Near the corner of Mulberry Avenue and Fern Avenue in Green-Wood Cemetery, Y and I saw this once mighty tree felled and its trunk removed. All that remained was its stump and roots that had been pulled from the ground–perhaps due to the recent rains and high winds. I counted at least 120 rings.
The side it fell towards shows an extensive wood boring infestation (more than half the the circumference of the outer bands on the side toward the bottom of the photo). Perhaps its roots were weakened on that side, which contributed to its fall.
Switch to the satellite view of this point on Google Maps to see how large the tree was in better days.
Long before AT&T was having massive data breaches, they were burying cables and putting up these signs in the back country to warn would-be diggers from slicing through buried copper or fiber optic cables.
As I wrote about yesterday, my Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 4 maintains lower temperatures when it has improved air flow under its body where the twin cooling fan intakes are. Without raising the laptop, the laptop’s support feet only give it about 3 mm of space underneath it, which chokes the intake fans. Since getting the laptop late last year, I’ve used a variety of at-hand objects–books and small boxes most often–to prop up the back of the laptop when I was stressing the laptop with a heavy workload.
I wanted a permanent solution, but the portable options available in retail are either bulky adjustable metal or plastic platforms or folding 4-point stands. The former takes up a lot of room and those with fans don’t always translate to lower temps, and the latter might not provide the support needed on the ThinkPad P1’s lengthy support foot at the rear of the laptop. So, I turned to LEGO to create a customized stand that gives the ThinkPad the support it needs while also being compact and easily carried in my backpack.
What I made to solve this problem mostly used LEGO Technic elements with some brick elements (plates to provide support underneath its joints and the bright yellow smooth plates on top to orient the stand and provide a stop against the ThinkPad’s support foot).
The ThinkPad’s support foot fits perfectly in the center of the stand without the studs toward the front or the flat plate in the back touching the laptop’s body.
Essentially, the stand is built like a sandwich: the bread is the Technic bricks with holes on either side, and the filling is the Technic liftarms (straight and L-shaped). I used 3-stud wide pins to hold the sandwich together. The red pins are only used to provide stability to the support legs when they are deployed for use.
On the back of the stand, the red pegs can be partially pulled out and the feet folded.
The LEGO stand completely covers the support foot at the rear of the laptop (seen at the top of the photo above). When folded, it easily slips into the backpack that I use to carry this ThinkPad.
LEGO is a versatile, rapid prototyping medium for building art, expressing ideas, and in this case, creating something practical to solve a specific problem.
If you have some LEGO bricks laying around idle, you might stop and think about what problem they might be able to solve for you!
About halfway through my sabbatical, I needed to visit my parents in Georgia, but I also needed to continue working on my research projects. I didn’t feel safe about lugging my A6000 desktop computer (in checked baggage or shipping), so I followed my own advice and started looking for a used workstation-class laptop.
It took a few weeks, but I landed this awesome, practically new Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 4 from a seller on eBay. It has a 16″ QHD+ screen (that I scale down to 1080p for my eyes), an i9-11950H (8 core/16 thread) CPU, 64GB DDR4 RAM, 2TB SSD, and an NVIDIA RTX A5000 16GB discrete video card (Stable Diffusion and llamacpp worked without any hiccups).
It plows through all of the work that I throw out at, but it does sound like a jet engine when its two cooling fans spin up. I have found that raising it off the desk by a couple of inches helps tremendously with cooling by increasing air flow. I had been using rigged up stands, but I built a special stand out of LEGO that I will show in detail tomorrow (but there’s a sneak peek in the photos below).
I can’t sing this laptop’s praises loudly enough! It works well with Debian 12 Bookworm, but it does have some issues with power saving/hibernation, which is a known issue and might have some work around that I haven’t tried yet.
The one thing that it can’t do without when doing GPU-focused work is it’s chonky 230 watt external power supply. I bring it with me when I know it will eat through its battery doing jobs. I recently upgraded my backpack to a Mystery Ranch 2-Day Assault Pack, which has a built-in sleeve that easily accommodates 16″ laptops like this one (but it can be tricky to use the laptop side egress slot due to the ThinkPad’s thickness).
This past weekend, I dug through my LEGO to build a display stand that could hold two heavy objects on my desk between my monitor and keyboard. It has a wide, lower space and a narrow, higher space for the two objects. To add some visual details, I used window panels along the front with transparent red cylinders in each window center, illuminated by ambient light entered through the top of the front.
I’m including more photos below of all sides to inspire others. Since it was a trial-and-error build, I didn’t create instructions for the build.
