View from the Mountain

Empowering Technology

Technology that empowers you is more than just cool stuff.  To be really successful, technology has to be affordable, easy to use, and capable of accomplishing important tasks which were previously difficult to do.

I was working for Apple Canada and living in Halifax, Nova Scotia in January 1985 when Apple introduced the LaserWriter, the first laser printer to be widely used. Ignoring the first home computers, this was the first time I was involved with the rollout of technology that had the power to fundamentally change the way we did things.

The list price was $6,995 and more important to those of us lugging it around for demonstrations, it weighed 77 pounds. Networking, called AppleTalk, which came with it reduce the per user price to something reasonable.

I was happy that my previous career was running a cattle farm where I spent much of the winter hauling around 100 lb+ bags of feed.

It is a measure of how technology accelerates that in December 2011, just about twenty-six years later, I bought a Brother HL-2270DW laser printer for $99.98.  It only weighed 15.4 pounds.

The original Apple LaserWriter printed eight pages per minute of 300 DPI text and graphics using a 12 Mhz Motorola 68000 chip.

The Brother printer that I bought in 2011 printed at 27 pages per minute at up to 2400 X 600 DPI.  It had a 200 Mhz processor.  The Brother printer came with Ethernet and wireless connectivity.  The Apple LaserWriter only had LocalTalk, a very slow but revolutionary network for 1985.

The original LaserWriters were heavy and expensive. Few of them made it into home offices in the early days. The most recent Brother Laser 2360DW that I purchased was only $85. The printing resolution is the same bit it now prints at 32 PPM and has wireless, Ethernet and USB connectivity.

Even more important to the success than the hardware of the original LaserWriters was the software that had been developed to work with them. As is still the case today, great hardware is only as good as the software that runs on it.  Pagemaker and Illustrator allowed people to create documents that had never been created on the desktop by office workers. What was a revolution in 1985 is an often-unappreciated part of today's office life.

I still remember doing a demonstration for educators in Fredericton, New Brunswick in the fall of 1985. I was about five minutes into the demonstration of a pre-release version of Adobe Illustrator.  There were twenty or so people in the room. When I glanced around the room about half already had their mouths open.  That is what happens when disruptive technology gets in front of people who are smart enough to recognize it and see the future.

The LaserWriter and desktop publishing were not the last disruptive technology that I got to witness in my technology career which will hit four decades next year.  It has been an amazing ride. I suspect there is lots more to come.

This list of technology that has changed lives is longer my short list. Here in no particular order other than how it has stuck in my mind is my list.

1. The graphical interface as epitomized by the original Macintosh was a revolution to those of us who started out with green screens and arrow keys. It was what drew me to Apple. It was revolutionary and we are still seeing its continued impact.
2. One piece of software that has had as much or more impact than a lot of fancy software that has disappeared is the spreadsheet. Lotus 123, Microsoft Mulitplan, and eventually Excel changed the way that we look at numbers. We felt like the Macintosh was a real computer when Microsoft released Multiplan for the 128K Mac. It ran on 3.5-inch floppy disks.
3. The ever-increasing size and speed of computer storage is also a revolution but it happened over time. The first 5 meg Profiles that I carried around were worth $3,500 US. I recently paid $87.99 for a SanDisk 500GB Extreme Portable SSD. 
4. The writable CD-ROM and even the DVD had huge but transitory impacts on us all.  Everything is in the cloud now.
5. Wi-Fi was a gamble at first and sometimes a pain to get working. Apple's first Airport Wi-Fi was not cheap in 1999. Wi-Fi is everywhere now, plus it is inexpensive and easy to use.
6. Even more important than WiFi is the Internet. As company, Apple, got on the Internet seriously around 1993.  The Internet is a huge part of our lives today. Just as important as the physical connection is what we can do on the Internet which has gone well beyond exchanging messages. The original iMac set a standard for making it easy to get on the Internet.
7. Digital cameras were another technology that changed lives. We used our first digital cameras, the Apple Quicktake, on a digital scavenger hunt at the Mountain Lake Lodge in Virginia around 1993.  Little did we know how big digital photography would become.  With digital photographs came iPhoto, editing photos and storing them on the web.  Even now Google photos are part of my life every day.

I could also add fiber to the home, FTTH, but I do that for a living and today far too few people are enable to take advantage of it like I do.

It would be easy to add Smartphones.  However, in a way, they are a bunch of revolutionary technologies crammed into a small form factor. I like the individual technologies better than Smartphones. Perhaps one of my favorite examples of revolutionary technologies crammed into something small, light, and inexpensive is the Chromebook.  

The summer of 2021 with tax I paid $416.33 for an ASUS Chromebook Flip C433 2 in 1 Laptop, 14" Touchscreen FHD NanoEdge Display, Intel Core m3-8100Y Processor, 8GB RAM, 64GB eMMC Storage, Backlit Keyboard, Silver. It has a built-in camera and WiFi.  It wakes instantly (faster than my MacBook Pro) and the battery never lets me down.

I once sold an Apple IIe with a 5 meg Corvus hard drive for over $19,000. That included a dot matrix printer and a daisywheel printer.  It was before the day of LaserWriter.  My $416 Chromebook easily prints to either my color HP Laser Printer, my color Epson Ink Jet or my monochrome Brother LaserWriter.  All of the printers plus the Chromebook computer did not cost $1,000.  That is empowering, transforming technology.

 

 

 

Snapshots of Our Lives

Pine Forest Along Raymond's Gut

I took a course in college my senior year. It was decades ago. The class focused on communications. Computers were not on the desktop, cameras were film based, and telephones were analog with rotary dials. There was no Internet much less text messaging or cell phones. People still wrote letters on paper by hand. The other choice was a typewriter.  It was not unusual to find people who did not know how to touch type.

The communications course was an unusual one for Harvard because it allowed lots of room for creativity. I decided to show people slides and see how much information they could gather without any verbal or written information. One of my roommates and I had just returned from a road trip to Alaska. The report for the course was not as easy to write as I hoped.

What was easy to predict was that someone who had visited a place or one similar to a photo gathered a lot more information from a photo than someone who had never been there. What surprised me is that my roommate and I had stored very different information about the same pictures. However, in general it is easy and not too surprising to say that people who have walked on beaches can draw more information from a beach picture than someone who has been landlocked all their life.

Hundreds of thousands of pictures later, I am still trying to take pictures which “capture the moment.” It is not an easy task. The lighting, the composition, the distance from the subject and the subject itself all have to be right to capture an image that stands on its own without commentary. A few years ago, I even went to the trouble of publishing a Kindle Book, 100 Pictures, 1000 Words, A Crystal Coast Year. The pictures that went into the book triggered memories for me. My wife, who helped edit the book, and I disagreed on some of the pictures which were chosen from over 100,000 images but usually I let myself win because I am the person with the closest connection to the pictures.

Even sixty years after a picture is taken, a picture has to be really good or have some written context to not be thrown away. Many good pictures today disappear today because they are only stored on a cell phone. They have no name, there is no back to write on, and the phone gets old and is thrown away. The lucky photos get put somewhere with a little more persistence than a cell phone that is going to be dead in three or four years.

Every time I go looking for a photo and find it in one of my many albums, I am thankful that I took the time to put it in an album. When I search by name and one of the photos that I have labeled comes up and turns out to be the right one, I am encouraged to keep labeling digital photos.

The closest that we can come to time travel is a photo that takes us back in time. As long as our memories remain strong, the narrative is not so important but at some point unless our narrative has been adopted by the next generation, the memories disappear and the photos can become meaningless especially as our landscapes are increasingly transformed by development.

A Safe Warm Spot for a Challenging Fall

Ed, a good friend of mine who died a few years ago, used to say that if you were willing to look a little, most of the time you could find a place on the water in Carteret County where the wind wasn’t blowing. Ed grew up here and knew the area’s waters better than anyone I have ever known.

We have spent fourteen years here along Raymond’s Gut just off the White Oak River north of Swansboro. I managed to learn enough about the White Oak River from my kayaking and boating to know Ed was right. Many times, I fished a cove just off the river when the main River had whitecaps on it. Then there were times you could be in the middle of the river with hardly a ripple. Sometimes it is blowing on the river but quiet on the backside of Bear Island.

It turns out Ed’s wisdom also applies to our house. If you look a little, you can almost always find a cozy spot out of the wind. It is one of the reasons we love our home. The side of our house with the most windows faces the South. That and the protection provided by pines just across the water from us makes our home a delightful place as the air turns cooler in the fall. It also creates a great microclimate for gardening. Living on Raymond's  Gut just off the White Oak River turned out to be a lucky decision for us.

On October 18, 2020, we awoke to a temperature of forty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. That is a very cool fall morning here on the coast. I actually wore a long-sleeved tee shirt when I went to retrieve the Sunday paper. It is only the second or third time that I have done that since early spring. However, I will have to change out the shirt by noon. I still have not given up my shorts and Crocs which often remain my uniform until well into November and sometimes even December.

When I headed up to my office, I stopped by our little porch which is off of our great room. I wanted to snap a picture of the view which turns out to be the picture that I chose for the post. As I walked onto the porch, I embraced by the warmth of the sun. The temperature on the porch was likely twenty-five degrees warmer than it was on the ground level out in the breeze. I was very tempted just to sit down and soak up the warmth and enjoy the wild world that is so much a part of our home. The number of Great Egret and Great Blue Heron pictures that I have taken from the little porch would stun most people.  I took this Great Egret picture and this Great Blue Heron picture the previous Friday just before I walked inside and took this shot of a Kingfisher.

Soaking up warmth is not something we do a lot of here in the summer when the heat has found us. Fortunately, Carteret County has a lot of water and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean, because of all the water, it takes longer for summer’s heat to reach us than it does many of North Carolina’s interior counties. In early summer it is not uncommon to find areas twenty miles inland recording temperatures ten to twenty degrees warmer than us.

We do go through ten to twelve weeks of really warm weather, but most people just use that as an excuse to either jump in the surf or be out on the water in a boat or kayak. We are lucky to have a house where there is almost always a continuous breeze in the summer. When fall comes all the warm water tempers the incoming rush of cool air. Many years we have even picked tomatoes in December and once we even harvested them in January. All that warm water makes a huge difference in the cold months.

With the Covid crisis that we all face, I feel extremely blessed to live in an area where there is room to safely walk and enjoy the natural surroundings that have so enriched our lives over the years.

While we might not have gotten our green beans planted early enough this year, we still have the hope of some November or December tomatoes. While the headlines in the newspapers cause a lot of stress, where I live and the house I live in generally help to counter that stress by letting me soak up some warmth or some of nature’s beauty.

Two of the linked drone pictures, the little porch and the wild area behind the house, were taken by Justin Whitt of Light House Visuals as he was taking pictures for the listing of our home. I highly recommend Justin but you can judge for yourself by looking at our listing.

Lumix Cameras That Capture My Life

Taking pictures is a big part of my life. I have been doing it for as long as I can remember. There is a picture of me as a college student over fifty years ago with a Nikon F1 camera in my hand.

I have written several camera articles starting back in 2006 when I wrote about a Sony Pocket camera. The death of that Sony camera gave me my first experience with Panasonic cameras when I bought a Panasonic Lumix DMC ZS-1 as a replacement. Ten years later that camera is still working.

I have also used and written about Nikon and Canon's point and shoot super zoom cameras. I bought my Nikon P500 in 2012 and moved to a quicker focusing Canon SX50 in 2013. The Canon was a great camera but had to go in for repair regularly.

In 2017 I got a Panasonic Lumix Z1000 as a large sensor replacement for my aging Nikon DSLR D3100. In 2018 after three refurbished replacements to the Canon now an SX60 followed by another hardware failure, I moved to a Panasonic Lumix FZ80 for my everyday bird and beach camera. I have been a happy user for over a year. Along the way in 2016, I added a Lumix LX100 which I sometimes use as a pocket camera. Most often it gets used for inside shots especially of people. These are not particularly expensive cameras. You could buy all three of them for what it costs to buy one of Nikon's new 70-200mm zoom lens.  The FZ80 is available on Amazon for under $300.

People regularly ask me which camera is my favorite? I often reply that my favorite camera is the one I have in my hand and sometimes that means my Google Pixel 2XL smartphone.

It is no surprise that cameras have a hard time surviving my environment. I take close to 100,000 pictures for some years. The cameras get exposed to a lot of sand, salt, and weather. I regularly wear out SD cards. I am happy to report that my two newest Lumix cameras have very reliable WiFi transfer modes.

More important than the cameras that I use is what I do with the photographs after I take them. On a typical morning, I will go for a walk and take anything from a dozen to fifty photos. When I return home, I will often do a WiFi transfer to my phone of four to ten pictures. Those pictures once they get to my phone, are automatically backed up to Google photos. I often use the online Google photo editing tools to resize and correct a few photos which I will post on Facebook.

When I go upstairs to my office, I will download all photos using Lightroom. From all of the photos I have downloaded for the day, I will pick the best ones, crop, and correct them in Lightroom. They are exported to a folder that is named with the day's date. That folder is on Microsoft's cloud service, One Drive. Sometimes, I will add to that folder from the ones I have stored on Google photos. Microsoft has very good tools that quickly allow you to resize photos that I download from Google. Once a month or so I will upload my favorite photos from the month to Flickr. I also create Google Photo albums when it makes sense.

I still believe that in most cases, you will get a better photo with a real camera especially if you are after birds. However, I have taken some remarkable photos with my Google Pixel 2XL but they would have a hard time competing with an image from the  Lumix Z1000 with its 21.1 Megapixels and 1 Inch High Sensitivity Sensor.

However, the best way to take good photos is to take lots of them and learn how to work with them. Photos straight out of the camera rarely match the image that you were trying to capture. At least learn how to change the white balance on your camera. Just setting the white balance on your camera to minus 2.5 will allow you to take a picture of a bright moon in the night sky. Having a good camera with image stabilization will allow for some great bird pictures. Most of all storing your photos in the cloud will let you easily enjoy your memories.

I was (07-03-20) a member of the Amazon affiliates program but I am no longer. You can click on one of my camera links to buy the cameras from Amazon where I purchased mine. No commissions will come to me.

I was (07-03-20) a member of the Amazon affiliates program but I am no longer. You can click on one of my camera links to buy the cameras from Amazon where I purchased mine. No commissions will come to me.

I was (07-03-20) a member of the Amazon affiliates program but I am no longer. You can click on one of my camera links to buy the cameras from Amazon where I purchased mine. No commissions will come to me.