While writing this I'm currently in Okinawa Japan. For anyone who doesn't know Okinawa is a small Island on the southernmost of the Ryukyu Archipelago, and it's roughly halfway been Japan, Taiwan and mainland China.
Last time I was here I had my MacBook Pro which performed fine, however being the 16" model is a bit on the heavy side when walking around the city.
This time I decided to take my trusty Thinkpad P1 that's presently running FreeBSD Current (15.0). This is a 15.6" laptop and since it's carbon fibre is noticeably lighter than the MacBook. The downside of this is it's battery life is no where near as good as the MacBook.
One of the issues I was mainly concerned about is connecting to WiFi. At this time I'm running the new WiFi 4/5 code which is at a beta level at present. I did have some ups and down with the Hong Kong airport while transfering to the next flight. It did depend on where in the airport you were though.
My experience so far has been acceptable. I have been able to connect to the Hotel WiFi perfectly fine and my
VPN works, though for some reason I cannot send emails when connected to the Hotel WiFi. Starbucks on the other hand
isn't playing nicely with my VPN, so I'm tethering to my iPhone. This is getting data though an eSim. I'm pleasantly
surprised at how well this is working. For some reason OpenVPN is not updating /etc/resolve.conf so I'll have to work
out why, but that can probably wait until I get home.
While mostly it was a pleasant experience I did have an interesting failure. I was sitting at a Cafe and trying to look things up when I decided to jump onto the nearest public WiFi. This was mainly due to my phone getting low on battery. Unfortunately that caused the system to freeze and it continued to freeze at each boot when starting up networking. I tried several times to sort it out in Safe mode however the easiest solutions was to re-enable tethering on my phone, reboot and remove the entry for the free WiFi. That seemed to resolve the issue.
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