I am just starting to get into Arduino programming, and I see various sellers. I tend to be more interested in the 2.4 and 2.2" diagonal LCD, many of which have touch screens than the larger ones. Lets see: Adafruit has a 2.8" LCD + touchscreen for $40 (though it is on backorder); I see various ebay sellers (e4u2011, isecsv110, yyli666 are ones I've marked) have 2.4" displays + touchscreen + SD reader for $20.

The usual place that talks about print permance is Wilhelm Research: http://www.wilhelm-research.com/ In general, the answer for home printing is the HP or Epson pigment printers with the appropriate papers, and UV blocking. However, I would tend to think that the only way forward is to backup the digital media, and backup early, backup often. You want the photos stored on your own backups that you control, stored as standard JPG images at full resolution. You want multiple backups, spread phsyically across different media and stored in different locations. You do want to think about cloud or other remote backups, in case something like Hurricane Katrina comes through and wipes out your whole town and surrounding area. In any backup system, you want to plan for at least every 5 years of recopying files from the old media to new media, as the media evolves.

While I am an IBM employee, I don't speak for them. That being said, for people in the technical tracks, one of the things that management looks at when making the decision to promote somebody, is what kind of patents have they done or been a part of. At the lower levels, it may not matter as much, but as you get higher in the ranks, it becomes much harder to get promoted if you don't have patents.

I've been a dreamhost customer for about 6 years now (shared web server though, not VPS), and I've been very happy with them. One of the reasons I went with them originally was I could update my web site with ssh instead of having to use FTP. I use their host as a CVS server (through SSH), and I remember you could also set it up as a SVN server (maybe GIT by now).

I was laid off by AMD 3 years ago. I hope the people affected will eventually land on their feet and go on with their lives. Even three years ago, AMD was getting into the bunker mentality of just trying to survive. The trouble is they made some missteps starting with Barcelona and Bulldozer, and Intel has woken up and become much more competitive.

IBM sold the laptop business to Lenovo a few years ago. I am currently moving from a Thinkpad T61 to a Thinkpad W520, and currently only the integrated screen drivers work for me out of the box, which means I can't plug in my external monitor.

For use in the field you probably want a small screen. I use a $40 MP4 player (JXD 969) that takes video input to provide remote viewing for my digital camera. Sure the resolution is only QVGA (320x240), that is what my camera's A/V output produces. Sure maybe in a few years, these devices will go away, but it is likely the system mentioned in the OP will also be enhanced, or their will be new systems.

That's why having a standard replaceable battery is important. So many of these devices either have batteries that are soldered in, or are unique to the manufacturer and will be hard to come by when either the manufacturer goes out of business or makes the next generation of new shiny that uses a different battery type. The JXD 696 that I mentioned earlier for instance takes a Nokia 5C battery that is very common (my previous cell phone in fact used it). Unfortunately, it looks like the newer generation of JXD portable music/video players now have a soldered in battery.

On the other hand, 5v (usb) charging is pretty common, and you can get cell phone recharger batteries fairly cheaply, and just carry a few for use during the day, and recharge at night (assuming you have power at night). The Energizer Energi to Go is one such unit. There are 9v and 12v power packs as well if your unit needs more juice.

Yes, I agree I've been looking for cheap monocular HMD's for some time that take RCA input, (all I need is QVGA quality) and have replaceable, rechargeable batteries. I want to plug in my steampunk-ish camera (Olympus E-3 DSLR mounted inside of a wooden shell with bellows made to resemble Speed Graphics press cameras) live view feed into something I can see off the side of my field of vision, but not take over my complete field of view. I'd like something in the 1 - 1.8" size. I just got a PMP (portable music player, JXD i696) that uses a cell photo battery and has a 2.8" lcd, but ideally to be mounted on my glasses, I want something a bit smaller (more borg, less Geordi). Maybe I'm using the wrong search terms, but I can't find small portable lcds that take video input.

My wife gave me a nook for Christmas, and after using my nook and her mother's kindle, my wife wanted her own reader. Originally, I was going to give her a nook, and we could share the purchased books. However, one of the things my wife wanted to download on her device was the Nancy Drew books that she read growing up. Those are only available for the kindle. Similarly, after reading Winterfair gifts (by Lois McMaster Bujold), I noticed that more of the Miles Vorkosigan books are available on kindle than nook. It might be possible to get the books as epub books (such as the Bujold books at baen.com), but it isn't as convenient.

Satellite networking has extreme bandwidth caps (worse than cell phone 5 gig plans if memory serves). Because everything has to go up to the bird and back, latency is real high. You also have to have a clear view of the satellite, which can be problematical in some areas, such as if a neighbour's trees block your view.

I live on a pond with 6 houses on the side of the pond I live on. Because there were so few houses, it was never economical to improve service. We never had cable. When I was a work at home programmer, we originally went with ISDN, and later T-1. Being a regulated service, the phone company has to provide it to anywhere they string wires, but it is not cheap. I recall it was an $1,800 installation cost just to prep the wires. After I parted company with Red Hat, we paid for it on our own ($400/month), but when the T-1 provider jumped the price to $700/month, we finally bailed. Fortunately, when we dropped the T-1, the lake had gotten a cell phone tower (that in fact helps pay for some of the lake improvements), and we were able to switch to cell phone networking for casual use. I did have to watch the bandwidth carefully, and not update my photo album from home in order to stay under the 5g limit Sprint charged. About 6 months after we switched to cell phone networking, one of the two towns that the lake straddles was getting Verizon FIOS, and fortunately that town government required the phone company to make FIOS to every house in town, even the houses on the ponds where access was more difficult. So all of us got FIOS. It would be nice the other town (the one I live in) would sign the paperwork so that I can get TV over FIOS to allow me to turn off my DISH TV satellite service.

I have perl scripts that date to 1988 or so (perl 1-2 era or 5 jobs ago). By and large most of these have worked over time, but in the mid-90's I did need to edit a few scripts to put a backslash in front of the @ inside of strings. Yes, in many of my .pl libraries, I haven't bothered to change creating variables on the fly and using *pointers instead of using refs and other modern mechanisms.

On one of the camera groups, I mentioned I had perl scripts to manage my images, from download to album creation to updating remote systems. I saw that in the 9+ years I've been doing digital photography, the support infrastructure has grown to 26,000 lines of perl, along with 20,000 lines of my support library.

Similarly, I automate building the GCC compiler, running spec, doing all sorts of tables of comparisons in perl. Most of these have been moved from job to job over the years. It was simple to transform the scripts I had for analyzing x86 compiler output code to powerpc as I moved from AMD to IBM.

I keep everything on my external web server, which supports CVS and ssh, and can update and edit files from any machine, both at work and at home.