Inkjet Printers: Revolutionizing Manufacturing?

Inkjet printers are getting extremely good now, with even a $300 - $400 printer able to spit out fantastic looking prints at remarkable resolutions (from a DPI) perspective. So much research is being put into both the quality of the inks and the inkjet heads that extremely precise dots can now be placed onto a piece of paper, making for very photorealistic prints.

In addition to making high quality prints, some photographers who are still interested in older film-based post-processing have taken advantage of the high quality and ease of use of inkjet printers to print out negatives on transparencies that can then be used in enlargers to create prints on traditional photographic papers.

Now it looks like that's just the tip of the iceberg. A woman has created her own photovoltaic cell by printing nail polish remover onto a transparency covered in nail polished. This essentially etched signal paths onto the transparency, onto which she then laid metal using an oven, creating an electrical signal path.

I'm not much of an electrical engineer, but it sounds like the foundation for printing your own circuit boards is right there, doesn't it? Imagine being able to take simple electronic schematics, dump them into your computer, then print a board out using your inkjet printer plus some sort of heating device (oven, heater, etc.). You could begin to manufacture your own electronics components! That would explode the capabilities of your average hobbyist, and could even change the way certain types of electronics are manufactured! The possibilities are pretty exciting!

HD-DVD mp3 players: The iPod Killer?

I was thinking recently that I might want to share my mp3 collection with some of my friends. Not just parts of my collection, but rather the ENTIRE collection. Right now that's only about 26Gb, but then again I've probably only ripped about a quarter of my CD's (not that every single CD is worth ripping, but still there's a significant number of CD's that I still haven't added to my collection).

The problem with trying to share 26Gb of mp3's (or anything, really) is that there's really nothing big enough to hold that except for a hard drive. CD's can only hold 650mb, and dual-layer DVD's max out at 9Gb. So I could put everything onto an external hard drive and just give it to people, but I don't exactly have an external hard drive just lying around that I could lend out, and it's way too easy for someone to break the hard drive. Or even just delete all the data on it accidentally. Hard drives are good for your personal data, but not really good for sharing with others.

Then I realized that both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray offer discs that will fit more than what I currently need. These two discs are competing formats to replace DVD's and offer higher video/audio quality. They can do this because they offer dramatically greater storage capacity than a DVD. Although both will probably initially launch as single-layer discs, thus topping out at 15Gb for HD-DVD and 25Gb for Blu-Ray, each technology will eventually offer storage space at 45Gb for HD-DVD (triple layer) and 50Gb for Blu-Ray (dual layer). This means that once those formats become prevalent, I should be able to burn my entire mp3 collection onto a disc and share it with others. That should be pretty convenient!

Then I realized that if I can fit my entire mp3 collection onto a single disc, then if a "discman" type of device came out that could read that disc and play mp3's off of it, then I could listen to my entire collection pretty easily, and would I really need an iPod at all?

Think about it - currently a 60Gb iPod costs $400. If someone offered a discman that could read HD-DVD discs with mp3's on it, how much would that discman cost? I can you right now that portable CD players are selling for something along the lines of $30, and mp3 CD players are only a little bit more expensive. Imagine if somebody sold a discman that could play HD-DVD discs for around $150. You could theoretically get 45Gb right there for only $150 + the cost of the disc. And you could buy another disc and get another 45Gb for only the cost of the disc, and so on and so on! If that discman could also play videos, you could put your entire DVD collection onto a few HD-DVD discs and watch all your movies whereever you wanted to.

Of course, there are a few problems. The biggest problem is that first everyone needs to get all the hardware. Computer manufacturers need to ship HD-DVD and Blu-Ray burners. Disc manufacturers need to release blank discs at low prices. And someone needs to make this discman. The second problem is battery life. Current discman devices tend to drain a lot of battery power because of the spinning of the disc and the laser. Add a color LCD display for video and that drains things even faster. Making a discman have comparable battery life to an iPod would probably be a big challenge. The final problem would be bulkiness. A discman is a lot bigger than an iPod, so a lot of people might be turned off by one.

Manufacturers could probably conquer all of those problems though. Eventually the hardware will come out. Advances in battery technology are happening pretty quickly, so getting good battery life should eventually be possible. And if something cost half the price of an iPod, I think a lot of people wouldn't mind the bulk so much.

This discman wouldn't replace mp3 players like the Nano, because for people who exercise strenuously or who really value a small sized device, the discman simply can't compete. And there will always be those who prefer the small size and sleek looks of an iPod. But for those who simply want a lot of music in a portable device at a much cheaper price than an iPod, I think the re-invented Discman would be a good choice.

No filesystem sharing across Unix/Windows ...

The advent of large drives plus USB has resulted in an interesting capability for those of us who have multiple computers all running different operating systems. If we format these large drives with a filesystem that all the OSes can read/write to, we can take these large drives, wrap them in a USB enclosure, and use them across all these different computers. This is great for things like using one computer to scan in or upload photos from a camera, then taking that drive and editing them on a different computer running a different operating system. For example, support for scanners, cameras, and other hardware is usually better on Windows systems, but perhaps image editing tools are preferred on Macintosh systems. Having one large detachable drive enables images to be uploaded to one big drive, then all edits can happen on the same drive, even though multiple computers are involved in the process. This is a big time-saver.

Except that it doesn't work on drives larger than 120GB. Unfortunately, the only filesystem that is both readable and writeable by Windows, Macintosh, and Linux/BSD/Un*x systems is good old FAT32. And FAT32 cannot be used with partitions greater than 120GB. Even five years ago this was probably considered more than enough space ... unfortunately, nowadays, anyone who has a 7megapixel camera and who shoots in RAW will quickly find out that 120GB holds only a few months' to a year's worth of pictures (depending on how frequently pictures are taken). Same goes for anyone who wants to share MP3's across multiple computers ... say, ripping them on OS that is less susceptible to copy-protection viruses, then using them on a computer at work.

All other options unfortunately do not work across Windows, Macintoshes, and Un*xes. NTFS is the preferred filesystem to use on Windows for very large drives, but no other operating system besides Windows can write to it in a useful manner (BSD and Linux machines can overwrite existing files ... IF the files stay the same size!). Windows can't read any of the other filesystems.

So the only choice left is to either split up a large drive into multiple smaller partitions, each formatted as FAT32 partitions, and manage file storage across those partitions. Or dedicate one machine to being a file server, and have all machine connect to that machine via the network. But that requires a lot more work to setup. I expect more products like this one, the SimpleTech network-attache storage drive to show up and try to address this issue. Unfortunately, even if file servers become easier to setup, they're still not as portable as using a USB drive, and wouldn't make it any easier to share multimedia files between work and home, for example.

And one last note about using FAT filesystems on non-Windows systems: Microsoft won their patent on FAT, so technically now any non-Microsoft OS must license FAT from Microsoft if they want to be able to read/write FAT-formatted drives. This affects not only USB hard drives, but also any type of removeable media, such as Secure Digital and Compact Flash. Fun fun.

New Laptop!

I got myself a new laptop for Christmas, with some help from my lovely girlfriend. It's a Compaq Presario V2424NR - AMD Turion64, 512mb, 100gb, 14" WXGA screen. Best Buy had a $200 rebate on it, so the total cost will be around $900 (plus tax). Quite a good deal.

But the primary reason I chose this laptop over any others was because I like the feel of the keyboard. For whatever reason, when computer geeks evaluate computers, they rarely talk about ergonomics. Honestly, computers have gotten to the point where they are commodity items. Gone are the days when it really made sense to build your own computer and cherry pick all the best and fastest parts. Nowadays, for a desktop computer the quietness of the CPU fan and the location of the USB ports is more important for most people than the speed of the CPU or video card. And for a laptop, since you can't easily swap out most of the parts, the quality of the keyboard, touchpad (or stick, if you are lucky enough to have that option), and screen are going to be paramount. So while I feel like I got a fast CPU with lots of features, more importantly I feel like I got a laptop that I would be able to type on day in and day out and live with comfortably whether I'm sitting at a desk, on a couch, or in bed.

Personally, I like keyboards that require a bit of pressure to register the keystroke. That's because my fingers are a little bit imprecise, and so I frequently touch other keys adjacent to the key I really meant to press. Most laptops (and desktop keyboards) try to be quiet and allow "touch-typing", and that bugs me because I end up hitting too many keys I didn't mean to. Also, I like the tactile sensation of knowing exactly when a key stroke has been registered. It lets me know that I've typed the key I wanted to type, and I can move on to the next key. Yes, very silly I know. BTW, I like Nokia phones partly for this same reason.

Oh yeah, I added another gig to the laptop today (courtesy of newegg). I've been scanning a lot of film using a film scanner at 4000dpi, and it chews up tons of memory. I remember the days when 16mb of RAM was a total luxury. Now, thanks to multimedia files, bloated graphics libraries, and Java, we need gigs of RAM just to have a smooth-running system. Gotta love it!