Archive for January, 2012
I Want a Raspberry Pi
Posted by Daryl in Senseless Rants, Technology on January 24th, 2012
I so want a Raspberry Pi. In the worst way I want one of these things. My problem is that you can’t buy one yet.
If you don’t know what that is, you must not be into computers…so I’ll tell you. It’s a $25 (or $35) computer, smaller than a credit card – though thicker – that uses an ARM processor (like in most mobile phones and tablets.)
The whole thing only uses 5W of power, and runs Linux (at least for a start.) There’s videos of it online running XBMC (popular media server software) and doing all sorts of interesting things. There’s also an addon (already) called the Gertboard that will let you control devices and motors and so on.
What I like the most about it is that I could put a computer – a fully-capable computer – anywhere I could supply 5W of electricity. I could control things with it, take pictures, really do whatever I wanted.
To a lot of people, the Raspberry Pi represents a cheap computer. And though that is certainly true, to me it means more of a chance to hack stuff together. 5W isn’t a lot of power – it’s low enough to run on battery power and/or cheap battery backup power, it’s small and it’s very capable.
Besides all that, it doesn’t run some strange embedded operating system that nobody uses – it run Linux – so there’s an absolute ton of software already out there for it.
To me the represents a new opportunity to hack. To play with a new system and see what you can make it do…see what you can make it control or where you can make it fit. For me, this brings back memories of sitting in a friend’s basement (you know who you are, Pete) with his 300 baud modem to see what it could do and how far it could go. Those wild-west days of whatever went that passed from our consciousness a long time ago.
So it’s not just a chance to play with a new toy…it’s the chance to actually learn something new, and maybe even to invent something.
We truly do live in interesting times.
Kodak Prepares to file Chapter 11
Posted by Daryl in Deep Thoughts, Senseless Rants, Technology on January 9th, 2012
I’ve been reading that Kodak is preparing to file for bankruptcy protection.
And though I suppose it makes sense, as they’ve been unable to keep up with the digital photographic revolution, it’s going to be sad to see the old girl go.
My whole life, the name Kodak has been synonymous with photography. From the Super 8 movies my Dad shot of us as children, to the film and paper used for my high school pictures, to the Kodachrome slides I shot in the 90′s, Kodak has been with me the whole way.
Of course, the advent of the digital camera has seen the end to all that, and I knew in my heart when I bought my first digital camera – a Canon S10 Digital Elph with all of 2.1 Megapixels – that the day would come when ‘classic’ photography would go away.
Yes, there are still niche markets for things like reverse-engineered Polaroid film (The Impossible Project) and there are still people out there creating daguerrotypes, but the mainstream went digital years ago and there’s no going back.
One thing that’s changed and that most people don’t realize is why people take the pictures they take. I remember when ‘the camera’ only came out for special occasions like Christmas and birthdays, and of course you took it on vacation. Just about every picture of me as a child is of me at Christmas, on my birthday, or somewhere on vacation.
Comparing this to the pictures we have of our kids, all of which are digital, you can see a real difference. Sure, we have the birthday shots, and we have the Christmas shots, but we’ve also got loads of Easter shots, playtime shots, walking-down-the-street shots – we’ve got shots of the kids doing just about anything you can think of, and we’ve got thousands of them. Pushing the button on a digital camera costs nothing, so there’s no disincentive to taking another shot, or another 100 shots. Though the subject of the photos is as important as it always was, the photograph itself is a worthless commodity item because it’s just so cheap to create.
Add to that the ever-decreasing price of global data transmission and you get services like Facebook. Yes, Facebook, where not only do I get to see pictures of what people are doing or where they are, I can easily see them while they’re still on the slopes or wherever it is they are while they’re still there. It also lets me see critical things like what people are about to eat for dinner…or what their dog ate for dinner.
Because pictures are so cheap to create, we’re snapping the things at an alarming rate. I can’t find any numbers that look credible to me, but I don’t think it would come as a surprise to anyone if it were that 10 billion digital pictures were taken every day.
And because the things are so cheap to create, we don’t put the same value on them that we used to. Pictures are disposable things now – valueless things that exist only as a stream of digital bits – and that’s how we treat them.
I also worry about keeping our digital photo library backed up, but that’s another article.
It’s a real shame, too, because negatives and slides are tangible, valuable objects that have stood the test of time. And you’ll never just stumble across a hard disk drive in a shoebox in the back of the closet.
