Baby steps

glennji | Feb 7, 2005 min read

I’m happy — today I took the first steps towards being able to use the Fuji Finepix digital camera as a USB webcam (mentioned in a previous post). Today I started reading about how to hack on the Linux kernel.

It’s quite exciting for someone like me, who has used Linux for the last 5 years or so but never been ready (or brave enough) to tackle the kernel itself. Hey, maybe nothing will come of it, but maybe I’ll get into kernel hacking in a big way and one day even submit a patch that is rolled into the main kernel source! Can you imagine that? Apparently some hackers have a big ol’ party when they get their code into the kernel, and I really couldn’t blame them!

In other news, I was thinking yesterday about my damaged Jornada and thought that perhaps it was a chance to try to make an audio-only PDA device? It really could be quite cool, with voice alarms, note taking, MP3 playing and whatever else I could think of. Not sure how well text-to-speech would work on a little StrongArm processor, but it’s worth investigating. Is there anything else out there like that? It would actually be useful to everyone, I think — imagine getting audible alerts when you walked into a wifi network, or reminders about your wifes birthday.

Ah, it’s just an unformed thought for now, but worth musing upon. Now I think I might sleep.