keyboard. I mention the good bits, the bad bits, the keyboard? Think of a calculator keyboard, its not rubber, but its as small, with squished keys, so typos? Yep, you’ll make a lot. The trackpad is in an awkward position, but when you hold it up, you can use your thumbs quite easily, so its a trade off in one area and a usable item in another. The sceen is very good for a device this size and its VERY light. Also has a wrist strap to stop you from dropping it. At least you get plenty of feedback.
It can be slow too, I mentioned I’ve run GTAV at 800×600, but sometimes, it gets slow as hell, I guess it is just my device, bit the fact it works at all is a miracle. Oh and unlike other devices, it runs a full copy of Windows 10 or 11, or even Linux. Thats worth the trade off. The number keys are also badly positioned, but then I understand why. Then the final problem, some have hinge issues and that has worried me when I saw the reports of that. My 2 haven’t cracked yet, but there are reports online where they have. I’ve dropped it though and it is rugged.
Who is it for? Well, if you like quirky things that you can hide, perfect. If you got an unnecessarily strict work place? Perfect. Otherwise, if you don’t have a need for it, don’t bother. It’s fun to carry, don’t get me wrong, the novelty does wear off after some time.
Especially when you can shove it places its not suppose to go, like your shirt pocket.
Firstly, its been a difficult 24 hours for me, because of this site, I knocked it off unintentionally and it wasn’t because I was doing anything I thought was stupid, but 123-Reg, my domain company has what is suppose to be “Award Winning Customer Service”.
Yeah, throw that out of the site for one minute because I want to jump ship! Added a subdomain, easy task right? Wrong!
Adding it wiped my entire DNS records. Yikes! It gets much better, I had to repopulate those from scratch, I had about 5 DNS entries on 123-Reg and about 20+ on cPanel (my website administration). Why? Well, I’m trying to fix a HTTP500 error and to do this, I had to play with some settings. I’ve kindly asked my hosting company if they will be willing to update PHP and MySQL to see if that fixes the problem, but I’ve also been removing and installing plugins to try and trap the error. I’ve also signed up for a free website as well, to see if that traps it. This could take some time, but if you go into the /wp/ folder, that version (staging) seems to have far fewer issues, so I think it could be the 3D plugin? That has been deactivated for the time being, while I do more tests.
On the other hand, I’ve also set up a public folder on my Cloud Drive, this being OpenDrive where I will occasionally dump files.
These are without warranty or guarantee, they will be raw as hell, so don’t expect anything to work in Trainz – if it does, but if you find some gems you like, use them. Link below.
EDIT (2 – much much later): Moved to another page with another provider (Google drive), use this link (opens a new window): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1EFy5fCBKZDrOxpK0y77By0aFYFwJIcrh?usp=drive_link Its in a page called currently “Cloud Drive Files” which includes a source folder of previously released files, but I can’t think of a better name and is currently handled by a Google Drive plugin.
EDIT (1 – much later): I think I fixed it, some of you may of noticed that they had weird text at the top – its WordPress debug mode, which gives an idea of what is actually happening to the site, then discovered I was running out of memory. I didn’t have time to fix it at home, so what do I do? Round up my smallest iPad (8in), take it with me to the pub as I was invited out and do everything in the pub with nothing more than an iPad with a keyboard and pub Wi-Fi over a VPN connection. Went through cPanel, found the offending (or rather add) the offending line, first time didn’t fix it, second time did – so now WordPress is chewing 128MB max of memory on my host’s computer. Good job I got more memory available as the test afterwards shows it was only using a max of 32%, so I am guessing the available memory for server use is 1GB, if we include cPanel overheads.
Still, I don’t drink, so ended up with loads of “Pepsi Max” (I’m inpartial to Pepsi and coke!). At least it seems to be fixed for the time being.
I do like taking photos of interesting “things”, so this was one of them. Saw this lovely insect flying around the carriage and I had to take a photo of it then stick it on Instagram. With a load of staff (I just happened to be with) and passengers going “What the hell are you taking a photo of?”, even the guard who I was talking to as they nearly get attacked by it, was questioning it, until I took it and turned the phone around.
This was South Western Railway’s service 07:20 Portsmouth to London Waterloo service (Headcode 1P51) this morning from the post date.
Butterflies and me seem to be attracted to each other as it’s not the first one I’ve seen, I used to get harassed by one at Guildford – in the middle of November, it didn’t mind me at all, never moved when I put the camera on it either. I wonder if it was the same one? It boarded at Godalming and didn’t see it after Guildford.
Wildlife on the railway isn’t rare, I came across a lot as a train cleaner, but it does provide an interesting photo. Now I wonder if this fly had a ticket?
I mentioned a couple of days ago, I did another test, just to see how Instagram worked and mentioned it was for another site. You can see this site when it’s up on https://tymaran52.wordpress.com/
Well, I went to a pub and got my iPad out, I never thought about developing a site on the worlds smallest computer, but I did it and, create a basic barebones of a site. Its only four pages. Its also proves one other thing, what peoples intentions for sites are. Her’s is to promote her dog history with the Irish Red and White Setters. Now the question I had, how do I deal with what is more like a technophobe? I.e. someone has little interest in comparison to me about computers? Well, find the easiest site to manage (I recommended WordPress as it is easy), set up the plug-ins and create the lowest amount of pages. I also used a free account on WordPress, which looks exactly like what I use to manage this site (save for some discrepancy to work within the WordPress ecosystem. I didn’t have a plan sadly as that wasn’t revealed to me, so what I did was just produce a bare bones site to get them started, which consisted of:
Home
Blog
Instagram
Contact me
Then tested everything. One thing I will say, producing a site, this is what I recommend everyone starts with. For a design, ask yourself the question
WHY?
For me, the question to why was pretty obvious, I have a lot of Trainz content to promote and produce, so producing a site to come to, primarily to download my content is a good start, it has a purpose. The question then I ask, “are you regurgitating anything else on the web?” in that are you actually constantly copying everyone else’s material, then I’d wouldn’t go any further because of the issues of copyright. These days, its getting worse these days as there are a lot of companies that will happily pursue you for a copyright claim, my dad has found this out.
“Are you producing original content or promoting content you produce?”, this could be products and services. In my case, a product but its for free.
Professionally “how are you going to fund it?”, mines cheap, so its currently funded by my (limited) salary. Free sites exists if you don’t mind tons of advertising, but other than that, its a consideration. If you got lots of files, the killer is bandwidth, meaning the amount you transfer to and from your site to your audience. Storage is usually quite cheap these days.
Originally, my mum wanted to do something with instagram which I hope I don’t have to explain what it is as Meta products are in our lives on line in one way or another. Instagram however, is limited, it is for displaying content for content consumption, I.e. photos and videos, its not the appropriate use if you want to talk about in my mum’s case, history of the dogs, who is who and what the tree is like. (E.g. a family tree of the kennel name of Tymaran). This is what you have to think about, your target audience, your content and your interaction. Even if it is looking for work, then again, I’m not, but I put my CV and LinkedIn profile up to say if something comes along that I like, I’ll take it!
Once you have some ideas, don’t just go out and create something, it won’t work. Plan it, even if you have HTML WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get) and thrash out some ideas to get the overall look and feel of the site. You can even do it on pen and paper, that is how I started this site but I lost the origins. Don’t copy, but look at inspiration from other sites or even the world around you. For me, I like trains a lot, so a rail map was the biggest source of inspiration, this I decided had to be the navigation bar. (Idon’t know what to do with the header, so I just added a rendering (from another project of all things), so thats why I came up with what I had. This becomes a template and a lot of sites are built like this. In reality, your template can have content anywhere, some sides like mine have a navigation bar to the left, not seen it for the ones I’ve visited to the right yet, but a lot (possibly to make it more responsive) put the navigation at the top in menus.
Now you need a story board. What categories are you going to split your site into? Trial and error on this, However, you can have multiple layers, but there is one rule to consider – 3 clicks. “Can I get to most of my content in 3 clicks or less?”. If the answer is “Yes”, its a good design, otherwise no, remember, your audience is probably not going to stick around for long. Don’t make your pages too busy either. Can you find the text you want without burying it deep? No, make it clearer. (I’ve used an “accordion” plugin for this reason on my Models page and to keep loading times down).
From there, consider your mobile and desktop users. In fact, consider your mobile more than your desktop users, why? Because I guarantee that most of your traffic will be from mobile users. A site thats hard to read on a mobile phone or tablet will deter users from using your site.
Finally, accessibility. I’ve incorporated it in this site, but as a lot of users now considered to have a disability or those that don’t have a disability but find it hard to use your site, is a turn off. If you notice, I have (an otherwise annoying plugin – sorry) that aids with that. My eyes love small text, my mum can’t read as much as I can at higher resolutions on the same screen size and she isn’t disabled. Likewise, I find black on white more difficult than white on black.
Then test, test, test. Test with the oldest, test with the newest, test with a small item, test with a large item, test with all sorts of operating systems (iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, Kindle, etc), or get others to test it for you. When it comes to testing, you can only do so much, so you’ll never have a 100% success rate. Test the links, test to see everything loads, just test everything, create a test table if you have to. You may have to go live, but other than that, call it a day. You’re done. Well, for a static site. As soon as you go live, you are going to get a million problems. Its called Hacking, its called spam, you’ll have a lot of it. Enable 2FA authentication as a minimum and a strong password.
Now call it a day unless you want to connect a load of apps.
Talking of testing, I got my Kindle out, it works on the web and noticed that some of the items produced by WordPress doesn’t work.
And if you want to go really old, sadly my old laptop also doesn’t work 🙁
This is to just link my instagram account to my site… oh wait!
This actually might take some explaining. I’ve been producing my website for a month at the moment, so my mum came up with an idea “I want to put more on Instagram for Irish Red and White Setters”.
Here’s a better suggestion, how about a full on WordPress blog and site? Well, I started it and it doesn’t have to be WordPress, it can be anything. The only thing stopping you is either
A) Skills
B) Experience
C) Plug-ins unless you want to get your hands dirty.
So, here is my trial. Oh as I am using “JetPack”, highly recommended plugin by the way, I had to turn my account into a “professional” account. On the other hand, at least I can link posts to this website now. (Another good thing with JetPack is the editing feature that allows you to update your site from your phone or tablet through an App offline, there’s something rather nice to have)
Even more importantly, I forgot to mention why I suggested it. Well, Instagram is good but a bit limited with what you can do. WordPress is a better platform for conveying thoughts, my original posts prove that and the fact I talk about development for my objects, how I did it and what I’m doing at the time. Here is an example of that:
Embedding using plugins is easy, just download the plugin and link away. However, my hosting provider, which is thankfully rather cheap, only costs me £20 a year to host and I get some nice “Softalicous” plugins which I have used extensively on this site, plus it comes with Pagelayer Pro which I haven’t used yet. Considering the site was only meant to be used to convey my personal blog, I grew it into more than that for this reason. I like talking about life and challenges but not mental health, my ultimate aim is to inspire others to come up with weird, unique and wacky ideas. Now with WordPress, I can do that by showing how things work in the background, but I got more mad ideas coming up if I have the time. A game based on Java or JavaScript? Now if you don’t know, I’m actually 39 and I thought of an idea, why not recreate a game from my past I used to play a lot on the BBC Micro Computer (non UK audience’s may not know what I am talking about) and let everyone else play with it while giving it a different twist? How about Airlift – depending on time?
