UptownMaker

Okay, hardcore nerdery here.  Sorry to the non-believers in the audience, but... 5.  SMT technology for hobbyists. Some will argue the point, looking back with nostalgia at the days when every IC was available in through-hole and sockets abounded, but I for one welcome our minuscule highly integrated overlords. Ten years ago, when I bought my first parts from Digi-key, it was inconceivable to me that SMT parts could be usable on an at-home basis.  Now, the proliferation of adapters (such as Capital Advanced Technologies' excellent "Surfboard" series ), cheap hot-air and fine-point rework stations , excellent reflow tutorials , and extremely low-cost low quantity PCB fabrication services (like BatchPCB and the DorkbotPDX group buy ), it's now completely and totally reasonable for a hobbyist to use SMT parts to realize extremely advanced designs in surprisingly small amounts of space. All that's really needed is the right attitude.

I missed yesterday (inauspicious, missing a goal two days in) but I'll make up by doing two today: 3.  CPU cycles are so cheap as to be practically free While excessive wasting of CPU cycles still bugs me (do I REALLY need something checking to see if updates for Acrobat/Flash/iTunes are available 24/7?), I LOVE the fact that CPU cycles are so cheap that we can waste them on GOOD stuff- operating system eye candy, virtual machines that let me write extremely simple code to do REALLY complex stuff that is highly portable (*cough* PYTHON *coughcough*), and data compression that lets high bandwidth analog come through even fairly narrow (by modern standards) pipes with great quality. 4.  Text messaging I LOVE text messaging.  Not the "omg lol i cant bleve u sed that" kind (as a grammar snob that stuff annoys me, although from a technical standpoint, it shouldn't), but the simple fact that it is (arguably) as information dense a means of communication as I can ima...

2:  I <3 nearly-free data storage ! The first hard drive I remember owning was 40MB on the Mac LC my parents got when I was in 6th grade. Four years later we upgraded to a Performa with a 500MB drive. Two years after that, we hit 1.2GB.  Surely that will never fill up, I thought to myself.  Of course, then I got to college right in the midst of the MP3 boom... Now I have two 250GB drives in my PC, and I can add another two terabytes (an unimaginable 50,000 times larger than my first drive) for less than $100. Relative to that first drive, that's too cheap to even calculate.

Public exercise: I am going to attempt to provide an example of why living in the future is awesome every day for one year.  I'll never come up with 365 totally unique reasons, but maybe, JUST MAYBE, it'll help me remember that my life in the future is not as bad as I sometimes think it is and maybe I should be more grateful. And no, this is not going to be a "neat stuff you probably already saw" series of posts- if I provide a link to an item, it's because I want to provide an example of what I'm talking about. Day 1:  Cultural remixes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgzmZtwxYiE I really can't say I like R. Kelly, but I love this video, and I love living in an era where that level of remix is possible.

More data...and a pretty graph! Okay, not pretty. The three lines represent weekly tallies for total number of songs played, total unique artist names, and total unique tracks. Fun things this shows up: 1. Beginning in late 2007, the total number of songs per week trends up. I suspect that this represents a reduction in the amount of named programming in favor of either listing the tracks played during such programs or generally choosing to play songs instead of programs. 2. Dips in number of tracks at pledge drive time. Every six months or so (late May/early June and late October) there's a clear downward dip in the total number played, to the tune of about 15-20% or so. Hardly surprising, and they have to pay the bills. I still can't help but wondering if there's some kind of Laffer curve in pledge drives, where talking more decreases revenue because it alienates listeners, but talking less decreases revenue because you create less guilt. 3. The weekly diversity o...

Arguably, one of the better things about Minnesota is Minnesota Public Radio. MPR is a giant on the national public radio scene (producing shows like "The Splendid Table", "A Prairie Home Companion", and "Marketplace", although "Marketplace" is recorded out in CA). One of their interesting recent endeavors has been a pop music format station, "The Current". It's at 89.3 in the metro Twin Cities region, and it is (for better or worse)(and let's not argue the point) pretty much the only radio station I listen to. I've noticed over the last couple of years (I've been listening since January of 2006; they came online in January of 2005) that the diversity of music seems to be declining somewhat. Not in the sense that they play more mainstream stuff, but in the sense that they are playing fewer songs more often. So, I decided I'd do a little data wrangling. See, one of the outstanding features of the Current is their ...