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.