Wednesday, September 12, 2012

The height of technological advancement

I got a hot, new, tiny, 64GB HD video camera, which is disguised as a working iPod Nano. I was reading the instructions to set the time and date, expecting to have to press one of the five buttons 2,012 times to set the year or somesuch nonsense, but I was surprised. Attach it to the PC USB port. Create a text file in its root directory named TIME containing the YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss and press the record button once. Voila. I set the clock on my video camera using Notepad. Freaking Notepad! Of all the wonderful technology I use each day, this impresses me. It's probably because over the years I've set the clocks on the most obtuse of embedded systems in VCRs, alarm clocks, answering machines, point and shoot cameras, ovens, and the dreaded programmable thermostat. This one was actually easy. I call that progress.