Tech

Having shipped over a 120,000 boards since their inception in Italy in 2005, Arduino microprocessors are becoming increasingly popular beyond the usual circle of tech heads and dedicated do-it-yourselfers. To help me find out why this may be I talked to Darren Tighe, who is currently working on his own Arduino projects.

The first significant aspect of the Arduino is its accessibility. Darren explains, “ Well it’s a microprocessor and traditionally they come in a little package with a couple of pins on them. To program them, play around with them and learn how to use them you would have to plug it into a programmer... and then unplug it and put it on to whatever project you were working with.
Whereas the arduino uses an Atmel chip which is a fairly common micro-controller but it’s set up for proto-typing. So it gives you a USB port so you can just program directly from the PC and it has lots of in and out ports for the electronics to be attached."

I switched (drank the Kool-Aid) from Windows to Mac at the turn of the century and haven’t looked back. However, I am not a fanboy. All I want to do is just get on with things. With the proliferation of iPhones and iPads, more and more people are moving over to the Apple way of doing things. I have been asked a number of times in the last few months by folks making the leap across the operating system divide as to what I would recommend as essential applications to have.

This is the list I usually come up with:

• Flip4Mac: Sorts out audio incompatibilities with Microsoft audio .wmv files. The free version is all you need unless of course you do want to do all those other things. See how it goes first. [Link]
• Perian: Sorts out other unusual audio and video formats. Of course, it would be quite legitimate to ask, “why doesn’t the Apple OS come with all these compatibility issues resolved?” My answer is I don’t know and I haven’t found the answer yet. [Link]
• Growl and Growlmail: Notifies you of incoming e-mails etc., so you don't have to keep checking back to the original application. [Link]
  

I am writing this as a convert. Just a few days ago if anyone has asked me what I thought of 3DTV I would have grimaced a little, murmured a few niceties and ended my answer with a sentence containing the words "marketing gimmick." They can only make televisions so much bigger and so much flatter, and an old boxy TV with a cathode ray tube is now a rare sight in places both public and private. So 3DTV technology must have been a godsend to the manufacturing executives. Another fad to generate more cash. Blu-ray never became a must-buy. Just something you thought about upgrading to when your DVD player needed replacing. It was only better, not different and better.