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Main Area and Open Discussion / Living Room / Re: Raspberry Pi's $35 Linux PC
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on: April 14, 2013, 12:10:24 PM
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Since Logitech had decided to kill the Squeezebox some months ago, here's another great use for the Raspberry Pi. Fire up Squeezelite, and you have a perfectly functional Squeezebox "clone". If you actually don't want any compromise regarding the sound quality, add a cheap USB sound card with a digital out (or an HDMI audio splitter), and the stream is ready to go in a pricey DAC and to the rest of the sound system. [attachthumb=1] |
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Main Area and Open Discussion / Living Room / Re: Raspberry Pi's $35 Linux PC
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on: April 05, 2013, 08:01:11 AM
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Got 4 in the mail just yesterday (just about 2 week of wait time from RS Components UK), for me and some friends.   Lots of fun with the little machine. I plan to use one in place of a '06 iMac that's now used only to run some old DOS apps (!). DosBOX seems to run fast enough on the Raspberry Pi. |
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Main Area and Open Discussion / General Software Discussion / Re: upgrade to SSD
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on: April 05, 2013, 07:45:31 AM
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When I migrated from HD to SDD from my main machine, I used the Parted Magic live distro, from a USB pen drive. It have everything that was needed: GParted for partitioning, CloneZilla to copy (whole disk, single partition, etc.), lots of other tools. Also, shell and browser to keep doing some (more or less) useful things while copying.  |
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Main Area and Open Discussion / Living Room / Re: Show us a picture of your.. CAR!!!
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on: February 25, 2013, 09:08:41 PM
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Honda Insight.
[attachthumb=1]
Whoops! Missed the story part...
Anyway, I had a Toyota Paseo (Cynos in some market, I believe) from 1997 that probably would still be going, but it was totaled when someone missed a STOP and crashed on my left side. So, since I had been interested in the combination of engine + motor of the hybrids for some months, and there was some interesting incentives at the time, I got the Insight.
I am very pleased with it; it's not a sporty car, but the CVT make for a very fluid drive, and the combination of the optimal rpm at any speed and the torque boost from the electric motor make it very effective in the windy mountain roads, for example.
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Main Area and Open Discussion / Living Room / Re: Mid-range DSLR Camera Recommendations
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on: February 03, 2013, 08:17:51 AM
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I too am partial to the "new" mirrorless, specifically M43. I find it's a great compromise between size, weight, speed and image quality. It's also the more mature of the mirrorless standards, and that mean a great selection of quality lens, plus the ability to reuse old lens from just about any manifacturers with cheap adapters. I like some NEX a lot, and especially the focus peaking feature, but having a large APS-C sensor also mean large lens. So that usually endup with a very small body + a large lens. A tool you may find useful to compare different photocams, is Camera Size. For example: Nikon D3200 vs Olympus E-PL5If you compare body + lens at equivalent focal lenghts, a M43 is easily half the size & weight. That's not a small difference. In practice it mean you'll have the small camera with you a lot more times. |
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Main Area and Open Discussion / Living Room / Re: Need a New Mouse
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on: January 06, 2013, 05:42:20 PM
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I'm using a Microsoft Arc Touch mouse by sometimes. It's more of a laptop mouse, but it come in times of need (when the left button of Logitech MX started acting funny) and as a gift.
I actually like it. The sensor bar instead of the scroll wheel especially: it's just amazing how it feels like a real wheel (the noise, the click feedback to the finger, etc.), with none of the cons. IMHO there's no turning back to a physical scroller after this.
Like of the 2 AAA batteries is good; about 1/2 week, using it a lot (but I'm not a gamer).
The thing that I hate a bit is the glossy surface of the front part of the mouse, buttons included, that obviously tend to attract grease & dirt very quickly.
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Main Area and Open Discussion / General Software Discussion / Auto-Threading compiler from Microsoft Research
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on: December 03, 2012, 07:24:42 PM
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This seems quite an interesting development: Develop in the Cloud - Auto-Threading Compilers Are HereRecently, Jared Parsons pointed me toward some research (PDF) conducted by Microsoft Research, and accepted for publication at OOPSLA. (Parsons is a co-author.) The team writing the paper also implemented the concepts as an extension to the C# compiler.
The key difference between FP and Microsoft's approach is that where FP tries to eliminate mutability, the Microsoft team only tries to track it. One core concept, referred to as reference immutability, in part allows the compiler to track mutability and make decisions about what code can be parallelized and what cannot. The result is a C#-like language that can be written normally (single-threaded), which the compiler auto-threads where it deems it beneficial. This is extremely interesting. It's a game changer. It's also real.
Parsons told me in an email:
In some ways I see FP as kind of an extreme answer to the problem of multi-threading. People find that unexpected state mutations are causing race conditions and they decide the best idea is to eliminate mutable state altogether. I think the the key is making the state mutations visible and controllable.
The team claims it's written millions of lines of code, creating a web server, an MPEG decoder, and many other applications. This, in Microsoft's usual style, demonstrates that the language is capable of real production use (or abuse). Unfortunately, Microsoft does not have a release date set at this time. |
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