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.

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.

As I sit here right now, a wire-cutting machine is making its way through the riser tube on the top of the blowout preventer.  And through the cut that is being made, an absolute torrent of oil is coming forth.

Just a couple minutes ago @ 11:07PM:

You can see the oil starting to gush out past the wire into the coin-slot that has been cut.  It looks to be under rather high pressure.

11:11PM:

The notch hasn’t been cut much further in by now, but you can see that the amount of oil forcing itself out has increased dramatically.  And all this while the broken part of the riser continues to gush at seemingly the same rate as before.

One gets the sense that cutting off that kinked pipe is going to release an absolute torrent of oil, and they had better have that cap ready to go or this is going to be really, really bad.

11:14PM:

Even worse now.

What the thing is is irrelevant to wha I want to say, but safe to say it’s a flat panel LCD with several HDMI inputs on the back.

We had the cable people come out and give us a new HD cable box.  It’s got all manner of outputs on the back of it – cable, composite, s-video, component and HDMI.  I elected to go HDMI because I know it’s the only digital signal of the bunch and I thought it surely must allow the best picture quality.So I trip myself over to a local big-box to fidn myself an HDMI cable to do the job.

For starters, all of the prominently displayed cables were from two companies; Rocketfish and Monster.

For Rocketfish, the cheapest cable they had was about $46.00.  For Monster, it was $150.00.

Come on now…$150 for a 3 foot cable?  Are you shitting me?

So I ask this guy, “Hey, there must be soemthing cheaper, but where are they?” and he proceeds to fetch a 6-foot Recoton cable that’s $25.00.

Then he says, “So, what’cha going to hook up?”

I say that I’m hooking up my cable box and that I’m buying the “cheap” cable expressly because I can’t see the sense in spending major dollars on a short cable.

He comes back at me and says that I might likely “get away” with this cheapo for my cable box, but if I were to buy a Blu-Ray or something similar I’d be wise to get a “premium cable”.

My only response to that was, “HDMI is digital.  As long as the dits and dots get to the other end of the cable without running together or fading out, there’s nothing to be gained from pricey cables.  And I really don’t think that one meter or six feet or whatever is worth throwing that money on…and I don’t know what the difference might be.”

To this, the response was, “Oh, there’s a difference.”

At this, we parted ways.  I went home, hooked up my el-cheapo cable and the quality of the picture on my TV is perfect.  And to think I saved more than $125 by not buying snake oil!

Just as an aside, I know there was a time – and there may still be – when you really did need the premium cables to pinch the most out of your HiFi.

Over short distances, it doesn’t really matter in any case, but certainly for shorter distances with a digital signal it matters less.

Selling a $20 one-meter cable for $150 should be illegal.

The Federal Minister of Industry, Jim Prentice, says “This bill reflects a win-win approach.”

Just who will be doing all the winning with this is pretty clear. And it’s not me and you.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/06/12/tech-copyright.html

Bll C-61 has all the hallmarks of being written by lobbyists. American lobbyists. Through the”process” of writing this bill, neither Industry Canada nor Mr. Prentice have held any public consultations or met with any Canadian industry groups that might be affected by this legislation. No public consultations at all. At the same time, meetings with American industry lobbyists have been free-flowing.  Canadian associations and industry as well as legal experts have expressly requested meetings about this, and all have been denied.  Just what the hell is that about?  Who do you work for, Jim Prentice?

Are we the 51st fucking state, already? Does our government have to kowtow to everything that the US government – and US business – wants? The only “Canadian” groups that support this – ACTRA and CRIA – are American puppets anyway.

And how is it that we keep coming back to this?  How is it that conservative governments in this country continually introduce – and ram through with some success – such unpopular pieces of legislation?  Think back to Free Trade, the GST,  Meech Lake…the list goes on…until we get to the current capstone of this rotting pile of faeces wesee labelled as copyright “reform”?

Seriously, the Liberal Sponsorship Scandal was a big deal, but when you stack that up against the towering pile of shit that has been forced upon us by our Conservative governments … the mind just boggles.

To Mr. Prentice: Any government that passes legislation that changes the status quo so starkly and revokes hard-won rights is going to be fought. I can bloody well guarantee you whose campaign I won’t be volunteering for and donating to at the next go-round. Serve your people, serve their interests, and don’t turn millions of us into instant criminals simply because we own iPods and like to take music with us.  You, sir, are – in my opinion – no better than a weasel.

Makes you wonder what ol’ Jim will be doing for a living when he’s through with politics…nice cushy job with CRIA, perhaps?  And let’s not forget his partner in crime, Heritage Minister Josée Verner, who is every bit as guilty in this.

Anyone concerned with this further erosion of rights should visit the nerve-center of opposition to this: Michael Geist.

Unfortunately, choosing the middle finger (and taking a quick screenshot) probably doesn’t convey the message they wanted.

The fact is that we – as in Human Civilisation – may never actually run out of Oil, so much as what remains will be a luxury item that only those with wealth can afford.

Not to mention that, even today, most of the countries supplying Oil to the World are – at best – politically unstable, and – at worst – not friendly to the West.

They like the colour of our money, though, don’t they?

So what do we do? Fossil Fuels are by far the best stuff we’ve got for doing all sorts of things! We can make electric cars, we can convert power plants to nuclear or solar or whatever, we can heat our homes with wood (which, strangely, is now environmentally friendly) and we can do all manner of things to replace Oil in our daily lives.

Science is even making progress on “cracking” things like Glucose and Fructose into something resembling crude Oil, so that our existing processes and plastics can be made from sugar. I don’t want to see what that does to the cost of a bag of the stuff, but with the Ethanol craze I think we’ll find out anyway.

But there are some things for which an Oil replacement is very, very far off indeed.

Like running Jet Engines. Or powering huge Battle Tanks. Can you see where I’m going?

The very last drops of Oil on Earth will be reserved by the powerful to drive their machines of War. Their planes and tanks and helicopters and Humvees and so forth, because all the alternatives just aren’t as easy to use. Fuel comes in a can…arrays of solar panels do not.

So where does that leave sick people?

Did you know that every time you heard of a drug being “Synthesised”, that means they’ve figured out how to make it from Oil? Oil contains so many complex hydrocarbon molecules that it is more than the ideal source for the long-chain molecules that can be tailored into just about anything consisting of Hydrogen, Carbon and Whatever.

Everything you can think of – everything – from Aspirin to Viagra is made from Oil-based products. It’s not that natural alternatives (or, indeed, the original chemical) aren’t available, but they aren’t available in enough quantity to be useful to us. Either that, or they don’t exist in the wild and never did or it might have been produced from something that’s now endangered or protected or extinct.

Kerosene was originally refined from Oil to replace whale oil. Whale oil had become scarce and expensive, so people figured out how to take that black gunk and turn it into something that could be burned in a lamp. Voila! An Oil industry.

I find it interesting that Gasoline – now the most widely-used Oil product – was originally a by-product of Kerosene production. Automobile engines were made to use it because there was a surplus of it and it seemed it would always be that way. Funny stuff.

What I find funny is that the USA wants to have its cake and eat it, too. They’re spending hundreds of Billions of dollars in Iraq attempting to secure their supplies and, thus goes the reasoning, their lifestyle. And while they’re at that, they’re hoping that some magic thing will pop out of someone’s rear orifice to take the place of Oil. Because they sure aren’t investing in anything. I suppose they’re trying to get back to the Moon for Helium-3, so maybe they’re not all that bad.

Yes, they have thrown some money at Hydrogen power. I’m convinced they’ve gone this way because Oil companies still want to be able to sell you something. The bastards.

I’m pretty convinced that the answer to this whole mess is nuclear power. The dirty Fission type in the near term, and the clean Fusion type in the long term.

Yes, we’ll have to store the waste, but we can find a way to do that. I’d rather dig a tunnel 4 miles down to bury the stuff with a large machine than try to dig myself a hole to live in after the collapse of civilisation as we know it. And hey, that’s what we’re talking about here.

Research has already begun into jet aircraft that can run on electricity. There might even be some small ones in the air in the next few years. They’ll be small, unmanned drones, but it’s a start.

Let’s generate absolutely fantastic amounts of power using nuclear Fission/Fusion, desalinate all the water we want and farm Sugar Cane on the damn Sahara Desert. And while we’re at it, plant the Outback in Australia, too.

Bury the nuclear waste in huge granite formations in Canada, and let’s get on with our lives.

This site is full of crazy rants and wild speculation, so I didn’t think it would be a good spot for techie stuff. I thought the name would be a good one as I date back to the JetForm era, and I stole the Daddy bit from Andrew Spaulding, aka Flex Daddy.

If you’ve got questions about JetForm, head on over and Ask JetForm Daddy.

Though that Mac 512 had a small Black&White screen, it was far superior to anything else then available…at least outside NASA. The dot-matrix ImageWriter printer with it could produce the best text I’d yet seen, and in all manner of faces, sizes and styles. What you saw on the screen was exactly what would print, and though WYSIWYG as a term has now fallen from use as it’s everywhere, at the time it was absolutely revolutionary.

But what really did it for the Macintosh was the introduction of the LaserWriter, made possible by the PostScript page description language. I really don’t think any single invention has done more for what you could do with a computer than the PostScript laser printer. Before these, you either had a dot-matrix that – while not horrid – didn’t really make nice looking text, or you had a daisy-wheel printer or something similar that worked like a typewriter.

But having a laser printer suddenly let you print all sorts of different typefaces without needing special wheels, at different sizes, pitches, leadings and anything else you might want to do with a bit of type. And suddenly you had this new thing called Desktop Publishing.

Suddenly, anyone with a Macintosh could design complete documents. Anything from books to brochures and advertising and so on. There was no other system out there that had anywhere near the same power anywhere near the cost of a Mac. And you can forget PC’s, those were still for the spreadsheet set back then. Back when an “Amber” monitor was a novelty and Print Shop was the coolest thing you could get on a PC.

What held the Mac back form big-time mass acceptance was it’s price. When you can buy 3 or 4 PC’s for the same cost as a Mac, then if all you need is WordPerfect then you can’t justify the cost. For people that really wanted (or needed) what the Mac could offer didn’t think twice about buying fleets of them, because it was what they wanted.

Consider that while I was doing slide presentations for a living in the late 80′s I could use PixelPaint and PhotoShop on my Mac, and on my PC I had Harvard Graphics and Zenographics Mirage. Harvard Graphics was the standard for making slides on a PC, and Mirage was a high-end app for doing the same thing. And they were both absolutely troglodytic when compared to even the simplest thing you could do in PixelPaint. Heck, even MacPaint could do more. Not many of you will remember PixelPaint (or PixelPaint Pro), but it was really, really good. And when PhotoShop came along it absolutely killed PixelPaint – that is how much better it was. At that time, it was absolutely impossible to do anything that even could be compared on a PC.

Have PC’s come a long way? Oh, yes, they certainly have. But they haven’t come far enough.

I’ve heard (and read) the argument that a newly purchased PC these days runs just as easily out of the box as a Mac. To a fair extent, that is true. It’s also true that PC’s are much more upgradeable than Macs – but most people never upgrade their PC’s. People that do upgrade their PC’s, or build their own (like me) tend to know just a bit more than the average bear about how these things work. And we’re also willing to put up with a bit of downtime now and then when some driver or something carks it.

And I’ll cry shenanigans on anyone that says they’ve been using PC’s for more than, oh, let’s say a year, and never had a problem. I suppose you might find someone that just reads the news in IE and nothing else, but that’s not typical. Endless strings of patches to protect us from endless strings of vulnerabilities, having to run so much anti-virus and anti-spyware software that doesn’t work anyway, bogging down your machine and adding to your headaches. Is this good? Seriously, is it *good* that I’m running an OS that is inherently insecure?

Well, let’s look at Mac OS X. It’s based on BSD Unix. Unix is inherently much safer than Windows, just because of the way it works. Noone has managed to write, not even as a project, a succesful virus for OS X. Not one! Maybe if everyone used it there might be more pressure…but don’t you think some Uni student should have whipped out a virus for OS X by now?

To be fair, there have been vulnerabilities spotted in OS X, and these could have been used to compromise machines. But – still being fair – these have been few and far-between, and usually are patched quite quickly. Certainly, they are patched as quickly as they need to be.

While millions of Windows boxen are zombie spam farms completely unbeknownst to their owners, the MacOS is spotless.

So, you’ve got all of that. And then, you’ve got how MacOS looks, and how it works. There are lots of Windows users out there that run docks (myself included) just to get a taste of the interface goodness that is the Mac. Noone that has used it for more than 5 minutes will tell you they don’t like it.

Finally, we come down to software. Well, you can get Office for Mac if you really want it. Apart from that, there are apps available for just about anything you want to do. And if you want to run Windows, you can do that too – dual boot, or in a window – and you can also minimise the window it’s running in while you’re not using it, so it doesn’t clutter your view. Want to play a game? Just boot into Windows and you’re away. And I read that people are working on that stuff, anyway.

And what about the design of the machines? Have you seen a 17″ MacBook Pro? There’s only one word for the thing, and that’s “Awesome”. Why is it that nobody else can make something like that, or invent a magnetic power plug so your lappy doesn’t do the spins when someone trips on the cord? They don’t because the PC market is focused completely on the margin, because all PC makers, with perhaps a few exceptions, operate on very tight margins.

I bought a PowerMac G4 a few years ago and got the 17″ tube monitor with it, as panels were still very pricey. I remember looking in the box – in vain – for the power cord for the monitor. I was sure that it had not been packed, and then I found out that the monitor didn’t need one…it got all the power it needed from the main system through the single monitor connection cord…even USB connections went through it! That the one cord do do everything for me was just amazing, but it also made complete sense. You can’t do that with a PC, because that’s not the standard that everyone has settled on…cords for everything.

Sure, a MacBook Pro costs more than a Dell, but can there really be any comparison? It’s like a 17″ iPod, all sleek and shiny, and the performance is nothing to sneeze at, either.

If what you want is a no-hassles computer that works as well as it looks, you should look no further than a Mac.