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Thinkpad is still not a bad brand
Tuesday, April 22 2025
On the drive home from work, I stopped at MyTown Market because Gretchen needed bananas for smoothies, but I also bought grapes, grape fruits, orange juice, and a loaf of sour dough bread that Gretchen tasted and apparently decided was full of chemicals.
After I got home from work, I found I had all the parts I needed to fix my E495 Lenovo Thinkpad laptop. Last week I got a new keyboard for it, which was necessary given how sticky some of the keys had become after a drink spill (also: some of the cursor keys had stopped working). Today a replacement USB board had arrived for it to replace one I'd damaged while trying to interface with the cursed non-standard USB port on one of the cabin's minisplit air handlers. After watching a couple YouTube videos, I was struck by how easy these things would be to replace, making me feel even better about the Thinkpad brand. I'd feared I'd have to dig into the guts of the computer to get to the USB board, but all I had to do was pop off the plastic panel on the bottom of the laptop and the USB board was just bolted on beneath that. The keyboard was also easily removed, this time almost entirely from the top. The YouTube video I saw showed me that all I had to do was pop off some buttons for the trackpoint to reach a pair of screws. That wasn't, it turned out, quite enough; there was also a screw holding the keyboard from below. But with those backed out, the keyboard came out and the new one snapped into place. My only complaints about the E495 are that it doesn't have a touchscreen and it lacks a backlit keyboard, but otherwise it is the perfect portable workstation. It has great battery life and uses a standard USB C charger, the first laptop I've ever had that charges this way and it makes it so I don't necessarily have to carry a charger with it. The E495 also has support for two SSDs, both of which I have installed.
While Gretchen was off at pilates, I took Charlotte for a walk up the Chamomile Headwaters Trail and then via a shortcut to the Stick Trail. It was sunny and temperatures were in the 70s and spring had arrived at a magical time, with ferns in their fiddlehead stage and striped maple leaves only just beginning to unfurl from the compressed form they'd had within their buds. I stopped at the Chamomile Wall to do further work on the extension of it west of the Stick Trail. I've been making this extension as a pair of parallel walls about eighteen inches apart with occasional long stick-like stones bridging the two and supporting a roof that will eventually cover the chasm between them, creating a linear shelter for wildlife.
Unfurling striped maple leaves. Click to enlarge.
Brand new sugar maple leaves. Click to enlarge.
Fiddleheads. Click to enlarge.
The state of the expansion of the Chamomile Wall west of the Stick Trail. Click to enlarge.
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