u/MrOptionist

2013 11.6 Macbook air i7/8gb/512gb getting 8+ hrs battery life with Linux Mint XFCE and auto-cpufreq installed. BEST battery life after trying 5 other distros. Also FAST.

Title says most of it. Super easy install only hang is the broadcom driver that I got by Bluetooth tether to my iphone.

Everything works and kind of looks like MacOS with Plank installed and some tweaks.

Really amazed at how fast and capable this $80 little old lappy is. Bloody GREAT keyboard too. All the Mac function keys work as well for Audio, Screen and KB brightness etc. I even swapped the CTRL and Command keys so my Mac muscle memory for cut and paste and such still works.

Fan almost never runs and if it does it is super slow... just doesn't get hot like it used to.

Just wanted to turn some others onto this find.

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u/MrOptionist — 2 days ago

Not a Deck but useful on one: Found a great writing app that is free and close to perfect for me. (WonderPen - Mac/Win/Linux/Android/iOS)

Let me start out by saying I am not a writer as much as an aspiring writer. I have written and finished a few things but have literally a dozen other "starts" that have thousands of words and several chapters.

I tried Scrivener first. It is the 800 pound gorilla and great at all that it does...but more complex than I want. Tried a dozen others like JustWrite, Ghostwriter, Apostrophe, etc... lots.

I stumbled onto a nice note taking app (Joplin) that can work for me and that I thought was the solution. It is easy to integrate it with Dropbox and write from a lot of different computers and tablets. But when I tried to export... well it kind of sucks for my needs.

So I went back to looking and found WonderPen.

Wonderpen is to me like Scrivener lite. There is a paid version but so far the free version combined with the industrious use of Dropbox lets me use several laptops, and my desktop. It has a Mac version, a Linux version and a Windows version for desktops and laptops. Since I use all 3 operating systems I am thrilled. There are also iOS and Android apps (free).

It has a very nice distraction free mode, and can be used in markdown, RTF, or plain text modes. Pretty awesome typewriter sounds (if you want) as well as carriage return and other spiffy fun things.

It also runs great on my old $80 2013 11" Macbook air running Linux Mint as my distraction free writing device.

I am only a few chapters into a new book that I have been making notes about for years... but so far it is working out rather well and can export to .pdf, doc, epub, and some others.

So I am in no way affiliated with this product and it seems to be from a Chinese software developer, but it is free/cheap, and so far ridiculously good (at least for me).

I have seen reviews of it that are 3 years old but nothing recent and it has grown up a lot.

I hope this helps someone.

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u/MrOptionist — 11 days ago

I have a new to me E350 W212 sport and am overall very happy. One of the things I like is the "growl" of the exhaust in D2 & D3 when I put my foot in it, but how quiet it is otherwise.

My question is this: Does the Sport version have a different exhaust system than the Luxury version... or exhaust tuning? Would the Luxury build sound the same in D2 or D3 under aggressive acceleration?

None of this matters, just idle curiosity. This car reminds me of my 2013 Lexus GS350 in so many ways, but the GS engine never sounded like this even though it has equal performance.

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u/MrOptionist — 14 days ago

So it is not as sexy as a home-made 3d printed e-ink thingie.... BUT it is easy, cheap, and plentiful.

Smallish, lightweight, fantastic full size backlit keyboard, and a crappy screen resolution and size (16x9 1366x768) that lends itself to distraction free writing. Built like a tank but much smaller and lighter ;-)

2011-2015 Macbook Air 11.6 inch with i5 or i7, 4gb is fine but 8gb ram is obviously better, and ANY size SSD from 128gb to 512GB. These are $50-100 all day long and sometimes even cheaper. I got lucky and my eBay find had 87% of it's battery life left (only 130 charging cycles). I paid $87 + tax with free shipping.

If you get a crap battery a new off brand one is $30-40 and 30-45 minutes to install with video from i-fixit.

I get 5-6 hours of writing with my old slightly depleted battery.

NOW IT'S TIME TO TALK LINUX:

These things are slow and shitty with OS X at this point, there are no good browser alternatives because the OS is so old, and loading up a distraction free writer is going to be more challenging.

Linux Mint is your friend. Specifically the Mint XFCE build as it is much lighter on resources and runs fine with 4gb of ram. Unlike many other linux distro's Mint just works with old Apple hardware. There are lots of videos to walk you through your installation, you don't need me. Just write Mint to an 8gb thumb drive and boot from it to install.

This has to be one of the best least expensive alternatives out there. The full size high quality backlit keyboard is what seals the deal for me. I don't use devices without backlit keyboards as I have become a BK snob. So nice to sit in bed with the lights off and just type.

Next I am going to try a matte overlay for the screen to get rid of the gloss... I have had mixed results doing this in the past. We will see.

I am currently trying out the distraction free app called Apostrophe, but there are at least a dozen to choose from and almost all of them are free or have a free version. Many can also save to common cloud apps like google drive, dropbox, box, etc...

Let me know if you have more ideas to jazz this up a bit.

u/MrOptionist — 25 days ago