The past couple of mobile phones I’ve carried, Pixel 1 and Pixel 4, had USB-C type charging ports. They came with the little adapters to convert the USBC-C port to a USB-A type connector. The adapter was provided so you…
The past couple of years I made a lot of use of an NDI-based video-over-IP strategy in producing the live stream and archival sessions for Cluecon in 2018 & 2019. One of the things involved in that production was displaying an NDI stream, produced in vMix, to a pair of local projectors.
Given budget constraints, I opted to use a pair of SFF Windows PCs running Newtek’s NDI Studio Monitor. I selected some used Lenovo M73 Tiny, which cost me about $200 each on Ebay. With an i5-4570 CPU and Intel HD Graphics 4600, they did the job well enough, each delivering 1080p30 to its associated projector without issue.
Given additional budget, I’d have opted for BirdDog Mini NDI adapters over the little PC’s. These little FPGA-based devices can be set to decode or encode. Also, they can be powered over Ethernet, giving added flexibility, but at a cost of $500 each.
At the time, there was no way to decode NDI on an device with an ARM CPU, like the Raspberry Pi. That has recently changed. Dicaffeine is a new NDI player for Raspberry Pi. The basic version is free and I’ve been tinkering with it for a couple of weeks.
After 6 years with the Lenovo X1 Carbon (Gen 2 circa 2013) I’m seriously considering a new laptop. In truth, the existing X1C still does most of what I need. The display is getting dimmer. The battery life is shorter. It’s short on ports. The 256 GB SSD feels a bit constrained, but it remains a basically functional machine.
My experience has been so good that I would buy another X1 Carbon (Gen 6), but Lenovo has thrown me a curve in the form of the X1 Extreme. It’s an enhanced model that include more; bigger display, more ports, more potent CPU, and most significantly a more capable nVidia GTX GPU. The second generation of the X1 Extreme is about to be released, which has my purchase plans temporarily on hold.
The discrete GPU is a real benefit to anyone who does any kind of live streaming. My favorite tools, vMix and OBS, can both leverage the hardware H264 encoders on a GTX card, offloading a ton of work from the CPU.
As you may recall, I had something of an issue with my Pixel mobile phone back in September. The August update to Google’s Android Pie OS badly mismanaged the Wi-Fi radio, resulting in battery life measured in minutes vs hours.…
We’ve had remote control lighting of some kind for almost twenty years. In the early days it was simple X-10 remote controlled outlets. For a while it was some Z-wave stuff. For the past two years it’s been Phillips Hue…
In the earliest days of January 2013 I ordered the first laptop that I’d bought with my own money in over a decade. It was a Lenovo X1 Carbon. I had been carrying an HP 8510W, which was a decent…