hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3265.txt

Episode: 3265
Title: HPR3265: My Chromebook Experience
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3265/hpr3265.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 19:54:10

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This is Haka Public Radio Episode 3265 for Friday the 5th of February 2021,
today's show is entitled, Microbook Experience,
It is hosted by Yuka and is about 9 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summer is adding my own perspective to the Chromebook discussion.
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Hello, this is Huka welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode.
This is kind of a response episode because I was listening to Episode 3242 which
went out in the feed on January 5th of this year and it was kind of an interesting episode.
Zen Floder 2 decided to take something that Kla2 had done.
Kla2 had recorded an episode on Gnu World Order and Zen Floder basically replayed what Kla2 had
done, interspersed with his own comments and his take and it was kind of interesting.
It was a lengthy look at Chromebooks by a couple of Linux folks and I say on the whole they
were pretty happy with the experience. Now if this may surprise some people I was not surprised
since I've been using a Chromebook for I guess a year and a half at this point and have found it
useful. Chromebooks have at the heart a Linux base and you can do a lot with them and the
discussion went into things like installing EMAX or doing audio or video production and stuff
like that. Well that's not my use case at all and I have a home network with several desktops.
One of which belongs to my wife who uses it for her work although we have Wi-Fi for things like
phones, tablets and laptops the desktops are all connected via Ethernet to the router
and we have a DROBO NAS box to handle backups on-site. We also have carbonite accounts for off-site backup
and the NAS box also handles NAS storage of things like MP3 music files, videos, photos,
stuff like that. When I do audio production such as recording my shows for hacker public radio
I do that using Audacity on my Kaplan 2 1804 desktop machine and I will happily continue to do that.
It works just fine. So while I was enjoying the discussion of how you can do that on a Chromebook
frankly I will probably never do anything that interesting. I try to fit my tools to my purposes
and I have no problem using multiple tools. Now my first thought when I was listening to the
episode was oh I'll post a comment. Then I channeled my inner Ken Fallon and decided no really
what I should do is record my own show in reply. Hacker public radio always needs more shows anyway.
So no harm done there. Now this is not going to be the longest one. I'm just going to give a kind
of a different point of view on why having a Chromebook might be something you would want to use.
So the start of my story in 2014 I have purchased a Nexus 9 tablet with the idea of having
something I could easily carry around and do things like read, check my email, look things up,
basically things I could do on a phone but just with a larger screen.
But the thing with email is that you have to type and using the on-screen keyboard never got
comfortable for me. I could do it but it was work. I really wanted a keyboard. So I got a keyboard,
case combination and that connected via Bluetooth. Sometimes it was really very erratic and
it tended to drive me nuts. Still it served my primary purpose. I took it with me on my trip to
Ireland in 2015 and used it to keep my diary of the trip and to look up tourist information and
you know any place that there was Wi-Fi available I could use it. I took it with me for breakfast
on Sunday mornings at a local restaurant here. So it was not excellent but it was okay and once
I had bought it I kept using it. Then it started to misbehave. While I was at breakfast at that local
restaurant it started to admit loud sounds kind of like a siren which is embarrassing when you're
out in public. And this happened again after rebooting. At some point I just had to face the fact
that it was dying. I could have bought another tablet but since I had not entirely enjoyed the
experience and I was curious about Chromebooks. I decided now let's try this Chromebook thing out.
So in June of 2019 I spent 309 US dollars to buy an Acer Chromebook. I've got a link in the show
notes if you want to see what I got. It has an Intel Selleron dual-core processor and four
gigabytes of RAM. So it isn't particularly powerful but it's very light and easy to carry around.
I can check my email on it and when my wife and I visited Europe in fall of 2019 I used it to
keep our travel diary as a Google Doc. I can install and run Android apps on it and I use it
every day to run a couple of Spanish learning apps because typing on a keyboard is much better
than trying to do it on a phone screen. Now if I fold the screen and the keyboard back it behaves
like a tablet and I use it at least a couple of times a week for zoom calls. It's great for that
and easier than plugging in a camera and microphone on my desktop since it has all of that equipment
built in and as a slim and light machine it is great for taking on airplane flights or for
other kinds of travel. So it does a lot of good things for me. Now that said it will never be my
main computer but that's fine since I have more powerful computers for other uses but for
something I can just grab and go I am quite happy with it. You know what happens if this reaches
the end of life. Now mine is scheduled to receive updates through June of 2024. Right now I expect I
will buy another when that happens. You know maybe new information will come to light between now
and then but right now I'm happy with it. Now if you have a Chromebook basically mine I get updates
for five years so I bought it in June of 2019 it will get updates through June of 2024.
Now I think there were some models that they extended the length of the updates but you know who
knows what the technology will be in 2024. I'll deal with that when it comes around. Now I have
a laptop it's when I got from Dell. It's getting kind of old. It's also heavy.
All right the days of the light laptop had not arrived when I got this one. In fact when I bought
it it was because Dell for the first time was offering laptops that had Linux pre-installed.
And if you remember just when that was that will tell you how old it is but it is old. I've
still got it. It's still you know if I have to go do a complicated Libra Office presentation
and a local Linux users group and I occasionally get asked to do things like that I would probably
take that laptop because it's really much more suitable for that particular purpose.
But when I just want to be able to check my email, surf the web you know wherever I go
Chromebook is pretty sweet for that. So this is a hook up for hacker public radio signing off
and is always encouraging you to support free software. Bye bye.
You've been listening to hacker public radio at hackerpublicradio.org. We are a community podcast
network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday. Today's show like all our shows
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