Snappy


Okay. On the one hand I'm back online (fingers crossed) after a week of stressed late nights and disgruntled early mornings. I've finally got this dratted computer working perfectly (fingers and toes crossed).

On the other hand I'm so sick of the sight of it I don't want to go near it for a week.

So...I've found another challenge. A few years ago my mother found a laptop in a skip. It has a 3GB hard drive, 128MB of RAM, and runs (I think) around 250MHz. So you can see why it was in a skip. But mother nursed it back to health, and now it's just waiting to perform some task that only a hopelessly obsolete computer can do.

A few years before that, Mother invested a whole UKP20 in a digital camera. It has space for 26 "high resolution" pictures - 320x240, the same resolution as YouTube, only dimmer and granier. It's chief selling point was that you could carry it in your top pocket.

Yesterday I stumbled upon a tiny program that took snapshots from your webcam - every second, 5 minutes, day, or whatever. And you can see where this is going can't you?

The challenge is therefore:

* To find a version of Windows that'll take up, say, 200MB instead of the usual 1.3GBs. Luckily, I spent the last week developing one.

* Put it on the "skip machine", with the "pencam".

* Find something to take a timelapse film of!

Update: After two nights of (very slowly) installing various flavours of Windows and trying to coax the USB port into life...I think I'll use the other spare laptop instead. The one with 768MB of RAM and the 2GHz processor. The one that works.

One of the Windows flavours was my own reduced version of 2000 - reduced from 360MB to 60. Sixty megabytes will give you a fully functional operating system with no software and no internet.

Compare and contrast with DSL - which I've mentioned before and which Aimee reminded me about. 50MB, giving you internet access, browsers, wordprocessors, a spreadsheet, image editing and more. Hmmm.

So I'm going to give it a go. Watch me as I take a deep breath, hold my nose, screw shut my eyes and dive in.

2 comments:

  1. Um, why a small version of Windows? Why not something like, oh i don't know, Damn Small Linux! It takes up less than 50K!

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  2. I know. And I've got a copy of it here. And it is indeed amazing.

    But I don't know anything about the world of Linux - including where I might find a timelapse film making program.

    Oh I'm sure they exist, and work better than their Windows equivalents, and wouldn't be that hard to find. It's just...rather a lot to learn for such a simple application.

    But if doing it with Windows on this machine proves difficult, I'll try DSL.

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