News written by Petteri Pyyny (June, 2019)

The true love of the geeks, the miniature computer Raspberry Pi, has been upgraded to a new major version. Raspberry Pi 4 Model B changes pretty much everything there was in the previous version - and to the better.

Previous flagship model, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ sold for $35 and the same base price remains for the new model, too. But the components, connectors and everything else have gone through a major revamp.

First of all, the system chip has been updated. Raspberry Pi 4 now uses Cortex-A72 system chip with quadcore architecture, running at 1.5GHz. New chip has built-in H.265 video decoding ability, just to mention one of the perks of the new chip.

Previous Raspberry Pis have shipped either with 512MB or 1GB or RAM, but the new model takes a leap forward here, too. The cheapest option ships with 1GB of RAM, but you can also get a version with either 2GB or 4GB of RAM. Furthermore, the memory tech has been upgraded from previous LPDDR2 to LPDDR4 tech, meaning that the memory is also significantly faster than previously.

Read more...

Our dear website, AfterDawn, officially launched in 10th of June, 1999. To celebrate our 20th anniversary, we start a year-long project to look back what news we covered back in 1999 - 2000. We'll publish these collections once a month, covering a month years earlier on, with modern perspective on events happened back then.

At this point, it is also time to remind you, our readers, that AfterDawn didn't start out as a "general tech website", but instead, our core focus was on digital audio technology (MP3s, most notably, and how to encode, edit and play them) and digital video. As the decades have passed, our focus has also changed to cover other things. But during these first years, it was all about digital audio and video.

And yeah, we didn't produce many news in our early days, as AfterDawn's original idea was - and still is - to be a "portal" where you can get various types of information. Back in 1999, that meant we published guides, news and software downloads. But hey, we also provided free hosting for independent artists' MP3 tracks and, at some point in time, offered a quite large collection of WinAMP skins for users to download.

And damn, our news articles weren't too long, either :-)

Software update: WinDAC

In June, 1999, we covered handful of major software updates in our news. One of those was a recent update to a CD audio ripper program called WinDAC. As the name implies, the Windows-based software was meant to copy the contents of an audio CD to a PC hardware. Back then, this was done by storing the data in WAV format, which user later could edit and compress (encode) to a smaller format, such as MP3.

Read more...

It all started in winter 1998/1999. It was one of the coldest winters in Finnish history with temperatures dropping to record low of -51C in Northern parts of the country. There was this slightly bored web developer, with too many easy job tasks at hand, dreaming about doing something of his own to the Internet.

After months of thinking it through, a vision of a website dedicated to all things about MP3s was taking a shape. The idea was to build a website that would combine all aspects of the trendy new technology under one umbrella: news about the tech, guides on how to use the tech, software downloads to help to follow the guides provided and a place for indie artists to publish their songs, in MP3 format, for free.

Drafting the plans, the realism hit hard. Building - and maintaining - such a site on my own seemed like an impossible task. The thinking was, that once the novelty of the project would wane, the project would be left to die, if running the site on my own. Furthermore, back in those days, there weren't open source CMS systems, free picture galleries, WordPress themes to pick from or anything like that. Nope, you had to build the entire site from the scratch, on your own, including all its backend systems, design, etc. And yeah, hosting, even a medium-sized website would cost something like $100 a month back then. I was in my 20s and quite poor, to be honest.

Read more...