September 2013
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The venerable iPod classic lives on...
Photo credit iLounge
Every year around this time my colleagues and I at iLounge discuss whether this will be the year that Apple discontinues the iPod classic. Although the old hard-drive based model continues to be the only truly high-capacity device in Apple’s lineup, it also ends up looking more and more like a dinosaur next to every other new model.
The iPod classic saw its last update in 2009 — now four years ago — and even that was a relatively minor update, little more than a capacity bump over the 120GB 2008 model, and no real physical design changes from the original 2007 classic.
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A cool slice of Raspberry Pi
It may not look like much, but this little gizmo is actually now powering my entire home phone system, courtesy of Freeswitch and VoiP.ms.
The device in question is a Raspberry Pi — a small, $35 ARM-based GNU/Linux box, essentially a credit-card sized computer. I ordered one last week, partly with the interest in turning it into a phone server, but mostly just to play around with. The unit itself is about as basic as it comes — 512MB of RAM, an SD card slot, two USB ports, composite video + HDMI output, and a single Ethernet jack — but it's actually more capable than one would expect for $35. No internal storage is provided — you basically supply your own SD card — and it's powered over a micro-USB connection using a 5V adapter. By the time the dust settled, the whole package ran me about $75, including shipping, for which I received the unit itself, a case, power adapter, and small micro-USB cable (I probably could have supplied my own power adapter, but the voltage requirements are very precise, so for the extra $10 I opted to go for the one sold with the unit, just to be safe).