Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's vision of the future turns 30 this year. This vision of the future was released on June 25th 1982 and continues to live on, I believe, as the closest portrayal of our world's future. There are so many fascinating conclusions that this film makes: technological, political, physical, psychological. And the predictions in the film are even more bang on -- it's as if Scott had a crystal ball to look into the future and filmed us an infomercial of a potential world, warning us to "Be careful of what you want. You may just get it."
Enjoy this short "documentary" on Scott's vision filmed in 1982. This adds yet another layer to a must-see film. See Blade Runner every year as we approach 2019, to remind you that the decisions we make every day lead to our eventuality.
BRYANT: Nexus 6. Runs Ice Cream Sandwich. Incept date 2012. Flagship model. Optimum self-sufficiency. Probably the leader.
[new phone appears rotating on screen]
BRYANT: Galaxy S. Talk about ‘Beauty and the Beast’ — she’s both.
[new phone appears rotating on screen]
BRYANT: LG Genesis. Your basic pleasure model. They were designed to copy the iPhone in every way except for their applications. The designers reckoned that, after a few years, they might develop their own smartphone ecosystem. You know, cases, boom boxes, charging docks… so they built in a failsafe device.
Quadcopters from Parrot that record HD videos and are controlled from an iPad or Android tablet.This is one of the coolest product videos I have seen in years. Must. Get. One.
Yep, it's real. $50 for a whole family worth of Macs and PCs. So worth it... AirParrot makes the PC to TV connection real. This is probably what people REALLY want to do rather than having some software inside your TV that is barely functional. Tying the PC and TV wirelessly is the killer app.
When experimenting with cloud apps, I am finding that older, out of date or low on memory computers are not great at running sleek, modern browsers like Chrome and Firefox. That netbook sitting unloved because Windows XP chews up memory and makes it run slow? Or that 10 year old desktop with 1GB of RAM and the hard drive that churns and churns and churns as you open your huge Outlook folders?
You can give it new life with Chromium OS. Chromium was launched in November 2009, and it has come a long way in 2+ years.
With that in mind, I tried the latest build of Google's Chromium OS. This operating system is as simple as possible: When you start, you just login to your Google account (gmail for example) and then you are presented with a Chrome web browser. Settings from Google's sync mechanism are available to you so your default bookmarks and tabs are brought over into Chromium. Basic things like touchpads, graphics, sound are supported without any drivers. I've tried this now on an Acer AspireOne netbook and an IBM Lenovo with success.
To give this a try, load up Chromium on a USB stick. I used a 2GB stick with success, although some websites suggests a 4GB stick. 1GB sticks or less won't do it. You're not going to be storing too much on this stick anyways, everything you access will be in the cloud! But if you need to store documents locally you will need some space for local files, although other filesystems (hard disks, DVDs) will be accessible from the "Google Drive" option.
Here is a step by step:
1. Get the "vanilla" build of Chromium OS from hexxeh. The latest build is probably best. The download is about 250MB and you will want to extract the .img file from inside the .zip file.
2. Use Win32DiskImager or this command line utility flashnul to create a USB stick with Chromium OS downloaded in Step 1. There are Mac and Linux utilities available online for writing IMG files as well. This will erase the contents of your USB stick, by the way!
3. Boot your computer holding F12 at the BIOS screen or F2 to get into the BIOS and tell the computer to boot off the USB device. This is key. If you cannot boot of a USB stick you will have to see other methods to try this out.
4. Be patient when you boot off the USB stick for the first time. It may take a 5-10 minutes for the video to be recognized and boot into the welcome screen. Follow the steps.
UPDATE: Using the USB drive as a way to run Chromium long term is not ideal. The speed of the USB key will severly hamper the performance of Chromium. So it is best to experiment and then when you are ready install the OS right onto your hard drive. Note that this will erase your hard drive completely, so be careful.
5. To turn on your mouse pad tap with 2 fingers simultanously. There are new swipe modes available in Chromium. And tons of keyboard short cuts. Use control-alt-shift-? to see a popup cheat sheet of all the keyboard short cuts.
6. Enjoy a super fast browsing experience, and remark how your computer feels brand new. Install Chrome apps, play games, go to Gmail, try a few websites. Load up youtube. It all works surprisingly well. Try Google Print in the Cloud. You can print to your printers at home from anywhere on the Internet, securely!
Google is selling a Chromium desktop and laptop now for $500, but you can reuse that old desktop, netbook or laptop quickly with this nice 15-20 minute project. Here's what Chrombooks look like:
