Robert Hampton

The tech world is abuzz today – Raspberry Pi is back with a new, sexier upgrade:-

A new more powerful Raspberry Pi 2 that is six times faster than the original from 2012, has been launched by the Cambridge-based startup costing £23.30.

Good luck getting one. They’ve been selling fast, and servers at some of the online retailers are buckling under the demand.

The Pi, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is a £25 computer. Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, but easily capable of running a variety of software. The Pi is leading the charge to get people (especially kids) interested in programming. Find a spare USB keyboard and mouse, then plug the Pi straight into the TV, just like the ZX Spectrums of old (although the Pi’s HDMI output is at a slightly higher-resolution). The idea is to have a cheap computer that can be tinkered with at will, without worries about breaking it. If something goes disastrously wrong, simply reformat the SD card and start again.

Although the target audience is kids, plenty of older geeks (ahem) have bought a Pi for their own pet projects. Pi has been used to run a home security system, create a retro game console, and even to create a DIY Ceefax service.

I got an original Model B a couple of years ago. Everyone else put a flavour of Linux on it, but I went and whacked RISC OS on mine. That’s the OS I grew up with – first on an Acorn A3010, then a RiscPC which lasted nearly eight years (towards the end of its life it was held together by bits of superglue and gaffer tape). Apart from the odd game of Fervour, I was the archetypal teenage bedroom coder, churning out semi-functional BBC BASIC files week-in, week-out. My proudest moment was getting one of my apps onto the Acorn User cover disc.

I haven’t had much time recently to play with the Pi, but I’ve tried to set aside an hour or two each week to sit and do some coding. After the stress of dealing with our barely functional LAN at work, and the slog of studying three (3!) Open University computing modules, it’s nice to have a reminder that computers can be fun.

The first Acorn computer I ever owned (and the third computer overall, after a Commodore VIC-20 and C64) was an A3010. It was bought for me in May 1993, purchased from Rapid Computers on Childwall Fiveways. It was a reward from my parents to celebrate my passing the entrance exam for Merchant Taylors School; had I known how that was going to turn out, I would probably have stuck with my Commodore 64 for another year or so.

The A3010 was the “budget” Acorn computer, an attempt by Acorn to escape from the classrooms and science labs where their computers were usually found and get into teenagers’ bedrooms with a games machine. There was no monitor supplied, but you could plug it into a TV for glorious 640×512 resolution. Only 1 megabyte of RAM, an ARM250 processor running at a blistering 12 Mhz, and no hard disc – why would you need one when an ADFS floppy could hold 1.6 megabytes?

It was cheap’n’cheerful and, to me, it was computer heaven. For a year or so before, I had gazed longingly at the BBC A3000 in the corner of my primary school classroom, enviously looking on as my fellow pupils typed away in the Phases 2 word processor, printing off their rubbish poems on the noisy Epson FX80 printer. Now, finally, I had a RISC OS machine to call my own.

A few years later I got a big power increase when I upgraded to a RiscPC, and the A3010 was relegated to a secondary machine. But it will always hold a special place for me. It was on this machine that I bashed out my first BBC BASIC programs. It was on this machine that I stayed up until 1am doing a project for History that I’d put off until the last minute. It was here that I wasted more than a few hours playing Sim City, and Lemmings, and probably my favourite of all, Fervour:-

When we moved to our current home there was no space to have my Aladdin’s Cave of computers on display, so the A3010 got put away in a cupboard. But it gained a new lease of life for a few years, as I wrote a program to run a game of Family Fortunes. Being able to code the game directly in BBC BASIC and then plug the computer straight into the TV to run it gave it a big advantage over the newer computers which we were using by now. It got dragged out regularly at Christmas get-togethers, with me playing the role of Les Dennis.

I thought long and hard about getting rid of this machine. Sentimentality can’t always win out, though: it’s been sitting in a cupboard for nearly three years. It needed to go, so tonight a nice man came and took it off my hands. I hope he loves and appreciates it as much as I did. Or uses it for parts. Whatever.

With the advent of the Raspberry Pi, I’m still using a distant relative of the A3010 every day, so I haven’t cut ties with that world completely. Even so… the feels.

The latest US late night host to quit is Jon Stewart of The Daily Show. He surprised his audience with the announcement:-

I haven’t watched The Daily Show regularly since More4 axed it, but I’m well aware that this is a massive moment in pop culture: equivalent to the Beatles breaking up or Wesley Crusher leaving Star Trek: The Next Generation. OK, maybe not that last one.

Stewart’s high point was probably during the Bush years, when he was a rare voice of sanity and reason in the media. For troubled liberals all over America (and the world) it was reassuring to tune in at 11pm four nights a week and have that frustration with the state of things articulated so well.

Few have had such a massive impact on both pop culture and the political zeitgeist as Stewart. Whatever he does next, his legacy in TV history is assured.

Much speculation over who the Daily Show will turn to for its next host. Is it too much to hope for long-time TDS correspondent (and very funny person) Samantha Bee to take over?

Not a big fan of crowdfunding-type things, but this one caught my eye:-

‘I am an immigrant’ poster campaign is a response to the increased anti-immigration rhetoric occurring in politics and the need to shed positive light on immigrants and the social, economic and cultural prosperity they bring to the nation.

The poster campaign emerged out of the Movement Against Xenophobia (MAX) which aims to rid the dialogue on immigration policy of racism and discrimination. With the 2015 General Election, the language and the rhetoric will only get worse.

The deadline to pledge is 24th February (i.e. this Tuesday). They have exceeded their original target already, but extra funding will allow them to run an even bigger campaign. In the run-up to the general election, a counterpoint to widespread anti-immigrant rhetoric is desperately needed. Head on over to crowdfunder.co.uk/i-am-an-immigrant-poster-campaign to pledge.

A lot of love on my Twitter feed at the moment for Star Trek‘s Leonard Nimoy, who has died today at the age of 83.

He had a long career, but let’s be honest, he will be remembered above all else for his role as Spock, across three seasons of Star Trek, eight films, and one of the best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation:-

After the Original Series ended, Nimoy was reportedly upset at being typecast as Spock. He got over that in later years though, going on to poke fun at his image in my all-time favourite episode of The Simpsons: “Marge vs The Monorail”.

He also launched an ill-advised singing career. The best you can say about The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins is that it’s not William Shatner’s Rocket Man.

It’s unlikely that Captain Kirk will steal the Enterprise to launch a rescue mission to the Genesis planet, largely because none of those things are real. So instead let’s just remember Nimoy’s final tweet from a few days ago:-

A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP

— Leonard Nimoy (@TheRealNimoy) February 23, 2015