Saturday October 19, 2024
7:43 a.m. My Room at the House
Port Dickson, Malaysia
(1,614 words)
Yesterday morning, I left the house early and I went to the Paklang Kopitiam. I got there right when it opened at 8 a.m. I do that routinely because in order to do my work, I need to sit at the table right by the front door and the two front windows. That allows me to plug in my devices to an outlet in the wall. Plus, it gives a perfect line-of-sight for a strong mobile Internet connection and a strong WiFi connection. Finally, that table is tucked away in a corner and provides a lot of privacy. It’s a great place for me to hang out and work. And I’ve gotten to know the owner, and he has told me that all my drinks are complimentary. I love their ice cham, and I have one as soon as I sit down and get set up with all my gear. And that cham is on the house. I could go there again this morning, but I don’t need the WiFi right now. I wanted to have WiFi access yesterday because my goal was to test the ASUS VivoBook laptop that was given to me by a YouTube subscriber, and my friend, Lim. It’s an older laptop that no one in his family uses anymore. When I first saw the laptop and played around with it, I thought it would be of little use to me. Maybe even no use at all. But over the last week, I’ve been cleaning up the hard drive and the system and it has become a bit more responsive. And even though it won’t be able to run DaVinci Resolve, it does seem capable of video editing if I use a different program. I discovered that a free version of Power Director comes preinstalled on ASUS laptops like this one, and I was able to do a test with it on 1080p video. It would require a subscription to edit 4K video. But my test demonstrated that it is at least possible.
One big problem with this laptop is that it can be very slow to turn on. A full boot sequence can take eight minutes. And that can be an eternity when you are constantly turning the computer off and on. However, I realized that you don’t really need to fully shut down the computer every time. You can simply close the lid and the laptop will go to sleep. So there does seem to be a problem with the laptop when it comes to boot time. But you don’t have to fully boot up every time.
And over the last week, I’ve realized that even if I don’t edit videos on this laptop, it can be useful in other ways, such as writing journal entries, writing emails, and doing the dozens of other Internet-related tasks I need to accomplish every day. I was thinking that I could do all these things on my tablet and smartphone with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. And that’s true. But it’s always a bit awkward to do that. Simply setting up Patreon will be a lot easier on a full-sized laptop than using a tablet. The browser is also quite different, and some things simply can’t be done on a stripped-down browser on Android. For many tasks, you need the full web experience on something like Google Chrome. I still haven’t signed in to all my various online accounts on this laptop because I wasn’t sure I would keep it. But I’m slowly coming around to the idea of bringing it with me to Sumatra. It will probably be very handy. I did a weight comparison yesterday, and it is .3 kg heavier than my MacBook. The Mac came in at 1.7 kg total weight. This VivoBook weighs 2 kg. So there is a bit of a weight penalty. However, it also has many advantages over the MacBook. For example, it has 3 USB-A ports, one USB-C port, and a memory card reader. And two of those USB ports are high speed. The HDD is 1-terabyte, which is double the size of the Mac’s SSD drive. It also has a separate power jack, so all of the data ports are free to be used all the time. It also has far better heat management. The Mac got extremely hot all the time. This VivoBook seems to produce no extra heat at all. It feels cool to the touch all the time. Finally, it is fully upgradeable. It came with 4GB of RAM, but Lim’s family added 4GB. So it has a total of 8GB right now. And that can be expanded to 16GB total. It also has two slots for hard drives, and I could add a separate SSD drive or add larger HDD drives. So it’s not the greatest video editing laptop. The LCD screen in particular is quite dim and colorless. But as a basic working machine, it is actually pretty useful. And I’m happy to be back in a Windows environment. Even after years of working with the Mac, being back on Windows feels more natural to me.
I had some other adventures yesterday after my time at the kopitiam. I spent some time back at the house working on my bicycle. I think I have come up with a pretty solid plan for mounting GoPros on the bicycle. But I still needed to think about the Insta360 X3. And after some experimenting, I came up with an idea that might be useful. I realized that I can drill a hole in the top of my pannier racks and screw in a tripod ballhead. And I can use that to support the base of the invisible selfie stick. And then I can prop up the selfie stick itself using my RAM Mount clamps. What I need to do is figure out exactly where to drill these holes and then find a place that can do it for me. I dropped by a bicycle shop yesterday, and the guy there said he could drill holes for me. So I might do that today. Perhaps I can drill just one or two holes and test the system. And if it works out, I can return and get additional holes drilled. That could end up being my big job for today.
Later in the afternoon, Lim dropped by Port Dickson with his son. And the three of us went to The Cove on the waterfront and had a good chat over some cold beer and some snacks. That was really great, and I enjoyed myself immensely. As I told Lim, that was the first beer I’ve had since Vietnam. And, in fact, the occasional beer I had in Vietnam was the first regular beer I’ve had in years. In all my time in Malaysia and Indonesia, I essentially never drank beer. I don’t go out to bars routinely. And since alcohol is not that common in Muslim-majority countries and it’s quite expensive, I just never bothered buying any. It was only in Vietnam that I had a beer now and then. Beer was just commonly available everywhere in convenience stores, and it was sometimes even cheaper than water or milk or any other drink.
Lim and his son left at around 6:30 and I made my way back to my house on slightly wobbly legs. Under Lim’s influence, I’d had more than one glass of beer. More than two, you might say. Perhaps even more than three. And not being a habitual drinker, I could feel the effect. There was a slight wobble to my gait. But I was happy to find that there were no lingering effects. I’ve noticed in recent years that even a small amount of alcohol can lead to a terrible headache afterward. But this time, I escaped unscathed. I can feel in my body and brain that I had a fair bit to drink yesterday. Some effects are there. But it’s nothing bad. No headache at all, which is fantastic.
Yesterday, I also spent time packing up. The days are racing by and I’m nowhere near ready for my bicycle trip. It may be risky, but I’m leaning toward taking the ferry on October 26th. I say it’s risky, because I think the 26th will be my 90th day in Malaysia. And if my or their calculations are off by even one day, then I will have overstayed my visa. And even if my math is correct, it’s never a good idea to leave a country on the exact day your visa expires. It gives you no wiggle room in case something goes wrong. So I could also leave on the 24th. But at the moment, I feel like I really need those extra two days to get ready. Realistically, though, I have to prepare as if I’m leaving on the 24th. That’s because KY is coming down to Port Dickson on the 23rd. That’s the day I will be taking my backpack and extra gear over to his house to store it there while I’m gone. And that means I essentially have to be fully packed up and ready to go bike riding by the evening of the 22nd. Today is the 19th. So that gives me 4 days to fully set up my bike and figure out what gear to bring and what to leave behind. I guess that’s not bad. Even I can get a lot done in four days. And then if I leave on the 26th, I will still have 2 more days to do any fine-tuning.