The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Let's have a brief look at The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, although at this point in time Skyrim has so completely overshadowed the rest of the Elder Scrolls franchise it might as well just be called Skyrim. Not Something Something Skyrim or Skyrim Something, just Skyrim.

The ironic thing is that Skyrim is one of the few Elder Scrolls games with an actual Elder Scroll on it. Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim. Are you sick of reading Skyrim yet?

The huge success of Skyrim raises the question of what Bethesda will call the sequel. The Elder Scrolls VI: Whatever will just confuse people. People want Skyrim! They want more Skyrim! They don't want The Elder Scrolls: Whatever. It's just confusing. The Elder Scrolls VI: Skyrim 2 sounds like a football score. Will it be called The Skyrim Chronicles: Skyrim? Skyrim: Ages of Skyrim? Skyrim and Knuckles and Knuckles and Skyrim Featuring Knuckles and Knuckles and Skyrim?

Seriously, I have the impression that most fans of Skyrim aren't even aware there are other games in the series. The lamers! The fourth episode, Oblivion, was a big hit on the PS3 and Xbox 360 way back in 2006, but that was a long time ago. The earlier games were pretty obscure. Morrowind sold well back in 2002, but Daggerfall and Arena were PC-only role-playing games of no great distinction. Skyrim on the other hand is one of the best-selling games of all time, with sales of over sixty million copies, more than the entire rest of the Elder Scrolls franchise put together.

What is Skyrim? It's a first-person open-world role-playing game by Bethesda Software. It takes place in a generic fantasy world based heavily on Norse mythology. It has dragons, magic, swords, simple technology etc. Bethesda's games have the same basic template. There's a relatively dull main quest accompanied by masses of short side-quests - players often ignore the main quest entirely, in favour of the side-quests - plus a bunch of busywork. In the case of Skyrim the busywork includes cooking, making potions, mining for ore, building houses, none of which are essential, but they pass the time. The cooking minigame is particularly pointless, and yet I found myself compulsively hoarding piles of salt (an essential ingredient), because the food looks so attractive, and it made me feel hungry. If nothing else Skyrim captures the feel of chopping wood on a cold winter's day before going indoors for a hot bowl of soup.

Bethesda's role-playing games tend to have a "never mind the quality, feel the width" element. Skyrim itself doesn't have a particularly lengthy main quest, but it has dozens of hours worth of dungeons to explore and mysteries to solve. On top of which it's fun to just explore the map. It takes place in a large open world that has a day-night cycle, weather patterns, plus several hundred independent non-player characters who live their own lives.

I'm old enough to remember the likes of The Hobbit on the ZX Spectrum and Midwinter on the Atari ST, and in theory Skyrim should blow my mind, but it's easy to take it for granted. One of the most popular sports on the internet is Bethesda-bashing, whereby fans who have played Bethesda's games for thousands of hours compete with each other to insult Bethesda as harshly as possible. In their minds Bethesda sucks, Starfield is the worst game of all time, and Todd Howard - the public face of Bethesda's games - is a moron, a liar, a lying little speck of a man. And yet they can't walk away, because they're addicted. Todd Howard has the last laugh.

Skyrim was originally released in 2011 for the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3, and then again in 2016 as Skyrim: Special Edition for the PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and then again in 2017 for the Nintendo Switch, and again a year later as Skyrim VR for virtual reality headsets, and again in 2021 as Skyrim: Anniversary Edition for the PC, Xbox Series X, and PlayStation 5. Did you get all that?

As of 2024 Skyrim is still available as at full price. In theory £40 or so, although it frequently goes on sale. Along with Grand Theft Auto V and Minecraft it's one of a handful of games that has been on sale continuously at full-price for over a decade, which is an impressive feat given that it has spanned three whole console generations.

Incidentally I played it on the PlayStation 4, because it was on offer for the PlayStation. The screenshots in this article are taken from the unmodified PlayStation 4 version of the game. I found the fixed field of view frustrating when indoors, and aiming arrows is awkward with a controller, but otherwise the experience of playing the game on a console felt painless. The game did make my PS4 chug air, though, so be sure to leave a lot of space around your console for ventilation.

This character is voiced by Lynda Carter - the actual Lynda Carter, of Wonder Woman fame. There's something immensely gratifying about being praised by Lynda Carter.

Why is Skyrim so popular? The obvious answer is that it's a good-looking, good-sounding game that builds on Oblivion without doing anything particularly wrong. I'm not a fan of role-playing games, but I quickly picked up the gameplay mechanics. Combat consists of stepping forward, swiping, and stepping back again, and you can go a long way just with those moves, but there's enough depth to allow for flexibility.

Unlike Dark Souls the gameplay is mostly mellow, and one upside of Skyrim's pervasive narrative blandness is that it never becomes emotionally overwhelming. As pictured throughout this article the graphics are still attractive today - everything is blocky, but the colours and lighting are lovely - and during the COVID years Skyrim even had a second wind as ambient entertainment for people who couldn't leave the house. At a time when people were flocking to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 for their travel fix, they also binge-watched 84-year-old Shirley Curry as she gleefully power-smashed raiders and giant spiders in, yes, Skyrim.

It has aged well. Oblivion was in theory an A-list title, but it felt janky. It had roughly a dozen voice actors for a cast of over eight hundred non-player characters, so the characters ended up sounding the same. The AI mostly worked, but the results were often bizarre. The combat became tiresome at higher levels, and on a visual level it was all over the place, as if the monsters had been sourced from a bunch of different public domain libraries.

Furthermore the pervasive use of bloom locked the game visually into the mid-2000s. Skyrim has a side-mission that sends the player back into the past, at which point the graphics, amusingly, turn into Oblivion:

In contrast Skyrim is visually, tonally, literarily-ly, writer-il-lilly restrained. It has none of its predecessor's camp excesses. The writing and voice acting are low-key, almost dour, as if the developers made a conscious decision that Skyrim should be less camp and more grown-up than its predecessor. The landscape is rendered in autumnal tones. The character models have a deliberately stylised look that resembles wood carvings.

The supernatural elements are also toned down. Skyrim still has mysterious underground cities, and the player can major in magic, but it has none of the deep lore of Oblivion, with its multiple planes of reality and occasionally baffling excursions into the minutiae of the Elder Scrolls franchise. Did you know that the moons in the sky are actually the decaying corpses of dead Gods? And the sun is actually a hole through which magic enters the mortal plane? None of this troubles Skyrim.

The player can role-play as a cat person, or a lizard, but those races appear only fleetingly in the game itself. For the most part the baddies are generic barbarians or more-or-less realistic wild animals, with the occasional zombie. There's a stereotype that fantasy games are full of Playboy models wearing chainmail bikinis, but Skyrim has none of that beyond the occasional bare arm.

Now, I'm 100% heterosexual, but if Tsun here ever needed someone to plait his chest hair I would happily volunteer.

Chest hair. Even the main plot feels more grown-up. The Empire of Cyrodil is being pressured by its more powerful neighbour to give up its old superstitions. The Emperor agrees, but this causes the most traditionally-minded part of the Empire to break away. A civil war seems inevitable - a war that the Empire can ill afford - but just as Skyrim gets going a more pressing issue arises. Dragons! They were killed off long ago, but now they are returning, led by a particularly bad dragon who wants to use the people of Skyrim as food.

The player is an amnesiac drifter who begins the game under arrest, on pain of imminent execution. I decided to role-play as Robert Plant, lead singer of Led Zeppelin, because the game is full of Vikings, and the main character has a special power whereby their voice can knock dragons out of the sky, which is true of Robert Plant as well.

Skyrim is full of books. They're mostly just flavour, although some of them can boost the player's skills. I was amused by the presence of a fighting fantasy / choose your own adventure book:

Is that postmodernism? I think it is. The developers intended for the civil war to be a dynamic wargame along the lines of STALKER: Clear Sky, but for whatever reason most of it was cut during development, with the result that the war only amounts to a pair of mission chains. I have to admit that I wasn't even aware Skyrim had a civil war until I started playing the game. I thought it was all about dragons. Dragons in Norway, because the map, the accents, the buildings are all based on Old Norse mythology.

Skyrim suffers from erratic writing. Sometimes it's good. The rebel leader, Ulfric Stormcloak, is a particularly interesting figure. He has some dubious followers who believe that the province of Skyrim should be Vikings-only, but the Empire itself is no better, forcing the aforementioned cat-people to conduct their business outside city walls and only grudgingly allowing the lizard-people to enter cities. But on the other hand Ulfric's actions weaken the Empire at a crucial time, and yet if the Empire continues to give concessions to the baddies, why does it exist?

None of this is highbrow, but it's surprisingly nuanced. In the hands of lesser writers Ulfric could have been a cartoon villain. Instead he comes across as a tragic figure, doomed to long-term failure no matter how the war goes. In a nice touch his home city is, as he points out, run-down and neglected, because the Empire doesn't care about its distant provinces, insert political shoehorn here.

In contrast the main plot, with the dragons, is much simpler. Which leads to the game's biggest problem. For all its size, for all the things that exist to divert the player's attention, none of it feels meaningful. It doesn't have an emotional payload. I didn't care much about the civil war, and the dragons don't come across as a particularly dangerous threat - after the player has levelled up a few times the periodic dragon attacks lose their shock value and become slightly irritating interruptions. The chief evil dragon, Alduin the World-Eater, has an awesome name, but I never had a handle on his character. He's just a big mean dragon. For gameplay reasons the side characters tend to be interchangeable, so despite the mass of NPCs Skyrim often feels empty.

Fleetingly, intermittently, I felt things. One side-quest in which I helped a ghost find justice stood out because the voice actor - Babylon 5's Claudia Christian, no less - really sold the role:

And another sequence, in which I infiltrated a cult that had committed ritual suicide, stood out for the following terse note:

Followed by the horrible realisation that the small steps I had just trodden on were not steps:

But for the most part the quests blend into each other. Each one involves clearing out a dungeon, or the lair of an undead dragon priest, and although the environmental storytelling is much more elaborate than it was in Oblivion, it's not on the same high level as the Fallout games. After a while it felt as if the game was washing over me.

Now, Skyrim is still great fun, and as mentioned earlier the lack of emotional grip means that it's easy to dive into the game periodically, but even the Fallout games had an underlying story, an underlying theme. Skyrim doesn't have that. It's not about anything. There are no twists, just mission after mission.

Skyrim also continues the Elder Scrolls tradition of having some high-profile voice actors who are barely featured in the publicity materials, which raises the question of why the developers bothered. Oblivion had Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean, who admittedly was very good in his role. Skyrim has Christopher Plummer as an old man, and Max Von Sydow as another old man. They both have one big speech apiece. Great actors in real life, but they don't stand out in Skyrim.

The game also features Joan Allen, who gives a good performance in a difficult role. She plays Delphine, leader of an outlawed sect who quickly realises that the player character has hidden potential. She illustrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of the game's writing. Most of the decisions she makes are wrong, and as with Ulfric Stormcloak she comes across as a doomed figure, fated to spend the rest of her days trapped in an isolated monastery with a bunch of followers who no longer have a raison d'etre.

Which could have been the basis of an interesting quest - everything seems to be leading to the conclusion that Delphine's dogmatism has no place in the modern world - but it never happens, presumably because the developers wanted her to remain in the background as a source of radiant quests. The overall lack of character growth or change is disappointing, but again the developers had to build a world that worked equally well for a low-lever player powering through the main quest, and a high-level juggernaut just chilling, so the opportunity for character change is very limited. The civil war ends with one set of local functionaries being replaced with another set, but the new bosses are more or less the same as the old bosses.

The game also has Lynda Carter, as mentioned above. In the 1980s Carter married the co-owner of the company that now owns Bethesda, and she appears in several Bethesda games, presumably as a favour, dating back to Morrowind in 2002. One mission in Skyrim involves accompanying her character into battle against a particularly tricky foe, after which she praises the player to the skies. It struck me that this is one of the things that makes video games so appealing. They're a wish-fulfilment fantasy in which the universe revolves around the player, and they take place in a universe where Lynda Carter thinks you're terrific. Is that so bad?

Do I have anything else to say about Skyrim? The music is lovely. There's masses of it. I was particularly struck by a simple piano piece, which I learn from the internet is widely beloved. It's called "Secunda" and it has a clever bit where the piano goes down. That's right.

At times the combination of lovely music, butterflies, the wind in the trees etc made me wish there was a mod that could turn off the monsters, turning Skyrim into an ambient wandering experience. And perhaps there is, because on the PC at least there's a popular modding scene. This mostly seems to involve turning the characters into anime dolls, but that's because most people are manko, a word that I just invented.

Anything else? Ice-T once said "don't hate the player, hate the game". Every baller on the streets is searching for fortune and fame. Skyrim has been indirectly responsible for some of the least entertaining internet content ever. A handful of NPC stock phrases have been turned into unfunny internet jokes. "I took an arrow to the knee", "something something cloud district", "never should have come here". None of those lines are funny in the game and they aren't funny otherwise. So much internet humour is based on the simple repetition of stock phrases. It's just no good. Youtube is also full of multi-part Skyrim "let's play" videos that usually begin with the narrator saying "hi youtube be sure to like and subscribe what's up".

"But at least some of this content must be good" - if there's one thing I've learned from being on the internet for over twenty years, it's that you can comb through the creative efforts of millions upon millions of people, and still find nothing of value. You know what's the worst? Blog posts. They are horrible.

There are also entire websites dedicated to scraping content about Skyrim, notably GameRant, which regularly reposts messages from Reddit's Skyrim subreddit as news stories. "This Player Found a Crazy Detail in Skyrim", "These Players Miss This Thing That Skyrim Doesn't Have", "Here are Ten Insane Things You Might Have Missed in Skyrim", that kind of thing. Skyrim has been responsible for some of the most worthless content on the internet, but that's not the fault of Skyrim. Who is to blame? People. It's our fault. You and me. And them.

Still, in summary Skyrim has a mass of content, and as per Bethesda's other games it works as role-playing junk food. But it doesn't mean anything, and I didn't feel anything, so after finishing the main quest and a scattering of side-quests it has started to drift from my mind. Nonetheless as a form of ambient entertainment it is tops, and it looks and particularly sounds wonderful.

Learning to Ride a Motorcycle

"Vroom!", "Vroom!", "Ca-chunk, Va-room!"

Can you guess what I'm doing? That's right, I'm riding a motorcycle. Obviously this makes more sense if you're watching the video version of this blog post. Just pretend.

A few years ago I didn't own a motorbike, but then I saw this video by top Canadian motorcycle channel FortNine:

That led me to Itchy Boots, a motorcyclist who drives up and down Africa and South America, and RevZilla, who are a bit like FortNine but from the United States, and now I own two motorcycles. If you aren't careful it will happen to you.

Why did I bother? I've managed to avoid learning how to drive a motorised vehicle well into middle age. If you're an urbane hipster living in London there's really no point. However I now live in the countryside, and although I don't have a pressing need for motorised transport it's nice to get around. In the UK the quickest way to get hold of a motor vehicle is to do a half-day Compulsory Basic Training course, at which point you're allowed to drive a 125cc motorbike or scooter for two years, so I did that. One year later I saved up for a series of proper training courses, and in March 2024 I passed my test...s, tests, plural, because there are two.

Well, technically there are three. I'll get to that. One thing struck me throughout the process. My motorcycle training establishment had no shortage of students, and there were at least five other people taking their final test on the same morning as me, but outside the training grounds they all seemed to vanish. Where did they go?

Motorcycles: The Case Against

The fact is that motorcycling just isn't all that popular in the UK. Motorbikes are outnumbered thirty-to-one by cars, which is sad because motorbikes have a lot going for them. I've always assumed they had their heyday in the UK in the 1970s, the decade of Barry Sheene, Chris Spedding, the hot summer of 1976, Junior Kick Start etc. All those punk leather jackets had to come from somewhere. But according to this academic paper motorcycle ownership in the UK actually peaked in 1960, a decade earlier, having more than doubled since 1950. That paper links to a fascinating report from 1975, Strategy Alternatives for the British Motorcycle Industry, which is a dry read, but informative.

The report points out that motorcycles had two heydays. In the post-war years they were a viable alternative to the car as cheap transport for the masses. They weren't very practical, but they were a lot more convenient than a horse. As a consequence the first generation of post-war motorcyclists tend to be associated with the working classes, and in the United States with the Hollister Riots, which were blamed on uncouth service personnel and working-class louts on their weekend off. That plus Marlon Brando in The Wild One cemented the image of motorcyclists as rough, tough, devil-may care rebels, which is hilarious nowadays because the average motorcyclist nowadays is middle-aged.

Ownership declined in the 1960s in the face of stiff competition from the car - according to this article car registrations increased more than five-fold from 1950 to 1968 in the UK, with an awful lot of those people ditching their motorbike for a BMC Mini. But sales recovered in the late 1960s and 1970s, because the motorcycle was cool! People who were too young to participate in the Hollister Riots or see The Wild One at the cinema were suddenly hit with Easy Rider and Electra Glide in Blue. The motorbike took off as a lifestyle accessory for people who already had a car, thus the popularity of Barry Sheene, Chris Spedding, Kick Start etc.

As Strategy Alternatives points out the market had by the mid-1970s become saturated, and a combination of that and stricter licensing sent motorcycle ownership into decline again in the UK, reaching a nadir in the mid-1990s. Luckily sales have recovered again over the last twenty years, and I like to imagine that YouTube hasn't hurt. I have the impression that the 1970s was the last decade when British people were prepared to buy a motorbike instead of a car, as practical transport, but given current economic pressures, who knows? I actually bought a bike purely as a commuting tool, because it's cheaper than a car - in particular petrol and parking are much cheaper, although on the flipside insurance is steep.

I mentioned licensing. Before 1982 the UK motorcycle test consisted of driving around the block a few times and doing an emergency stop. There was no requirement or even expectation for formal training, so it was easy for youngsters to hop on a motorcycle and admittedly kill or seriously injure themselves. From 1982 the test involved a riding-around-cones element, and from 1990 it was made harder still, which has greatly reduced motorcycle deaths, but has had the side-effect of excluding anyone under the age of 22 from driving a full-sized bike. As of 2024 a motorcycle test is just as complex as a car test, so why bother with it?

As a consequence the average age of a motorcyclist in the UK is apparently 54, according to Honda, which jibes with figures from the United States, where the average is apparently 49. Part of the reason for this is the the full A-class licence is only available at the age of 24, or 22 if the rider has progressed through from the A2 licence. Another part of the reason is that older riders tend to own more than one motorcycle, which skews the figures upwards; anecdotally, London seems to have plenty of young riders buzzing around on L-plates, but they only own one motorcycle.

The ageing population of bikers is a major pain for the likes of Harley-Davidson, who are stuck between a desire to appeal to a dwindling pool of ageing riders while simultaneously appealing to new riders who have grown up with TikTok and internet memes. Hanging over everything is the spectre of electric bikes, which generally appeal to a young, tech-savvy generation that can't legally ride them.

On the other hand the population of old people is growing all the time, and every so often a young person grows old, and short of a major plague or solar flare I suspect that old people will be with us forevermore. One day we will all be old.

Putting the Boot In

There are a number of other reasons why motorbikes are a hard sell in the UK. The climate doesn't help. There's a widespread perception that they're deathtraps, or at the very least that a motorcyclist can do everything correctly but still be killed through no fault of their own. There's also the fact that British cities are smaller than their counterparts in the United States, with superior public transport. And the most popular type of motorcycle in the world, the 125cc type, is a frustrating fit for British roads, being just slightly too slow to comfortably ride on motorways and faster A-roads. In Africa, India, and South-East Asia, where the roads are jam-packed, a 125cc is perfectly sufficient, but I can't imagine it being much fun to drive on the A303 with a 125.

People will always want cheap transport, but that need is increasingly being met by electric scooters and electric bicycles, neither of which require a two-part test and a load of expensive safety gear. Did I mention that you can't take your mates out to the beach on a motorbike? At least not without a sidecar, which you can't legally use unless you've passed your full test. And there's insurance. In the major cities insurance is enormous, because bikes are theft magnets.

But

Motorcycles do have some things going for them. The days of oil-spewing two-strokes are long-gone, and all modern motorcycles are EURO 5 compliant. Even the absolute highest-performance street superbikes will do over 40 miles to the gallon, with 125cc models double and sometimes triple that. Road tax is £24 a year. Parking is in most places free. Motorcycles can squeeze through gaps that confound cars, and in the UK filtering between lanes is perfectly legal. Furthermore if you've ever wanted to have a conversation with a middle-aged man about parking, a motorcycle will break the ice. And they're fun to ride on the rare days the UK has sunshine.

If you're a speed freak motorcycles also have an incredible price-performance ratio. A Suzuki Hayabusa costs around £18,000, but it will accelerate from 0-60mph in under three seconds, a second faster than an Audi S3 (around £50,000). It has an electronically-limited top speed of 184mph, slightly faster than a BMW M2 (£65,000), or indeed a Lotus Carlton, although I I'm showing my age again

Admittedly a car will also carry luggage, and a car is much less likely to send the driver flying hundreds of feet through the air in the event of a crash, but if you only have £18,000 and terminal lung cancer (for example) there are fewer more spectacular ways to end it all. And there are plenty of bikes much cheaper than a Hayabusa that will outpace a mid-range Ferrari.

The Point, At Last

But how do you get to ride a motorcycle in the UK, in the modern age? As mentioned earlier, before 1982 the test involved driving around the block a couple of times and doing an emergency stop. The majority of riders didn't bother with formal training. From 1982 a ride-around-cones element was added, and from 1983 the 250cc training limit was reduced to 125cc. A loophole whereby trainee riders could own a high-capacity bike as long as it was fitted with a tiny vestigal sidecar was closed at roughly the same time. The modern system came into being in 1990, although there have been tweaks since then.

As of 2024 there are four elements, technically five:

0. You have to own a helmet. This isn't part of the testing regime, but it is the absolute legal minimum amount of safety gear you need to own in order to ride a motorbike. Ideally it should be a government-approved helmet with a SHARP rating. I bought an Airoh Valor, which has a five-star SHARP rating. It set me back around £110.

In addition you will also want a pair of gloves, preferably with some kind of armoured palm protector, plus a tough jacket, tough trousers, tough boots, ideally boots that prevent your ankle from being crushed. I ended up buying a bunch of second-hand gear from eBay. Getting hold of safety gear is one of those unpleasant hidden costs of motorcycle ownership, but on the other hand it lasts forever and you're treating yourself to some cool new duds. If you're a woman, don't forget to flip your hair whenever you take off your helmet.

1. A Compulsory Basic Training (CBT) course, which takes four hours or so and has a mixture of riding-around-cones, navigating junctions, and riding on the road. It's a miniature version of the full-on motorcycle test. A CBT costs around £150 although prices vary depending on the school.

In order to book a CBT you need at least a provisional driving licence. It can be done on either an automatic scooter or a geared motorcycle, up to 125cc capacity, but it doesn't lock the rider into a particular category. I did my CBT on an automatic scooter, but I bought a geared motorcycle and taught myself how to change gears while riding on my CBT certificate.

16-year-olds are restricted to a 50cc moped, and having briefly ridden a 50cc moped during my own CBT I don't recommend it. In the UK they're restricted to 30mph, which strikes me as dangerous. I have to admit that I was absolutely terrified before doing my CBT, because I'd never ridden a motorbike of any kind before, but I have spent most of my life riding a bicycle, and the basic principles are similar. A motorcycle feels like a big, heavy bicycle with lots of luggage. Motorcycles tend to balance themselves with a bit of throttle, so I quickly learned that if I felt slightly wobbly I just had to twist my right wrist a little bit.

Once the CBT is over you are entitled to ride on the roads for two years with front and rear L-plates, but not motorways, and you can't carry a pillion passenger or fit a sidecar. You can however use dual carriageways, which are bracing. After the two years are up you can, in theory, book another CBT, and there's nothing to stop you from riding indefinitely with back-to-back CBTs. This appears to be how Deliveroo drivers manage things, which explains why there are so many scooter drivers buzzing around on L-plates. If you want to progress to a full licence you need...

2. A theory test, which costs £23 and is booked via the government's website. This consists of a mixture of Highway Code-style questions, plus some short CGI videos. During the videos you have to hit a button whenever there's a developing hazard, as if you were playing Dragon's Lair in the arcades. That dates me. I passed by a single point, largely because of the hazard section. The two parts have separate qualifying scores, e.g. you can't ace the multiple-choice questions and then give up on the hazard perception section, you have to do well on both. When that is done you have two years to book...

3. The dreaded Mod 1, technically the Module 1 Off-Road Test. The name is slightly confusing. It doesn't involve driving up hills or through country paths. Instead it takes place in a flat area covered in grippy tarmac that is literally off the public road. The Mod 1 test involves weaving through cones; doing a couple of figure-8s through some more cones; riding at walking pace to a stop line; performing a controlled U-turn; driving around an imaginary bend in the road before performing a controlled stop; driving around the same bend before performing an emergency stop at a speed of at least 50kmh / 31mph; driving around the same bend before performing a swerve around an outlying cone, again at 50kmh / 31mph.

One thing it doesn't test is riding up to, and pulling away from a junction. The test is closely-monitored, and it is possible to fail even before entering the arena, if the instructor judges that the student isn't in control of the bike. In particular the tests involve a certain amount of role-play - the student has to pretend they're on a public road, performing mirror checks and lifesavers as necessary.

After a year commuting in slow traffic I had no trouble with the cones. The U-turn was difficult because in real life I would put my foot down, which you aren't allowed to do on the test. Getting up to 31mph on the training course was hard, but at the actual test ground it was easy. I wonder if the training course was deliberately made slightly smaller?

I passed my Mod 1 with one minor fault, observation. There's a general consensus that it's the hardest part of the process, because it feels artificial, and there are no second chances. If you knock over just one cone you fail. Put your foot down? Fail. Momentary lapse of reason? Delicate sound of fail.

On the other hand it's a defined set of manoeuvres with no traffic, no chaotic elements, obvious pass/fail requirements, and I found it the easier of the two tests. Perhaps because I grew up playing computer games, where you either win or lose, and if you touch the sides you die.

You can in theory book the Mod 1 test yourself, and turn up with no training at all. It costs £15.50. Bear in mind there are a limited number of test venues - in my experience the hardest part of the test was the thirty-mile ride to the test centre - and you have to supply your own bike. The Mod 1 is the point at which you are locked into a certain class of motorcycle, and with a CBT you're restricted to a 125cc, so in theory the only bike you can ride to the test centre and take the test on is a 125cc.

In theory you could hire a full-sized 650cc bike and have it delivered to the test venue. Perhaps a friend could ride it there. But you would need to be insured during the test, which strikes me as not a trivial ask, and bear in mind that the DVSA is literally the DVSA; they won't turn a blind eye. But on the other hand perhaps you really do just want an A1 125cc licence, in which case my tips are (a) do shoulder checks compulsively (b) and a lifesaver during the U-turn.

With the Mod 1 under your belt the final step is...

4. The Mod 2, the Module 2 on-road test. Some riders find this easy, and if you're an experienced car driver who knows the roads I imagine it's not hard at all. But I don't drive a car, and the local area has some tricky roundabouts, so I dreaded it. But I passed. The test involves reading out a numberplate from a distance, then answering some technical questions, then navigating the local area for around forty minutes under test conditions, so you can't skimp on over-the-shoulder lifesavers and shoulder checks. The instructor follows you in a car or motorcycle, communicating directions via radio. Sometimes the directions are "turn left" or "turn right". Sometimes they're "follow the signs to X". If you take the wrong turn that's not a fail, unless you do so dangerously, although if you consistently refuse to navigate a roundabout - let's say you take the first exit all the time - the instruction will eventually fail you.

On three occasions the instructor asked me to pull over to a safe spot at the side of the road, which was nerve-wracking - was that it? was it all over? - but no, I pulled off again. The first two times there was no traffic; the third time there was. In theory there's a hillstart, but I didn't notice one. I assume it was part of my regular riding. The Mod 2 test doesn't include a U-turn or emergency stop, presumably because they would be far too dangerous.

In the end I was convinced I failed in the first ten minutes, so I relaxed. And then later in the test I was convinced I failed again - I passed very close to a person getting out of car - but I carried on. Ultimately I had six minors, but they were spread across the different riding categories. You're allowed a total of ten minors, but no more than four in a certain category, so it pays to be averagely bad. If you crash, or cause another road user to take avoiding action, or the instructor has to intervene, the test is an instant fail, although the instruction might continue until you return to home base before telling you the bad news.

The technical questions are available on the government's website. Your instructor will go through them, and bear in mind that some bikes have an oil level window, other bikes have a dipstick. It's called a show-me, tell-me test, because some answers involve demonstrating the procedure while others merely involve describing them. You are allowed, nay expected, to answer literally. When do you use the emergency engine cut-off? In an emergency. That is the correct answer.

And that's it. Having passed your CBT, your theory test, your Mod 1, and your Mod 2, you are now a motorcyclist. After passing my Mod 2 I was reminded of the final shot from Lawrence of Arabia:

I remember thinking "was it worth it" and "what now" and "how much would it cost to ship my bike to Peru" and "how much is a drone" and "if I'm going to be a YouTube star, what will be my gimmick" and "do I need a gimmick? can't I just be really, really good" and "we should send cows to Titan, the methane-rich moon of Saturn, to show them the error of their ways".

Is there anything else? There are complexities. In the UK there are four different licence categories, split into automatic and manual pathways. A manual licence entitles the owner to drive an automatic in the same category and below, but not vice-versa, and you have to do your Mod 1 and Mod 2 tests on (a) the same category of machine (b) the category of machine you intend to ride. One thing worth mentioning is that no matter which licence you go for the tests are identical, so if you're over the age of 24 you might as well go for an A-class licence.

AM is for 30mph mopeds, scooters, three-wheelers and light quadricycles. It's the only category available to 16-year-olds and it strikes me as a very narrow niche. A1 is for 125cc motorcycles up to 11 kW / 14 bhp, or 20 bhp and any capacity for tricycles, although as far as I can tell no such vehicle exists. You have to be 17 to qualify for an A1 licence.

A2 is for machines up to 35 kW / 47 bhp, which is actually a useful power range. Most of Royal Enfield's motorcycles are A2-compliant, for example. It also covers bikes that have been electronically restricted to 35 kW, but only if the original bike has a power output of less than double that, e.g. 80 kW. The idea is that you can complete your A2 test at the age of 19, and then when you do pass A-class test you can use the same bike, but destrict it. I proof-read these posts a day after I publish them, and I'm going to leave "80 kW" as a warning to my future self to never again attempt to multiply two numbers.

The A licence has no limits. It's available from the age of 24, but there's also a progressive access scheme whereby if you've been driving on an A2 licence for two years you can pass the test at the age of 22. And there's also an A1-A2 progressive access system, but I'm fuzzy on the details.

I admit to not being sure about the regulations regarding sidecars. The popular Ural motorcycle/sidecar combo is A2-compliant, but the government's website implies that only A-licence holders can use them.

One thing that struck me throughout the process is that there's no separate test pathway for automatic scooters. The law treats them as motorcycles with an automatic transmission, but they're almost a separate category of vehicle. I mention this because if you want to ride a scooter with a capacity over 125cc - such as a 300cc Vespa GTV - you're almost railroaded into an A-class geared motorcycle licence. A-class, because why bother with A2? And geared, because there are only a handful of automatic motorcycles, and very few riding schools have access to A2-compliant automatic scooters. This is probably the main reason why the Suzuki Burgman / Yamaha X-ADV maxi-scooters are so rare in the UK. If you're going to go the whole hog, why not go the whole hog?

Do I have any tips? The first time I rode a geared bike I held the handlebars in a death grip. But that is not the way. You are instead supposed to grip the bike with your thighs, so that when you go over a bump you don't jerk the throttle. This is one area where knowing how to ride a bicycle was useful.

You will stall in embarrassing situations, e.g. after waiting for ages at a roundabout, just as a small gap appears. Always remember that "slow is smooth, and smooth is fast". Formula One icon Pastor Maldonado was fast, but he wasn't smooth, and in his career he only won a single race. It's tempting to slowly release the clutch until the bite point, and then just let it open the whole way, but you have to be smooth.

At every stage in my training I remember thinking "who am I kidding" and "what am I doing" and "never again will I criticise the man in the arena" and "is that sexist" and "no-one can see inside my mind" and "that's okay then" and "am I saying this out loud" and "echo echo echo echo".

How did I cope with the gnawing, nagging fear that I was out of my depth? I thought about royalty, and world leaders, and people who are born into wealth. As children they have a personality. There is a little boy or girl or person within them. But they are taught from an early age to bury their personality. To act in a certain way, dress in a certain way, hold certain opinions, as in a Bret Easton Ellis novel. They are taught to obliterate their animal self and instead become a construction, and that is how I coped with the nerves. I put my personality into a box and told it to wait until later on. At some point I will have to retrieve it.

And with that I bid you adieu. After hitting "post" I will drink myself senseless, and at three o'clock in the morning it'll dawn on me that I've left out a crucial detail. But it will be too late, the damage will be done.

Yamaha YS125: Last of the Breed

Let's have a brief look at the Yamaha YS125. It's not often that I write about motorbikes, but it's 2024 and I've recently passed my motorcycle test, so I'm in an up-beat mood. The YS125 is a learner-legal 125cc motorbike sold by Yamaha from 2017 to around 2021, as a replacement for the decade-old YBR125. NB It has nothing to do with the Yamaha YZ125, which is a motocross bike, or the Yamaha Y125Z, a scooter.

The YBR125 was apparently very popular, with sales of over 150,000 units. I have no idea how well the YS125 sold, but I have seen a few here and there, including this one in Trieste, Italy:

Some 125cc motorbikes are sold in Europe with 150cc or 200cc engines - 150cc is the minimum requirement for the Italian autostrada - but as far as I can tell the YS was only available as a 125.

I bought mine to learn how to ride a geared motorbike. Now that I've passed my test my YS125 is in theory surplus to requirements, but it sips petrol and doesn't take up much space, and one of the few good things about being middle-aged is that motorcycle insurance is cheap.

The YS125 represents an interesting turning-point in the evolution of modern motorbikes. A long time ago all of the big motorbike manufacturers had a boring, ordinary 125cc learner model - neither a sports nor an adventure nor a custom bike - but now only Honda has a standard learner bike, the CB125F, which is yours for just over £3000. Where did they all go?

There's still a huge demand for 125cc motorbikes, but the entry-level end of the market is now dominated by cheap imports from China. Chinese bikes are controversial. There's a stereotype that they're unreliable and don't last. It's not that Chinese manufacture is inherently rubbish. The YS125 itself was made in China. It's just that importers in Europe and the UK tend to import the absolute dregs.

On top of that the Japanese manufacturers have all gone upmarket. Yamaha's nearest modern equivalent of the YS125 is the XSR125, which is considerably more capable but also a lot more expensive, at £4800 (vs £2800 for the YS125 in its final year). Yamaha's other entry-level 125 is the sporty MT-125, at £5000.

Honda has a range of 125cc motorbikes, but they're mostly novelty models such as the pint-sized Grom or the semi-automatic Super Cub 125. Other 125s from other manufacturers, such as the Kawasaki Ninja and the Suzuki GSX, are aimed at the sporty market, and so the basic commuter 125 is a dying breed, on the endangered list.

What's the YS125 like? Agricultural. Part of the reason for its obscurity is that it was essentially a continuation of the 2005-onwards Yamaha YBR125. The YBR125 was originally sold with a carburettor, a kickstarter, and an old-fashioned round headlight, but by the end of production it had been updated with electronic fuel injection and plastic fairings. The YS125 added a slightly larger fuel tank, a tweaked engine that complied with EURO 4 emissions standards - the YS125 is ULEZ-compliant - and a simple digital dashboard:

It also added a linked braking system. From 2016 onwards European standards required that new motorcycles have ABS, or alternatively a braking system that linked the front and rear brakes. The YS125 has a disc brake at the front but a drum at the back, so Yamaha added a linked braking system. It's odd. When I press the rear brake pedal the front brake lever moves slightly. The rear brake itself is designed to stop the bike on a hill, but it's not particularly effective otherwise, which is something that tripped me up slightly when learning to ride a bigger bike, but more of that later.

Yamaha's publicity materials quoted a fuel consumption of 2L/100km, which is 140mpg, but most reviews suggested a range of 300 miles from its 14-litre tank, which equals around 100-120mpg or so. That's still not bad. I find that £10 of fuel takes it from a couple of bars on the meter to full. The fuel meter is such that I can start off at two bars and reach my destination with three bars, perhaps from the tank tilting in the corners.

Performance-wise Yamaha claimed 7.4kw at 7400rpm, which is just slightly less than 10bhp. In the UK the legal learner limit is 14bhp, and I can confirm that the YS125 is not a rev-happy speed demon. Let's talk about the good and bad things.

Not long after writing this post I did a short video ride around Salisbury's Woodford Valley on one of 2024's rare sunny days.

Good Stuff
The YS125 is almost purpose-designed for commuting in a city. It's slow off the lights, but it keeps pace with ordinary cars and vans. It chugs along easily at 20mph, 30mph, and 40mph in second, third, and fourth gears - 20mph falls slightly between second and third gears, perhaps because a 20mph limit was still unusual in 2017, when the bike was new. It weighs around 120kg and I have no trouble moving it around. I am six feet tall, and I can easily, easily get both feet on the ground while sitting in the seat.

It's physically tiny, and it doesn't look aggressive, so I find that squeezing in between traffic isn't a problem at all. No-one waves, no-one shouts, I have not been glared at. Parking is easy.

My commute amounts to around 50 miles a week, and every three weeks or so I have to buy £10 of petrol. The bike doesn't smell of petrol, and it doesn't leak oil all over the place. Maintenance consists of periodically wiping off and lubricating the chain and checking the oil level. Yamaha sold a top-box as an accessory, although there are also aftermarket mounts that allow for panniers. As far as I know the battery, fuses, wheels, probably chain are shared with the YBR, which was on sale for ages, so parts are still widely available.

As a recently-qualified motorcyclist I can't comment about the handling. The only time my knees have touched the ground while owning my YS125 have been while I was changing the oil (it takes one litre of 10W40 and has a separate filter). But, again, in town I can easily wend my way around vans, pedestrians, bollards etc.

Bad Stuff

As mentioned up the page performance is sluggish. I noticed this after doing my motorcycle training and my test. Moving from a 650cc Kawasaki back to the YS125 was a striking experience. In particularly it needs a fistful of revs to pull away at more than walking pace. Up to 50mph it keeps up with traffic, topping out at around 65mph in fifth gear, although I have only briefly touched that speed, and the speedo over-indicates, so it was probably more like 60mph.

The biggest problem is handling - not so much cornering but staying planted on bad roads. On regular roads the YS125 doesn't have a problem, although it tends to smash over potholes, but it copes poorly with ruts. It has a habit of tramlining, as if it wants to follow ruts in the road rather than bumping over them, and in general I wouldn't want to ride in the countryside in poor weather at high speed on a YS125. On the other hand mine still has stock tyres, so perhaps the problem is the tyres.

That's about all the bad stuff I can think of. It has no integral storage at all, beyond a small compartment for a toolkit, but that's motorcycles for you. Did I mention the toolkit? It comes with a toolkit:

The lack of storage makes it awkward if you're going to be a delivery driver. Where are you going to put your helmet and security chain, hmm? Despite the sluggish performance it's still inherently fun to ride a motorbike though, and as a tool for learning how to use gears it worked in my case, as I now have a full motorcycle licence.

On the used market prices from dealers vary from £1000 or so to £1800 depending on condition. A scan of eBay suggests that anything less than £1000 has masses of rust, and anything above £2000 is wishful thinking, bearing in mind that a brand-new Honda CB125F is only £3000. The YBR is still widely available used, and older YBRs have a classic, retro look that has aged well, although I have no idea if the YBR was ULEZ-compliant or not.

Incidentally, the YBR's predecessor was the carburetted SR125, which looks great but dates back to the 1980s. My hunch is that the few SR125s available nowadays are valuable antiques. There was also a 250cc version of the YBR, with a 21 bhp engine. To confuse matters Yamaha still seems to sell a version of the YBR125 in Pakistan, as the YB125Z-DX, but it's not formally imported into the UK.

Is that it? Can I stop now? My impression is that the equivalent Honda, the CBF125, holds its value slightly better, and judging by the reviews the Honda had one extra horsepower. But I imagine that either one will teach you how to ride a geared bike, after which you have the choice of selling it to the next student, or keeping it and using it for errands.

Peugeot Tweet 125: Because Somebody Has To

Let's have a look at the Peugeot Tweet 125, a 125cc scooter sold by Peugeot. Despite being on the market for almost fifteen years the Tweet is surprisingly obscure. The internet has one professional review, from Motorcycle News. I've only ever seen a handful in the wild, including this one in Turin, Italy:

The Tweet is actually made by SYM of Taiwan. It's a rebadged SYM Symphony 125, identical except for the badges. Peugeot sells the Tweet here in the UK for around £2800, vs around £2500 for a Symphony, but I live near a Peugeot dealership, and they threw in a top box, so that swayed my hand. Mine is the 2023 model. There's a slightly more modern update that has USB charging and a different headlight arrangement.

Why did I buy a scooter? Two reasons. I've managed to avoid learning to drive a motorised vehicle right up to middle age. Partially because I lived in London for several years, and also because the places I like to visit - Italy, for example - have great public transport. Or in the case of Greenland the only roads are dirt tracks.

But knowing how to drive will be a useful skill at some point, and a 125cc scooter is a handy way to learn the roads, so I booked a Compulsory Basic Training course and bought a cheap scooter. Two years later I am now a fully-licenced A-class motorcyclist, and perhaps at some point I'll learn how to drive a car, just in time for them to be banned, or something.

The other reason is that I have a soft spot for Italy. I remember the first time I went there. I was envious of the Italians buzzing around on their scooters. I had nothing like that when I was a kid. Here in the UK scooters are surprisingly unpopular - everybody gets a car instead, perhaps because of the weather - but in Italy they're all over the place:

Now that I have a motorcycle licence I can in theory hire a scooter when I'm abroad, but I really need a bit of practice before tackling Italy's roads. In the UK scooters have taken off over the last few years for delivery drivers, but they have to compete with bicycles and electric scooters, which don't even require a training certificate. Hanging over them all is a looming transition to electric motors, which will hit the scooter market hard, because it's difficult to put a big battery into a small scooter and sell it cheaply.

Peugeot has a modest range of scooters. The two most popular are the hilariously-named Speedfight, a 50cc model that looks like a much bigger scooter, and the Django, a good-looking Vespa clone. The Tweet is Peugeot's budget model, seemingly inspired by the Honda SH125. As with the SH125 it has 16" wheels at the front and back, vs 12" or 13" on most other scooters. Peugeot even calls it "the big-wheel scooter". Larger wheels cope better with potholes, which is useful in the UK.

Ye gods, it's filthy

The Tweet has the same GY6-style four-stroke engine as every other scooter in the world. It makes a soft burble when it idles and the electronic starter catches on the second beat. The engine is EURO 5 emissions compliant, and according to TFL's website the Tweet doesn't trigger the ULEZ charge. It has front and rear disc brakes with ABS, which actually makes it more sophisticated than my Yamaha YS125 motorbike. Transmission is automatic, with a CVT belt. Supercharger? No.

The internet gives varying figures for power, but the manual says 7.5kw, which is just over 10bhp, four less than the legal maximum. It weighs around 120kg with fuel. I have no trouble moving it around. There's also a 150cc model, not sold in the UK, that has one more horsepower. The 150cc model exists because that's the legal minimum capacity for the Italian autostrada.

I've driven my Tweet on a dual carriageway, and on the flat it will sustain 65mph, although the experience is terrifying.

Back in July 2023 I visited Middle Wallop's Wings and Wheels festival on this very scooter.

The 2023-model Tweet doesn't have USB charging, or a navigation system, or anything fancy. It's interesting to compare it with my YS125. Instinctively I would expect the motorcycle to be faster, but the Tweet actually feels more rapid off the line and up to 50mph, perhaps because it's lighter, or perhaps the CVT is more efficient than my left foot, or the technology is more modern. The suspension is softer, and the tyres tend to bash over potholes and ruts rather than tramlining, so it actually feels more stable.

The one problem is riding at dead-slow speeds. With a manual-clutch motorcycle this isn't too hard, but the Tweet activates neutral below a certain speed, so it has trouble crawling forwards at walking pace. I find myself lurching forward, then gently coasting. This isn't really specific to the Tweet, it's a consequence of CVTs in general.

125cc motorcycles and scooters are frustrating. They're just slightly too little for general motoring in the UK, at least outside a city. It's not so much the performance, which is van-like, but the fact that 125cc bikes and scooters tend to have weak suspension and brakes. There's a market on the continent for beefed-up 200-300cc scooters, but here in the UK the licensing requirements are such that mid-sized maxi-scooters are very rare. Above the age of 24 it makes sense to get a full A-class manual licence, at which point why not buy a full-sized motorcycle, hmm? Only a few riding schools in the UK even have an A or A2-compliant automatic scooter on which to perform the necessary tests.

Still, back to the Tweet. The storage box isn't quite large enough for a full helmet, doubly so once I stow away my padlock and chain, which means that the rear top-box is almost mandatory. The storage compartment appears to be airtight. If I leave a damp cloth inside it the compartment quickly starts to smell musty.

The Tweet is compatible with E5 fuel. The manual says that the tank has a capacity of five litres, but I find that after depleting the tank to a flashing single bar on the meter the most I can put in, with the scooter on the centre stand, is around four litres, which is around £5.60. The manual also suggests a fuel consumption of around 84mpg, which seems reasonable enough. A lot of petrol stations claim that they will only dispense a minimum of five litres of fuel, so I always feel slightly guilty when I fill my Tweet.

I bought mine brand-new with a discount in February 2023 and have driven it for just over 2000 miles, with a professional service at the 500-mile change-the-manufacturer's-oil mark. For the first 500km the manual recommends not sustaining more than half-throttle, and from 500-1000km not more than three-quarters throttle.

During the time I've owned it the only trouble was on the hottest day of 2023, when the temperature reached around 32c - and only then it was slightly slow to start. During the winter, at temperatures of just below 0c, it starts, then seems to bog a little bit, but quickly settles. Beyond that it starts with two chugs of the motor every time. Tell a lie; shortly after getting it the motor wouldn't start at all, but that's because I forgot to flick the yellow cutoff switch (visible in the photo above) to the UNLOCK position. Whoops.

Any other problems? The left headlight stalk tends to trap water, perhaps because the bike sits tilted to that side when it's at rest. I find that even a day after it has rained the stalk continues to drip, which makes me wonder if it'll rust out. But the stalk itself unscrews easily - you have to do that to fit a mobile phone mount - and spares are readily available.

Do I have anything else to say about the Tweet? Over the course of a year it hasn't let me down, and although I've passed my test I have no plans to sell it, because it's handy. In the UK it tends to be overshadowed by the Honda Vision 110, which has slightly less power but much better fuel consumption. The Vision 110 is the same price, £2800, and it's a Honda. Everybody likes Honda. "You meet the nicest people on a Honda."

Within Peugeot's own range the Django is much more striking, and as mentioned the Tweet is essentially a SYM Symphony, so it's technically not a Peugeot. It has to be said that Peugeot hasn't gone out of its way to sell the Tweet, and I was wary of buying one because "what the heck is a Peugeot Tweet?". But I like it, and I'll probably end up riding it until the exhaust rusts out and petrol motors are banned, because it's incredibly easy to drive and keeps up with traffic.

Tiny Core Linux on a ThinkPad X60s

Let's have a brief look at Tiny Core Linux, a tiny Linux distribution. It's only 23mb! Or 240mb if you want out-of-the-box WiFi support and a choice of different languages. That's a far cry from the days of the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST, when operating systems could fit into a 256kb ROM chip, but it's still very impressive for something that can connect to the internet.

Now, I didn't explore it in any depth, and I wasn't expecting something I could use on a day-to-day basis. I think of Tiny Core Linux as a kind of singing dog. It doesn't matter what tune the dog sings, it's enough that it can sing at all.

In the image above I've connected my old X60s to the internet with an Ethernet cable. Tiny Core Linux doesn't come as standard with WiFi support. I tried out the Core Plus version, which has WiFi, but although it detected my WiFi network it couldn't connect. My hunch is that the WiFi card in my X60s is too old to support modern encryption. You might have better luck than I did.

The oldest laptop I own is an IBM ThinkPad 600X, but it doesn't boot from USB, so I used my circa-2006 ThinkPad X60s as a guinea pig instead. Mine has the chassis of an X60s, but the lid of an X61, because I swapped the screens. The X61's screen was getting yellowy and old.

Tiny Core Linux's website is vague about the minimum hardware requirements, but it apparently needs at least 48mb of RAM. My X60s has three gigabytes of memory, so it's good to go.

The X60s-for-slimline model is a distant ancestor of the X1 Carbon. It has a low-voltage, dual-core, 32-bit Core Duo processor running at 1.66ghz, with a slimmer heatsink than the standard X60. In theory it'll run Windows 10 - probably very badly - but I've left Windows XP on mine for compatibility reasons.

The X60 in general will take 4gb of memory, but the motherboard can only see 3gb, and unlike the X61 it won't accept the popular Middleton custom BIOS that unlocks SATA 2 storage speeds. It's stuck on SATA 1. My X60s has an old SSD in it, but a lot of the SSD's speed is wasted by the slow bus.

The best thing is the keyboard. The X60-61-200-220 generation of ThinkPads had a lovely, lovely keyboard. From the X230 onwards Lenovo moved to an Apple-style design that is, apparently, still very good, but not in the same league.

Overall the X60s is a really nice piece of hardware. Lightweight but solid-feeling, plastic but not in a bad way, with decent ergonomics and a surprising amount of ports, including three USB sockets, an SD card reader, BlueTooth, FireWire 400 - unusual for a PC laptop - and a PCMCIA card slot. It's let down by an Intel GMA graphics chip that was below-average even in 2006, and it only has VGA out, not DVI or HDMI. The 64-bit X61 is more useful nowadays, although the faster models tend to run very hot.

A long time ago you could pick up ThinkPads of a similar vintage for £120 or so. As of 2024 the X60 generation has mostly gone to silicon heaven. After all this time even third-party batteries are dying off, so it's of limited utility as a portable laptop. Enough of the X60s.

I downloaded the regular 23mb version of Tiny Core, which has a graphical interface. There's a command-line-only version that's just 16mb. They're available for both 32-bit and 64-bit processors. I burned the ISO to a USB stick with Etcher on my Mac Mini, which worked flawlessly.

Tiny Core boots at lightning speed. As far as I can tell it loads itself into memory and uses free RAM as a virtual hard drive, which meant that the version of Tiny Core I used wasn't persistent - I had to download everything from scratch whenever I rebooted, but that wasn't particularly onerous. I'm sure it can be persistently installed to a hard drive, I just didn't feel the need. I downloaded Nautilus, a file manager, and it saw the SD card reader, so I used an old SD card to store downloads.

On boot it comes up with a Mac-style dock with a terminal, a control panel, a text editor, and an application repository. In the following image I'm installing Chromium, a web browser:

Initially it didn't work, but after trying to run it from the terminal I realised that I needed to install a supporting library as well:

After installing libEGL Chromium started working. Video is a distant dream, but it did access the internet and render pages, although curiously it only loaded the first few images. Perhaps there's a memory limit:

Unfortunately this version of Chromium is over a decade old, and a lot of websites refused to work because the security certificates were out of date. Perhaps there's a way to update the certificates. I don't know.

I tried out Dillo, another browser that's notable for being small, although it doesn't have support for JavaScript so it's of limited use. It worked! I also tried out a couple of other applications, including FoxIt (a PDF viewer), AbiWord (a word processor that will write PDFs), and Audacity, an audio editor. And DOSBox.

When I say "tried out" I mean "I established that they would run, then closed them":

Running under DOSBox, this is Doepfer's official utility for the A-112 sampler module

And, well, that's Tiny Core Linux. It works on a ThinkPad X60s, and will load and run a bunch of standard applications, albeit that they're all very old and it feels clunky. I have a hunch that TCL is largely pointless on something like an X60s, because the X60s is still sufficiently modern to run full-blown versions of Linux.

It might come into its own on a small development board, or perhaps you something that could sit in a cupboard under the stairs as a media server or firewall or something - although that raises the spectre of the Raspberry Pi, which can do those things in a smaller case. Incidentally the Tiny Core people have a Pi version of Tiny Core if you want to try it out.

It strikes me that Tiny Core has a fundamental problem. Development began in 2009, a few years before the Pi, a few years before a flood of ARM-based development boards. So they made it for x86, and for a while that made sense. But in this day and age x86 feels like a slowly, slowly narrowing dead end, especially for tiny versions of Linux. If you have an old PC gathering dust something like Puppy Linux is more functional. The fact of it being just 23mb is an impressive technical feat though.

Bonus Beat

But that's not all. No! Let's also have a look at Supermium, a port of Google's Chrome browser for older versions of Windows. It sounds vaguely rude but I can't put my finger on it.

Supermium is conceptually a bit like TenFourFox, the it-was-great-while-it-lasted port of FireFox for PowerPC-powered Apple Macintoshes. It's a port of Chrome for versions of Windows that no longer support Chrome, which includes Windows 7, Vista, and XP, with rumours of Windows 2000 support in the works. As mentioned up the page my X60s has XP, so I decided to see if Supermium worked on it.

What's the point? It might be particularly handy if you're running a business that has a bunch of XP machines that have some kind of industrial software, but they have a browser-based front end, or perhaps you need to log into a manufacturer's website to download an updated driver and you have to do it on the local machine. Or maybe you have an ancient Netbook, and you just want something that will check the BBC's news website or Wikipedia etc. Given the age of XP I would be wary of giving Supermium my credentials, but as a dumb internet terminal it might be useful.

The most modern version of Chrome for XP is 49. On my X60s I actually use FireFox, which goes up to version 52:

Why FireFox? Historical inertia. I'm old enough to remember Netscape Navigator. I'm old enough to remember when it became Netscape Communicator. This was back when the version numbers of browsers actually represented real, major changes. Now Mozilla just updates the version number to one-up Google (as I write these words Chrome is at version 122, Firefox is version 123), and in turn Google updates the version number at random, because Google doesn't care what Mozilla does and probably doesn't even like to acknowledge its existence.

I'm digressing here. FireFox 52 works, but again I would be wary of giving it my credentials. As mentioned my ThinkPad X60s has Windows XP, Service Pack 3, with 3gb of memory. Supermium installs without a problem:

And it runs just fine, complete with support for extensions:

Internet video playback is choppy, not unwatchably so, but not pleasant. I assume that's the fault of the X60s' ancient video chip. I was hoping Supermium would break, or something, because then I would have something to write about. A funny anecdote or something. Something about fiddling with the BIOS, or something.

Still, in summary, Supermium installs without any fuss whatsoever on a ThinkPad X60s that has Windows XP SP3 with 3b of memory. It browses the internet more or less exactly like modern Chrome, potentially giving the machine a new lease of life if you're very, very careful about using script blockers and don't plan to give the machine your personal details.

My recollection is that the typical netbook of 2007, 2008 only had 2gb of memory, which might be tight, but on the other hand XP doesn't take up all that much space, so perhaps it would even out.