I've been feeling guilty lately about my Raspberry-pi sitting on my desk collecting dust, every time I use my PC I can feel it staring silently at me, judging me.
To fix this I decided to get a 32GB SD card so I could have more space to play around on it (2GB is not enough) and got a HDMI to VGA converter so I could give it a monitor of it's own. No need to give up one of my screens to use it, or have to crane my neck at an awkward angle to use it on my TV while still sitting at my desk.
After hunting around for a power cable for the old 15" Dell monitor I had laying around I remembered that I would need to flash an OS onto the SD card. Then I remembered: I own no SD card readers. For a split second I had a strange feeling of panic and sadness, then it hit me: I could just use my camera like I did last time!I dug around in my drawers and found it, my old Casio Exilim EX-S10RD
It looked a little battle worn with some scratches and scuffs from being dropped a few times over and the red finish was starting to chip away at the edges. Just as I was taking it out I happened to notice my cellphone(Samsung Galaxy S2), iPAD retina and DSLR sitting pretty close to each other and realized how downgraded my once prized piece of technology into a glorified SD card reader.
The Casio was once my crown jewel, the piece of technology that I never left the house with. With a whopping 10.1 MP(don't forget that extra 0.1 Mega Pixel) it was the best camera I'd ever owned in my life back in 2009 when I first got it. My cell phone at the time had a 3 MP camera, and all of the pictures it took came out blurry and washed out. But not this 10.1MP red beauty. Picture came out crystal clear, it had a great continuous shooting mode and let's not forget about the 720P video it could take.
This camera by it's image count tag had taken at least 4203 pictures from 2009 until I stopped using it probably around 2011. That's over 20GB of pictures! I've since lost a good portion of those pictures due to various hard drive crashes (should be a warning to backup more). The camera was with me when I went to my first nerdy convention Otakon in the summer of 2009. It traveled up and down the east coast with me as I went around seeing new places in the US. It was also there when I watch a police chase end right outside my dorm room during my sophomore year of college when the police ended a chase with road tacks causing the car to stop on the side walk. I was recording the chase when the man in the car decided to end his life with a gun right outside my window. I also remember almost dropping it into the reflecting pool in DC and leaving it behind and more than one party.
When I bought it he camera cost $211.99, which wasn't easy on a college student budget making minimum wage ($7.19 at the time). I got it right after getting my first job on my college campus the summer after my freshman semester.It now sells used for $53.99 and Amazon offers to buy mine for $24.10.I remember spending weeks researching the digital camera market, going over features and deciding which ones mattered to me, reading reviews good and bad, whipping out a ruler to get an idea of the size since I wanted a really portable camera, battery life, warranty, LCD size, feel of the buttons, quality of the images and then I finally bought it. I think I still have the box it came in stowed away somewhere. I even made sure to write a review on it on Amazon giving it 4 out of 5 stars lamenting in my review:
Where the Exilim logo is right under is a big sticker with "YouTube Capture Mode" it looks like a high quality adhesive sticker, and I'm a bit worried to take it off thinking that it might leave an ugly square spot on the camera. So I'm stuck advertising for YouTube every time I whip out my camera....oh well I'll get over it eventually. I think the reason I knocked one start off of it was because it wasn't as slick of an interface of some of the Sony ones I'd used before. Oh and the YouTube logo rubbed off of the sticker eventually after a few years. I just noticed that someone else commented that the sticker came off easily for them. If only I had known back then...
And now for the past two years or so I've used it to read and write to SD cards. The once mighty inseparable companion now collects dust in my drawer not seeing the light of day for months at a time.
So here is to the memory of an old friend. I might try to hang out with him more like we used to. The pictures it take still look great five years later. I don't need the iPhone's new autobalancingretouchandairbrushingdualled or whatever the new feature is nowadays. Here are the last few forgotten pictures I found on the internal memory probably from a mini golf course I went to a few years ago. Probably taken after the memory card got full and we still wanted more pictures:
WinAmp! Artsy I don't remember whose fingers those are So many pearly white teeth!