The internet is a great place to find out how to do things. You can often find a ‘recipe’ for precisely what you want to do or a how-to article to solve your exact problem. But even if you can’t, whatever problem you’re having, the internet is chock-full of people with knowledge who will most likely be willing to help you if you go about it the right way. This article attempts to give you some tips that will assist you in getting the help you need. But What is the Right Way? Two things […more…]
I have a Raspberry Pi 3B that acts as a web server for my temperature sensing network. I also use the same Pi for my Pi Word of the day tweets. It’s been pottering along fine for a long time. But last week we had a power outage while we had smart meters installed. For ‘network management’ reasons that I won’t go into, I’d recently decided to ‘hide’ the SSID (Service Set Identifier) of the router this Pi was connected to. I had thought it would automatically connect, having been connected before. But it didn’t, […more…]
Last week. Simon Long from Raspberry Pi released a new version of Raspbian with several new features. The most visible of these is the new-look desktop skin, named PIXEL (Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight). There’s a lot of user interface (UI) tweaks both functional and visual… new splash screen on boot stunning background images added a whole new set of icons larger ‘drag handles’ for resizing windows (that’s bugged me for years) windows now have rounded corners new font rendering package for better typography I think the new look is a big improvement and I […more…]
Yesterday (28 Sep 2016) a new version of Raspbian was released with a brand new skin called PIXEL. I downloaded it on my Mac and tried to unzip it in the usual way. It threw an error, so I assumed the download was faulty and downloaded again. But the error persisted. GAH!!! My friend Albert Hickey (who runs the Egham Jam) had a similar issue on Windows… Les Pounder said it worked fine in Ubuntu though. Didn’t Unzip on Pi I tried unzipping it on a Pi, but that failed too. BOO! However, it was […more…]
From observation of the computer industry going back to 1987, when I did a pre-university year at IBM Scientific Centre in Winchester, it seems that the very brightest and best programmers (software creatives) are often not very good at or not very keen on documenting their work. I think the reason for this is often misunderstood. Poor documentation is a source of great consternation in the world of Linux. In fact it’s a large part of the raison d’être for RasPi.TV. We, the users, often feel that the geniuses who write awesome software can’t be […more…]
On Saturday I received an email from Linux Voice with download instructions for Issue 1. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Linux Voice, but it’s a brand new crowd-funded Linux magazine (they ran an IndieGoGo campaign in November/December 2013). It’s in print and digital formats. They needed £90,000 to get it up and running. In the end they raised £127,603. But I Don’t Buy Magazines Any More? I haven’t bought a magazine for several years. There’s so much information on the web these days that I don’t really bother with them any more. But, […more…]
Just a short post today to let you know that RasPi.TV has just completed server migration to a new server at Mythic Beasts. Why move? I found out on New Year’s Day that my existing server hosting company was moving from London to Reading. So at the end of January they were going to physically move the rack, containing my server, to Reading. This meant that, while it was in transit, all five web sites I have on this machine, and all my email, would be offline. This was estimated to be ~8 hours. But […more…]
Having managed to get VLC streaming from Pi Camera to Nexus 7 Android tablet working, it was only a matter of time before I wanted to stream from the RasPiCamcorder. But when I tried it, I came across an annoying problem. RPi.GPIO needs to run as root (that’s why we always use sudo for our GPIO stuff) But VLC refuses to run as root. This means you can’t run them both from the same program. There’s all sorts of clever solutions people proposed (and I wasted a lot of time unsuccessfully trying them all out) […more…]
I wanted to be able to upload photos from my RasPiCamcorder straight to DropBox. So I did a little research and came across an absolute gem of a program called Dropbox-Uploader, by Andrea Fabrizi. A truly brilliant piece of work that gives you access to your DropBox account right from the command line. You do have to jump through a couple of hoops to get it set up (security mostly), but once you’ve done that, it’s a breeze. 1. DropBox account First of all you need a DropBox account. Hop on over to DropBox and […more…]
Gordon Hollingworth announces a New Out Of Box System for Raspberry Pi owners at the Cambridge Jam. It’s a setup/recovery system to make it easy to set up your SD card from the outset and also recover it if something corrupts. It boots in seconds. To activate it, you hold down the shift key while powering up the Pi. Very impressive and should make a big difference to those for whom flashing an SD card image is the stuff of nightmares. It should be out in a week or so.