Aug 102012
 
Where's my Pi? pifind - locate your missing raspberry pi

pifind.py A week or two ago, the illustrious Jim Manley ran a Raspberry Jam – a meeting of people interested in the Pi. Unfortunately someone walked off with his Raspberry Pi. A bunch of us were chewing over ideas, on the Raspberry Pi forums, for how to add security features to make it possible to locate a stolen Pi. The whole thing reminded me of a fabulous book I used to love as a kid: The Great Pie Robbery by Richard Scarry Except the pies in the book were cherry, not raspberry. Someone else (rurwin) […more…]

Jul 292012
 
How to Make a Raspberry Pi disk image to SD card with win32diskimager

Why do I need to know how to write a raspberry pi disk image to SD card with win32diskimager? Even if you bought a ready-prepared SD card with your Raspberry Pi, sooner or later a newer, better version of the operating system (OS) will be released. Unless you know how to make a bootable SD card from the downloaded OS image file, you won’t be able to take advantage of the improvements (and believe me, there will be lots of them as time progresses). There have already been three versions of Debian since I got […more…]

Jul 242012
 
Neewer HDMI to VGA Adaptor warning

Several people, including me, have bought these… Neewer Black HDMI Input To VGA Adapter Converter For PC Laptop from Amazon and other places. I bought one to use in the school where I teach ICT 1/2 day per week and have only briefly tested it at home. Unfortunately it has come to light in the forums that these adaptors can be harmful to your Raspberry Pi hardware (click here). At least one person has reported that using one of these adaptors caused diode D1 to burn out. Subsequently it turns out that this Neewer device […more…]

Jul 222012
 
How to back up your Raspberry Pi SD card

Why bother backing up your SD card? There is some new information (September 2016) concerning Raspbian images and methods of SD card flashing that may be useful to you. How to flash an SD card with >4GB files I had a difficult time getting the new Raspbian image up and running. That wasn’t because there was anything wrong with it. It was because I am in an unusual position. I’m away from base without my normal Samsung HDTV/monitor, and without ethernet, so I’ve been running my Pi “headless” via ssh and VNC, using wifi. I’d […more…]

Jul 202012
 
Get_iplayer installation on Raspberry Pi with Raspbian

Installing Get_iplayer on Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi Update 15 November 2016 Installing latest Get_iplayer instructions here… https://raspi.tv/2016/get_iplayer-on-raspberry-pi-update-november-2016 Update 5 November 2014 Installing latest Get_iplayer instructions here… https://raspi.tv/2014/get_iplayer-raspberry-pi-update Update 23 Jan 2013 Installing Get_iplayer just got a whole lot easier. Now all you have to do is type… sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install get-iplayer ffmpeg atomicparsley libmp3-info-perl You may still find some of the following information useful. I’ll leave it there anyway. ;) Original post Following on from my original two postings on get_iplayer, (for Debian Squeeze & wheezy distros for the Raspberry Pi), […more…]

Jun 292012
 
How to install Fuse ZX Spectrum emulator on raspberry pi

How to install Fuse ZX Spectrum emulator in Debian Wheezy Beta and Raspbian On the Raspberry Pi site there is a thread about how to install this spectrum emulator in Arch. I figured it was time to have a go in Wheezy – just for the heck of it – and it worked. Not 100% – still can’t get it to make sound reliably and satisfactorily through HDMI, but I have managed to get it working well through the analog audio out – *so you can use headphones or speakers to get those primitive speccy […more…]

Jun 262012
 
How to create a new user on Raspberry Pi

Creating a new user with Sudo privileges in Debian on raspberry pi Someone asked on the Raspberry Pi forums recently how to change the default pi user. There is a command usermod, which could be used to do this if you first created a root password. But there are a lot of reasons for not creating a root password (mostly security and “best practice” related – and people still disagree about it). You can’t use usermod to modify the id you are currently using, so the only way to do it is to create a […more…]

Jun 232012
 
How to safely shutdown or reboot your raspberry pi

How to safely shutdown or reboot your raspberry pi (Debian/Raspbian) (If you came here because your B+ won’t fully shutdown, visit this page.) Of course, we all know you can shut down any computer by pulling the plug or switching off the switch. Most PCs can be forcibly switched off – even when they’ve crashed – by holding the power button down for 3 seconds. But we also know, or should know, that doing this isn’t good for the computer. For desktops and laptops, it can cause problems on the hard disk drive. For the […more…]