Archive for November, 2006
The hand-wringing is over. I’ve taken the plunge and spent what is still a ridiculously large amount of money on a discretionary item by getting a Nikon D80 digital SLR. Despite the fact that some of my favourite amateur photographers use a Canon EOS camera, I decided to go for the Nikon based on personal recommendations and the fact that I’m a sucker for the rich browns it seems capable of capturing. Good times ahead, although I fear this purchase may be a gateway drug to also finally spending money on a Flickr pro account.
I don’t think I’ll ever leave film behind though. Despite my lousy conversion rate of about five decent photos for every roll shot, there’s something about film that digital will never match. Not only in the texture of the image produced, but in the anticipation of development, the joy of the happy accident (a common occurrence in my light-leaky old Canon AE-1), and the sense of wonder at the precise mechanical ingenuity that went into the manufacturing of my beautiful, heavy old camera, long before I was even born.
Anyway, despite the fact that the clocks went back last weekend and all our lovely summer light is gone, there should be more photos around here soon.
I’m excited by this; the Linutop will be a small desktop computer with just enough specs to run Firefox and some open source office apps comfortably, and no hard disk.
Details are pretty sketchy on their website, but I assume that it will run a simplified version of an existing Linux distro that just boots into Firefox. Price is also undisclosed, but my guess is that this will come in somewhere around $150. The cheapest Mac Mini costs four times more than that. We’ll see.
Of course, people aren’t going to want to go without a hard disk, but if you’re the type of person who uses their computer for email and doing The Google, it looks good to me. If anything, it’s probably a little ahead of the broadband and web apps curves. We should get some of these into Irish schools.
I’m more interested in this from an environmental point of view, though. If you’re reading this on a desktop computer, chances are the beast humming away under your desk right now is gobbling up an order of magnitude of electricity more than it actually needs to support your actual activities. There is a massively long tail of home users that are spending way too much money and energy on their computers, and the long tail of power can add up to big numbers.
(For more, there’s a poor quality 30 minute introduction to the Linutop on Google Video. I wrote more speculatively about the environmental impact of thin client systems earlier in the year.)
I went to Vienna for the long weekend with Paula and Margarida. We flew into Bratislava (how very Ryanair to drop you in the next country and expect you to bus it from there). The journey through Slovakia was very odd; dull concrete communist hangover highrises on one side, tall forests on the other. Reprocessing plants and billboards on the horizon. Then onto a wide raised motorway, curving right over miles of corn fields before arriving at the border checkpoint, right in the middle of a massive wind farm. A couple of miles into Austria and the landscape couldn’t be more different; winding roads through small hamlet towns lined by squat homes. Apparrently the marked difference was planned by the Austrians to encourage commuting city workers to live on their more expensive side of the border.