Pi R squared

I have been playing with the Raspberry a bit more this week.
One of the SD cards didn't seem to like it so I swapped it with one the OH had which is the same size,different make.
This one works fine and my card works in his phone quite happily so it was win/win.

There are quite a lot of operating systems available for the Pi so I have changed around a few times to see what they are like.

My favourites so far are openelec and debian wheezy but puppy alpha is also very nice .

There is a boot loader so that you can put more than one on a single SD card.
That is trial and error.
First I couldn't run it at all because it only recognized ethernet,then I tried a different wifi dongle and that worked out so I put all 6 of the OS that are downloadable to work with it and loaded them.
Everything seemed okay until I ran debian and then none of the other OS were accessible.
After much messing about,I now have Puppy and openelec on that one card.

There is a very handy little windows program called HDDbackup which is free and lets you blind copy to an image or from an image of any sized HD including SD cards. That has saved a lot of frustration as it means I can just restore the whole SD card with its OS when I make a hash of something .
It works like xcopy used to work on the amiga, copying every bit on the disk without the need to understand the data.

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Snow

It snowed here last weekend and we have a good thick layer still.
The garden is white and silent.
OH has driven to work by car this week as he can't get the motorbike out onto the main road due to our living in a side road off another side road. Meaning that the council wont clear it.
They do clear the main roads or grit them but that is useless if you cant get onto them in the first place.

We have been trying out our shoe cleats that I bought for christmas.
They are the kind with springs going under your shoes and you stretch them on over your ordinary shoes.
The kind we have are excellent and made walking into town for supplies this weekend, a doddle.
 We took them off on the non snowy parts of town and in shops and where there were still the odd patches of snow, it really noticed how slippy it was compared with wearing them.

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I m trying a new search and be paid thing.
It is called Qmee.
You add it as a search option and it pays you to search.
No referrals as yet so you will need to google it if you are interested.
One or two places have invites.
I did it yesterday for the first time.
You search as usual but without purposefully trying to 'score pennies' of course.
When a search is relevant to the criteria they are looking for
 (I think this equates to...is sponsored and earns them something),
 you are given a few links to one side and you can earn some pennies by clicking on one.

I havent tried cashing out yet as it will take a while to be worth cashing out but I earned 63pence yesterday much to my surprise.
I don't constantly search all day long but use around 30 searches a day I guess and around 8 of them were with this new 'project'.

They will check the sensibility of searches and how frequently they are accessed so hopefully will weed out greedy online vultures who spoil it for everyone by sitting all day at their computer and typing and clicking with the aim to become millionaires.

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Online vultures do exist and in their focus on becoming online rockafellers forget that these schemes that pay for online activity must earn in their turn else how will they have anything to pay their minions?
Hence why superpoints sank under the weight of their members.
I have to admit that they were quite generous, promising to give a referrer points based on referrals and sub referrals plus very frequent pay outs.
It was as I said on first joining ,more of a pyramid scheme and they are unsustainable in the long term.
I had one referral while I was a member and they never to my knowledge used the site even once after they signed up.

The littlest pc

I got a lovely surprise of a raspberry pi for xmas.

The OH bought it for me.
Some people would call it a geek toy but it is very much my thing.


When I was about 19, I bought myself a ZX Spectrum, it had 48k of ram and you plugged it in to your TV to see the programmes.
The data was all on cassette tapes and you needed to have a cassette recorder to be able to run them.

Well the Pi is a similar idea except that it is more sophisticated being 40 years further evolved.
You can plug in things using its usb ports so that it can be online with wifi and  have any amount of storage via harddrives.
Mine has a cable going to a spare monitor (OH salvaged from the bin at work) .
I have a 7 port usb hub with a wifi dongleand some flash drives which were surplus to requirments as were the keyboard and mouse.
It powers from a mini usb connector so I have a mains adapter on mine but you can plug it into any usb outlet to power it.
The operating system is free and you can put it on an SD card so you can have multiple OS' and just swap the cards over when you fancy.
I have 2 cards so far, one with debian wheezy(linux) on and one with openelec running XBMC.
The latter means that we can watch some of the catch up services online without needing to plug in a laptop and it makes a very nice conduit for playing any of our audio and video files.

I will definitely learn to program my pi, I always missed that about the speccy, the programming language was so easy and it was something that gave me a huge sense of achievment, plus it helped me to organise my mind in a much more calm and patient manner .

Some people use their Pi to control their TV.
They have a usb socket on the TV and plug the pi straight into it,then have a wifi dongle to pick up the signals and watch their media without needing a lot of other hardware.
You can use them to catch live TV if you have a TV dongle but we wont need that .

Some people have them joined to their xbox gane machines in a similar manner.
You dont need the keyboard ,mouse or monitor if you network your pi with another computer because you can then see the results on the controlling computer's screen.

Giving the telly a miss and the freecycle vultures

We used to have just radio when the kids were little.
I preferred it that way.
It meant we could get on with our lives instead of shceduling our lives to fit in between the programmes on TV.
There were drawbacks, conversation at the school gates was invariably about the latest cliff hanger 'soap' rubbish.
However, there were many good points to being noTV.
The kids didn't badger us for fad toys.
We didn't need to think about all the latest new products in the supermarket.
We were quite happy with life without wishing for the artificial lifestyles portrayed on the screen.

OH brought a TV home with him one day much to my disgust and we have had it ever since.
18 years later and he finally announced a couple of weeks back that there was nothing on TV anymore.
This was triggered by his sitting in front of the screen for much of christmas flicking back and forth through endless repeats of Last of the summer wine and then on Christmas Eve the 2 ronnies etc.
All from the 1970's and 80's.

I pointed out to him that we could watch streaming TV for £5.99 a month.
Streaming TV is not live broadcast so if we only watched streaming stuff, we could cancel our TV license (£12 a month) and still watch something each night AND almost every thing we watch will be new to us.

It is a win /win situation.
OH will get to see something every single day that he hasn't seen before, he still can see his old favourites if he wants as there is plenty of choice there
AND
we no longer need to pay for the privelidge of being served up reconstituted TV that we have both seen before and been made to pay for if we watched it the first time round and every consequent time since.
AND
it is half the price of the ridiculous TV license.

Our set top box is going to charity. British Heart foundation will collect the machines from us to sell in their shop.
We have 2 set top boxes for them ,a video and a DVD player.

There will be one TV in this house which belongs to my daughter and that is only going to be kept for her to play DVDs on.

We have a ginormous monitor in the living room so we can watch our streaming films on that and feel like we are watching on a big screen telly.
The monitor was one OH rescued from the rubbish and is 50" wide. It hangs on the wall and the picture comes in through his little netbook which is only about 10" wide.
There is no sound on the monitor so he has a little speaker thing for that.

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We were going to freecycle the video machines.
I listed them and then was bombarded with demands .
How rude people can be.
Although I listed everything seperately and waited a few days to be fair( so everyone gets to see the offers)
I had demands along the lines of ...

'I will take it all,where do you live'?

'Is it the such and such model,if it is I want it'

'Give me your address ,I will collect it today'

Then there were quite a few that made me feel uncomfortable  just because they had

'sent from my iphone'  
along the bottom of them.

These 'iphone' messages tended to be followed by others all from the same people with requests for all the other offers (we had 6 things on offer).

While I love freecycle and freegle and will continue to offer and request in the future, I will be checking the British Heart foundations website every time we have anything that is good enough to sell on ,incase they can make use of it purely because of the greedy gannets that sit and wait for their iphone messages to come rolling in .

I know not everyone is a trickster and many people don't mind their offers being sold on but I do mind and they are my things to decide about.