Raspberry Pi OS on a ThinkPad X60s

Let's have a brief look at the newest version of the Raspberry Pi operating system, Raspberry Pi OS. It's made for the Raspberry Pi 4, but it runs on a wide range of hardware, and in this post I'm going to install it on my ancient ThinkPad X60s. Will it work? Will it work well?

I'm installing a version that includes a desktop environment, which I mention because a lot of Raspberry Pis are set up once and then left running in a cupboard under the stairs forever, as a file server or home automation tool, so they don't even need a graphical desktop. They can be set up remotely with terminal commands.

The Raspberry Pi OS is essentially a cut-down version of the popular Linux distribution Debian, in this case version 11, Bullseye. Pi OS is particularly interesting because it still has support for 32-bit processors, which is handy if you have a laptop from 2005, 2006 or so. Which I do! It's this little bastard here, with a lovely old-fashioned keyboard and a ThinkPoint nipple:

The X60/X60s models were the first ThinkPads with a Windows key. Many years after the failure of OS/2 I like to imagine that IBM finally, grudgingly admitted that Windows was here to stay, just as they washed their hands of the ThinkPad range.

My ThinkPad X60s has a dual-core, 32-bit Intel Core Duo CPU running at 1.66ghz. It came out in 2006. I still use it every now and again as a mobile typewriter. Compared to the regular ThinkPad X60 it has a slimline heatsink, which was made possible by the use of a special low-voltage version of the Core Duo. Apparently some versions of the X60 had a 64-bit Core 2 Duo, but they must have been very rare. I've never seen one. Apart from the 32-bit CPU the machine's other major limitation is the SATA 1 interface. I have a small SSD in mine, but the extra speed of an SSD is wasted - it can transfer data faster than SATA 1 can receive it. Nonetheless I like the lack of noise and moving parts.

The X60s was released during the heyday of Windows XP. In theory it can run the 32-bit version of Windows 10, which was kept current until 2020, but I imagine it would be very slow. The built-in Intel GMA graphics accelerator is pretty poor, and the machine can only have a maximum of 4gb. Even then some of the memory is reserved for the graphics chip, so it can't use all of it. Video out is VGA, which made sense in 2006 but is very old-fashioned nowadays.

On the positive side the X6x models were only slightly larger than the netbooks that appeared about a year later, but were a lot more functional. They had a full-sized screen and lots of ports. The X60s has three USB 2 ports, an SD card slot, a PCMCIA slot, Ethernet, and, unusually for a PC, a FireWire 400 port. The presence of SD and PCMCIA slots is handy if you want to use it as a storage device for your digital camera. The timing was such that a glut of X6x models appeared on the used market circa 2009 or so, when the world's IT departments switched to the widescreen ThinkPad X200 instead, so for a while you could pick up X6xes for pennies.

As you can see the machine has 4gb of memory, because there's no reason not to max out the two memory slots nowadays, but only 3gb is available for the operating system. After startup Pi OS's free command shows a total of 3091416 magical memory units.

Older ThinkPads are easy to fix up and modify. I bought my X60s because I had an X61 with a dim screen; I swapped the top half between the two machines, which is why my X60s has an X61 logo on the bezel. IBM sold the ThinkPad range to Lenovo in 2005, but Lenovo retained the rights to use the IBM name for a short while, which is why the palmrest has an IBM sticker.

But what of Raspberry PI OS? There's some debate as to whether the Raspberry Pi is a desktop replacement or not. The manufacturers originally intended for it to be a hobby project machine for robotics etc, but the Pi 4 has 8gb of memory, dual 4k video output, and more USB ports than a MacBook Air, so there's no reason why you can't plug it into a monitor and use it as a simple desktop computer.

As such Pi OS comes with a mixture of standard desktop software (LibreOffice, a browser, VLC) plus a bunch of esoteric stuff that makes more sense if you're a hobbyist - such as SmartSim, a digital circuit simulator, and Sonic Pi, a live coding environment aimed at nerds who are also musicians. Do such people exist? In any case you can install whatever you want using Debian's package manager, so that's not a problem.

Installing Pi OS is easy. Gone are the days when you had to manually edit Xorg to get Linux working properly. I downloaded the ISO to my Mac Mini and used Etcher to make a bootable USB stick:

Installation involved inserting the USB stick, switching on the X60s, and pressing the F12 key to boot from the USB stick. I chose the "run with persistence" option, which runs from the USB stick with a small area set aside to retain my preferences. The installation procedure was simple, with just two pages of options. The first asked for localisation data:

The second asked for my wifi details. At the point it set about downloading and installing updates, which took a while. Half an hour? Forty minutes? I didn't time it:

Notice how the screen is yellowy and dim. All of the X60 and X61 models had a matte, 1024x768 LCD panel that wasn't particularly great even back in 2006. The convertible laptop tablet models - the X60T and X61T - had a 1400x1050 panel, which is a popular modification, for the non-tablet models, but it's rare on the used market nowadays.

After installation the standard desktop appeared:

It's slightly laggy, but that's probably because it was running from USB. The Chromium browser is version 103.0.5060.114, the most recent as of this writing. Does this make the X60s immune to viruses and other internet nasties? I have no idea, but it's a lot more secure than XP with the last version of Chrome, which was released back in 2016. The Core Duo is vulnerable to Meltdown and Spectre attacks, but you can't worry about everything all the time.

Just to make sure that LibreOffice Writer works I loaded it up and typed "Alan Bean was the third person to walk on the moon. Sean Bean has never visited the moon but there is still time." Both of those statements are true. Chromium takes a while to start up, and generates a number of "page unresponsive" errors, but after a while it settles down, so I imagine that's more the fault of the USB stick than the X60s. It runs YouTube at 480p well enough:

720p also works, but it's very choppy. Battery life? The system monitor shows a battery life of around a hour, which is fair enough given that that the battery is probably sixteen years old. Windows XP reports a battery life of around ninety minutes, but there are too many variables to compare the two.

I plugged it into an external 1920x1080 monitor, which worked, although there doesn't seem to be a way to set the resolution, screen layout, refresh rate etc using the desktop. It also made the system very slow, I know not why.

Is that it? I think it is. I can report that Pi OS installs without any tinkering on a 2006 laptop and works well enough to type things, read the news, and play videos at 480p at least. And it'll do so for about an hour with a sixteen-year-old battery. The Raspberry Pi people don't give a minimum hardware specification for the Pi Desktop, or indeed any instructions at all, so I have no idea whether it'll work on older ThinkPads. My hunch is that the X40 models should be fine (the Pentium M had a similar architecture to the Core Duo), but before that I have no idea, the end.

NaissanceE: Ownership Implies Control

It has an extra e at the end. Naissance-ee? Dunno. At the beginning of the game you fall down a hole after being chased by a floating space thing. You find yourself trapped in a series of giant empty megastructures. NaissanceE, the game is called NaissanceE. I'm talking about NaissanceE. It's kind-a bug and kind-a snack.

Naissance is the French word for born. I suppose if you're born you are a naissance-ee. Is it a French pun on borne? We may never know.

Today we're going to have a look at NaissanceE, an indie art game from 2014. It was developed by a chap called Mavros Sedeño. As with Gris it's a one-off. The developer hasn't made anything since. It began as a mod for Far Cry, using that game's engine, but it was polished up and released as a full product with the Unreal engine instead. Is it any good?

It's so-so. It starts off well, collapses, then gets better. Sedeño is a professional level designer, and NaissanceE feels like a disjointed bag of ideas that he couldn't use during his day job strung together one after the other. It's intermittently clever, but also very frustrating. There's a bit near the end where some objects dance a waltz around you that made me forgive some of its flaws. I wish more of the game had been like that.

The soundtrack uses a bunch of pre-existing music from Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening project, which sounds like trombones and accordions being played in a vast underground space, and selections from the works of Thierry Zaboitzeff and Patricia Dallio, occasional members of (it says here) Art Zoyd. I have to admit that I had never heard of Art Zoyd until playing NaissanceE so plus one to NaissanceE for bringing good music to my attention.

My recollection is that the game got decent reviews in 2014, and at least on a visual level its mixture of textureless environments and stark lighting was very influential, but it didn't have much of an afterlife. Neither Limited Run nor Special Reserve have made physical releases of NaissanceE, there isn't a vinyl soundtrack on Important Records etc.

NaissanceE reminds me a bit of The Unfinished Swan, in the sense that they both begin with a clever gameplay idea that isn't complicated enough to support a complete game, and then they turn into a grab-bag of minigames. Swan starts off with the player navigating through a featureless void by firing a paint gun at the walls; NaissanceE has starkly-lit black and white platforming sequences that ask the player to navigate through a three-dimensional world that looks like a two-dimensional silhouette. It's a clever idea but not enough for a whole game.

I'll write about Swan separately. NaissancE essentially has four different components. There are the shadowy platform parts; there are lengthy sequences where you have to explore a huge environment; there are some simple puzzle sequences that involve sliding blocks or manipulating lights to clear a path; and there are platforming sequences that involve altered gravity or fans or rhythmic jumping.

The game has a mechanic where you have to periodically take a breath while running, so there are a couple of rhythmic sequences where you run, breathe, jump, run, breathe, jump etc. The breathing-running-jumping parts and the shadows feel the most developed, the rest of the game feels like filler, although ironically the exploration sequences are the thing that the reviewers noticed most. They're the bits I will remember.

The shot above isn't just a skybox, it's an actual environment. You can only explore the suspended walkways in the distance, but the game doesn't cheat with its depiction of vast scale.

On the positive side the game is very stylish. A chap on Discogs.com once described the music of Thomas Koner as sounding like "mechanical insects trapped in an air ventilator on the surface of a giant metal moon", and NaissanceE captures that kind of atmosphere really well. It even has giant cooling vents spewing steam into the sterile air. NaissanceE is one of the few games I have played that has a smell - a giant train station, a mixture of dust and soot.

It reminded me of some ancient 8-bit and 16-bit 3D games, such as Driller or Damocles, in which you were entirely alone in a giant space made up of untextured polygons. The draw distance was usually very short, but they had a sense of scale. They felt like a complete world inside your computer. Several worlds in the case of Damocles.

Unfortunately NaissanceE's technology is starting to show its age. The shadows are flickery and the use of ambient occlusion is unsubtle. It would benefit greatly from a remaster. I was struck by the relative conservatism of the level design. The maps are huge, but unlike for example Antichamber - which was released a year earlier - the geometry is mostly conventional. There are a couple of tricky bits with portals but the game was less mindbending than I expected. I wonder if it's because the developer was still getting to grips with the engine?

The game was never ported for any platform other than the PC. If you want to play it on the PlayStation you're out of luck. The nearest console equivalent I can think of is Bound, which is a lot more colourful. Or Manifold Garden, which I wrote about a few months ago.

The game also does the whole grunge quiet/loud thing where you walk from a small corridor into a gigantic space and it's like "no" and "whoah" and "no". As with the distant mountains of Battlezone the actual play area is much smaller than the environments, but it's still a fascinating place to get lost in.

Bad stuff? Well, the big problem is the game side of things. The platforming starts off well enough, with a sequence where you have to descend a giant wall by riding the backs of polygonal slugs. It's clunky but imaginative. Some of the running-breathing-jumping-running-breathing sequences are also solid, but the player character's motion is awkward at the best of times, and I found myself falling and dying because the controls felt stiff. Neither realistic nor stylised, just stiff.

The platforming reaches a nadir with the sequence pictured above, in which you have to negotiate a bunch of turbines in a series of ventilation tunnels. The rotating axles throw you off; the air blows you back; you have to avoid the fan blades, and eventually leap from one universal joint to another, and to cap it all you only have one chance to do it, because the air pressure gradually increases, throwing you back to your doom. It's needlessly sadistic and feels like part of a completely different game.

And it doesn't work, because the wind continually pinned me against the ceiling so that I had to restart the run. Apparently the game goes wobbly unless it runs at exactly 60fps. I also kept getting stuck on things, or bouncing off things, but perhaps that's just me being clumsy.

One complaint levelled at Journey and Abzu etc is that they're not much fun to play, because you can't lose and the action sequences are there to keep you entertained rather than challenge you. For most of its length NaissanceE is like that, but the fans suddenly appeared and brought me to a crashing halt. Bear in mind that I've completed Manic Miner. I've completed Map24 of Hell Revealed. I finished about three-quarters of Ori and the Blind Forest before something distracted me. I once had breakfast and dinner in two different McDonalds eighty miles apart and was order #000 in both of them. I wish had kept the receipts. That actually happened. I was order #000 in both of them.

Just being order #000 was impressive enough. But to be order #000 twice in consecutive meals in two completely different restaurants eight miles apart was incredible. I suppose the odds depend on the footfall in each restaurant, which is probably linked to the time of day. There would be more orders in the morning and at lunchtime, but does that make getting double-zeroes more likely, or less likely? Do the restaurants reset to #000 when they open, or do they roll over from the day before? There is so much in this world that I don't know.

I was talking about NaissanceE. The fan section almost made me give up because it felt like a cruel joke at my expense. Elsewhere the game has a gag where you are warned you not to go down a certain path, and if you carry on the game throws you back to the desktop. These two ideas might have worked well together, if perhaps the fan section was also an elaborate dead-end, and you were supposed to find a clever way around it.

But, no, they're just two disconnected ideas that don't mean anything individually and don't link together.

The second problem is that the next section, "Deeper Into Madness", really makes it obvious that the developer didn't have a central theme for the game. NaissanceE is is just a set of level ideas glued together, without a story or characterisation.

It's a problem because it feels unsatisfying, as if it was an interactive 64kb demo. NaissanceE is often described as an art game, but it's essentially posh street graffiti. It has the form of art, the surface appearance of art, but it's just pretty visuals. FAR: Lone Sails had pretty visuals, but underneath the looks there was a bittersweet meditation on mortality. NaissanceE in contrast has nothing.

I mean, yes, the universe is an arbitrary series of events with no inherent meaning, and in that respect NaissanceE is more honest than Journey, but the game has enough wisps of a storyline that I suspect it wasn't intended to be completely abstract. There is an implication that the environment of NaissanceE is a little bit like the alien hotel at the end of 2001 - a construction intended to mimic human habitation - and that you eventually outstay your welcome, but it's very vague.

The game pulls itself together in the final level, which takes place in a vast-but-not-endless desert, so ultimately the game starts off good and ends good but falls apart in the middle. If the middle section had been replaced with some more large-scale levels, and if perhaps some of the ideas in "Deeper Into Madness" were scattered about as optional diversions, the game would work a lot better.

If anything NaissanceE made me appreciate Manifold Garden and Gris even more. Gris is a surprisingly slick platform game, and Garden strikes a good balance between visual spectacle and tricky puzzles. NaissanceE on the other hand is all over the place. The exploration sequences don't really have gameplay, they're just spectacle, but the platforming sections are too hectic for sightseeing. The vague storyline is too amorphous to be emotionally satisfying.

Having said all that NaissanceE is available on Steam for free, so you don't lose anything by trying it out. If nothing else you can see where all those untextured large-scale environments came from. Something something liminal spaces something isolation more relevant than ever in the post-COVID age something something the end.

Kangerlussuaq

Let's have a quick look at Kangerlussuaq. It's a small town that has grown around Greenland's main international airport. The airport has the longest civilian runway in the country and is located at the end of a fjord, where the winds are relatively subdued. What does Kangerlussuaq mean? "Scary fjord", from the Greenlandic kangerluk (fjord) and -suaq (big, deep, formidable, scary). The Greenlandic language is no-nonsense and to-the-point.

Kangerlussuaq and the airport are indivisible, because there isn't much else in the local area. Which is awkward, because there are plans to extend the runways at Nuuk, the capital, and also Ilulissat, which is Greenland's chief tourist destination on account of the icebergs. When that happens Kangerlussuaq will no longer have a raison d'etre, but it seems wrong to abandon such a large facility.

How did Kangerlussuaq Airport come to be? War, and the threat of war. Back in April 1940 the Germans overran Denmark, which meant that Denmark's foreign possessions became part of the Third Reich as well. In practice the Allies stepped in. Britain invaded and took over the Faroe Islands, and also Iceland, which was almost entirely independent from Denmark at the time but we invaded anyway so that the Germans couldn't.

Technically this was wrong of us, but in return for having to pretend to like corned beef and Tommy Trinder the Faroe Islands and Iceland got new roads, new harbours, new runways, plus masses of bored and lonely British and American servicemen. That must have been incredibly awkward but that is another topic for another time.

Things went slightly differently with Greenland. The United States wasn't happy with the idea of Britain interfering with its sphere of influence, so we didn't stick our oar in. Canada set up a base in the south of the country, but the US wasn't particularly happy with that either. For a year Greenland existed in a kind of legal limbo, theoretically part of the Axis but in practice too remote for Germany to exploit, until in April 1941 the US ambassador to Denmark, a chap called Henrik Kauffmann, signed a defence treaty that gave the United States the right to set up military bases. In doing so he overstepped his authority, because the Danish government continued to exist and the King of Denmark remained in Denmark, but in the long run there were no hard feelings and he was pardoned at the end of the war.

And so in late 1941 the US built a series of bases in Greenland, codenamed Bluie West and Bluie East depending on their location. This all happened before the US formally entered the Second World War. The rationale was that the bases would extend the reach of the US Navy and make it easier for the USAF to transfer lend-lease aircraft to Europe. This does raise the question of whether the United States provoked the Second World War purely so it could get its hands on Greenland, and I imagine there are people on the internet who believe that to be the case. Construction of Bluie West 8, which became Kangerlussuaq, began in September 1941, and was completed in January 1942, a month after the Pearl Harbour attack. It can't have been easy building a runway in Greenland in Winter.

Bluie West 8 was particularly useful for ferry flights. The flights typically took off from Presque Isle Army Air Field in Maine, before heading east over the Atlantic via Gander to their destination in Scotland. However the distance from Gander to Scotland was just over two thousand miles, which was too far for heavily-laden transports and almost all fighter aircraft.

In contrast the US-Greenland-Iceland-Scotland route had a longer overall distance, but the hops were shorter, so long-range fighters could complete it. Have you ever read about Glacier Girl, the P-38 that was dug out of Greenland's icepack? That was lost during one of the US-Greenland-Iceland-Scotland ferry flights. Poor weather prevented it from reaching Iceland, along with a B-17 and a bunch of other P-38s, so the flight leader turned back to Greenland, but he got lost.

Low on fuel, he elected to belly land on the ice, after which the aircraft was covered in snow and forgotten about for years. The internet is cagey about exactly where in Greenland Glacier Girl came down, and I don't blame them because souvenir hunters would probably pick the place clean.

Why Bluie? The internet says that it was a US codeword for Greenland, but the codeword doesn't appear to have been used outside the context of the airbases. Perhaps it was just a random word plucked from a book. Perhaps someone in the Government felt that Greenie would be too obvious and Spaciegrey would never catch on.

Germany still attempted to militarise Greenland. They set up a series of weather stations on the east coast. After initial success the venture ended in a series of skirmishes that left one Danish and one German soldier dead, so not even Greenland escaped the destructive influence of war.

In the post-war years Bluie West 8 became Søndrestrøm Air Base, after the Danish name for the local area. The issue of place names in Greenland is a fascinating one that I'm going to ignore completely because it's controversial. In 1992 the US left, although there's still a military presence, mostly the Danish Arktisk Kommando (just visible in the top-right of the first image). The US and Canadian Air Forces still use the place occasionally:

The US also maintains a base at Thule, in the north. It's pronounced Tool. Throughout the Cold War Greenland was a vital part of the United States' early warning line, but advances in technology have meant that radars in the continental US can do the same job. Furthermore the greater range of post-war airliners means that Kangerlussuaq quickly lost its importance as a refuelling base, so unlike Gander in Newfoundland it never really had a civilian heyday. As far as I can tell none of the civilian flights airborne on 11 September 2001 were diverted to Kangerlussuaq. They went to Gander instead.

Did you know that there's a whole subgenre of accidental noise albums? They're albums that have been automatically uploaded to YouTube and Spotify, but the uploading process went wrong, so the albums are totally corrupted and changed, e.g:

Even the Amazon previews are corrupt, because the whole process is one-click automatic and no-one noticed. It's entirely possible that by the time you listen to the video above someone has fixed it, but it reminds me of The Talos Principle, a video game set long after the demise of the human race. I can tell that the upload is corrupt because I'm human, but what about them (gestures to robot overlords; alien successors; pan-dimensional scientists; rocks and stones; water underground). What about them? How can they tell that the upload is wrong? I'm digressing here.

Kangerlussuaq's fuel is stored in a bunch of tanks just outside town. They're topped up by ship in the second half of the year and used up in the spring and summer. While I was there Kangerlussuaq smelled a bit like Morocco - dust and unburned fuel - but perhaps the cars are in need of repair. It apparently costs a fortune to import a vehicle. Perhaps because of this Kangerlussuaq has a high concentration of Toyotas and Volvos. Sensible, sturdy cars:

The purple car is a Lada Niva 4x4, which is still in production. It actually looks pretty cool. During the Cold War my hunch is that the USSR had at least two missiles aimed at the base, one at the runway and one at the fuel storage. There's a harbour down the road, but it's icelocked during the winter months. Perhaps there was a missile aimed at the harbour as well.

Would anyone have survived a nuclear strike? Given Kangerlussuaq's bowl-like geography an airburst would have been super-effective, and anybody who did survive would have faced an eighty-mile trek to Sisimiut, assuming they didn't die of burns or radiation poisoning first. They would presumably have to integrate with the local population, and perhaps hundreds of years later Brazilian scientists would be puzzled by the blonde, sarsaparilla-craving inuit of Sisimiut.

There are still traces of the US presence in Kangerlussuaq today:

Should I drop a sick Deus Ex reference, or not? That game came out more than twenty years ago. Most people reading this would be baffled.

The US National Science Foundation struck a deal to continue using Kangerlussuaq in support of its science missions after the USAF pulled out, although I have the impression that this has been cut back by successive US governments. NASA still uses the airfield for research into climate change, and when I was there I spotted a Kenn Borek turboprop DC-3 conversation that, as far as I can tell, was supporting NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland project:

But I could be wrong, because that blog post is two years old. Someone else might have hired the plane. If Greenland's ice cap melted away the results would be catastrophic for coastal areas in the lower latitudes, but Greenland itself would be relatively safe.

The colour scheme reminded me of Mirror's Edge(tm).

For most visitors Kangerlussuaq isn't a destination, it's a delay. I imagine that the majority of visitors only leave the airport terminal to see what's outside. International flights arrive at 10:40, and the local flights are scheduled for the afternoon or early the next morning.

The town itself is split in half by the runway. The civilian airport side is in the photograph at the top of this article. It has the main supermarket, the civilian hotels, the post office, and the main restaurant, which is part of the hotel. Technically there are two restaurants. There's a cafe that serves surprisingly good food and a posher restaurant that I didn't visit because my trousers were filthy.

I'm tempted to say that after hiking for six days anything would taste okay, but the lasagne and musk ox burger were legitimately good. The lasagne in particular. Pulled musk ox is tasteless but the same is true of all pulled meat. I'm not a fan of pulled meat. It was a bad fad that needs to die out.

The meals came to around 16-17DKK, which is about £18, which is not cheap, but you're paying for the fact that it's in Greenland. Ordinarily I wouldn't post a picture of lasagne to the internet but this lasagne is in Greenland.

You have to walk along a curved road to reach the southern, military side of the base. Apart from a few neat-looking summer houses it's mostly made up of utilitarian blocks, like a low-poly 3D game:

Datsun. It's been a long time since I saw that name. The Polar Bear Inn in the top image has been closed for several years. Online maps show a Thai takeaway in the same block, but it's not there any more. Instead the takeaway seems to have moved into a mini-market across the way. There appeared to be a bar that opens at 20:00, and some kind of grill house, but I couldn't tell if they still existed or not. Out of town, to the south, is Restaurant Roklubben, which requires a reservation. I've never been to a restaurant that requires a reservation and I felt that Greenland is not the place to start.

There were a couple of huts on skis. I wonder if they were prefabricated research stations that were built to be airlifted into place.

That fact that no-one has swooped in to take over the former site of the Polar Bear Inn doesn't bode well for the local economy. Especially given that online shopping is still very basic in Greenland. But then again I went in May, just after COVID ravaged the world, so perhaps the conditions aren't typical. Greenland largely sailed through the COVID pandemic - eleven thousand cases, 21 deaths - and when I went neither Greenland nor Denmark (nor London, for that matter) enforced any COVID restrictions, although I did have to prove that I had been vaccinated at the Air Greenland check-in desk in Denmark. I didn't have to prove it very hard, but I did at least have to make an effort.

The southern edge of the town is marked by a bridge, beyond which is Lake Ferguson, which I didn't visit:

The western edge is connected by road to a harbour, and thence the defunct Kellyville, which is a ten-mile walk away:

The northern border of the town is a cliff face and the eastern edge is connected by a long road to the Russell Glacier. The hotels in Kangerlussuaq offer tours to the glacier and the surrounding area. I took a four-hour tour which approaches the glacier but doesn't do on it, which I felt best given that I was recovering from the arctic circle trail at the time:

Some people might baulk at the idea of flying across the Atlantic to check out a melting glacier, but as mentioned passim I am a documentarian, so I can get away with that sort of thing. This is a fantastic excuse that works in all situations. Have you ever seen a photo-essay about prostitution in Cuba? There's a cottage industry of photo-essays about prostitution in Cuba. And South-East Asia. Just google "photo-essay prostitution cuba" or "south-east Asia" or whatever. The fiction is that the photographers are raising awareness of prostitution, but in reality they're maximising their return by sleeping with prostitutes and getting a photo-essay out of it while being paid to do so by the UN or whatever. I admire that kind of chutzpah.

I'm digressing wildly here. Apart from the tours, the hiking, the surprisingly decent food, the flights, is there anything else in Kangerlussuaq? Not really. There's a post office just outside the airport from which you can in theory send a postcard, but it has odd hours, and when I popped my head around the door there was no-one inside. It seemed to be aimed at local people who needed a secure postbox.

There's a Canada Goose store and a couple of tourist souvenir shops. Greenland has a limited domestic manufacturing base, so there aren't all that many souvenirs. I brought back some Danish tea that I could in theory have got in Denmark. I also found some shell cases, which I could have perhaps posted back, but it struck me as a bad idea:

A mixture of 30-06, 6.5mm Swedish, .22, and a couple of .222 cases.

As mentioned earlier the only airline that flies to Greenland is Air Greenland. Its main route is Copenhagen -> Kangerlussuaq all year round, with Reykjavik -> Nuuk in the summer. A return ticket from Copenhagen is around £500 if you book in advance, and on top of that you have to budget £200 or so for an internal flight from Kangerlussuaq when you get there, because you can't just hop on a train. There are no trains.

The airport at Nuuk is under redevelopment, which in theory makes sense given that Nuuk is the capital and most populated town, but Nuuk itself has a limited range of things to see. There's a cinema and a small shopping mall. A few hiking trails. A ferry runs up the west coast (about £200 for a bed, more for an enclosed cabin), but only once a week. Perhaps it will be joined by a second ferry when Nuuk's runway is extended. Greenland's major tourist destination is Ilulissat, which has icebergs. It's on the ferry route, further north than Kangerlussuaq.

The ferry doesn't visit Kangerlussuaq, so presumably if the airport is downgraded visitor numbers will plummet. If the airport is turned over to the military or closed entirely Kangerlussuaq would presumably have to be dynamited and bulldozed into the ground, because it would otherwise become a wasteland. Which seems a shame given the existing infrastructure, but what to do with it? Even if the road to Sisimiut is completed there will be very little reason to visit Kangerlussuaq, not enough to justify the expense of maintaining a road. I'm glad I'm not in charge of Greenland's infrastructure.

And that's Kangerlussuaq. If you want check it out you could cover the whole town in a day, or two days if you do a couple of tours and have a meal at Restaurant Roklubben. Despite the Second World War connection I don't recall seeing anything about the town's history. There's a museum, but when I was there it looked defunct, but again I went a month before the season begins.