Self-employed and living the dream

Being self-employed is a roller coaster full of dizzying highs and anxious lows. I have find it essential to record the highs as a resource to battle the lows. After 2 years of self-employment it seems to be paying off and I'm a little more relaxed when I hit a slow period or suffer a setback.

This is a post about the previous 24 hours that have been one of the many highs that remind me that being self-employed is my way of 'Living The Dream'.

Raspberry Pi Interface Board: Part 1

Through the meetup I organise, RaspberryPint, I received a Raspberry Pi Interface board and an I2C Port Expander Kit from Quick2Wire.  These kits are self-assembly and enable lots of cool possibilities for control of the real world and protect the Raspberry Pi in case of wrong connections which could otherwise burn out your Pi - eek.

I have written a series of blog posts about assembling and using these Quick2Wire kits.

Part 1: Assembling Quick2Wire's Raspberry Pi Interface Board
Part 2: Assembling Quick2Wire's I2C Port Expander Kit
Part 3: My first project with my expanded Pi (yet to be written)

Raspberry Pi Interface Board: Part 2

Through the meetup I organise, RaspberryPint, I received a Raspberry Pi Interface Board and an I2C Port Expander Kit from Quick2Wire.  These kits are self-assembly and enable lots of cool possibilities for control of the real world and protect the Raspberry Pi in case of wrong connections which could otherwise burn out your Pi - eek.

I have written a series of blog posts about assembling and using these Quick2Wire kits. This is Part 2: Quick2Wire I2C Port Expander Kit assembly

Part 1: Assembling Quick2Wire's Raspberry Pi Interface Board
Part 2: Assembling Quick2Wire's I2C Port Expander Kit
Part 3: My first project with my expanded Pi (yet to be written)

Renaming multiple files

Have you got a folder full of files that you want to rename in the same way? If you are using Linux or Mac you can do it with one line of commands.

Raspberry Pi 6 Operating Systems

Like any computer a Raspberry Pi requires an operating system - software that allows you to do computery stuff with the hardware. Phones, laptops and even some washing machines have operating systems.  Windows is an operating system and so is Android, Mac OSX, Linux - there are hundreds of different operating systems out there.

This post describes how to install 6 different operating systems for your Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi can use a number of the operating systems available - all for free. You just need to download one and write it to an SD Card to plug in to the RPi. The SD Card is much like a hard-disk on a computer, just like Windows is installed on a laptop's hard-drive, Raspberry Pi Operating systems must be installed on the SD Card.

CentOS 6.5 Install Problem

I have recently installed CentOS 6.5 on a couple of computers, once without any problems and once with a fatal hang during install.  With both installs I chose to overwrite any existing partitions and use the whole hard-drive.

The problem during the failed install happened as the new partitions were being created. An error window including 'Unable to read group information from repositories' had a Retry button that did nothing. Google was no help (other than to say it might be a DVD read problem) but with some persistence I found a straight-forward solution.

If you get this error, power off the computer then start the installation process again. This time choose to overwrite an existing installation and CentOS will install without this problem recurring.

Easy!

Add An Existing Local Git To Github.com

Git is a great way to manage different versions of your code during development. I use it on my local machine when developing on my own but occasionally need to start working with others. This is a step-by-step description of how to upload a local git repository to github.com for sharing and collaborating.

Useful Git Commands

I've made several posts about git as I was learning to use it. This is a list of all the useful commands I found in the form of a cheat sheet.

Intro to Git Version Control

This is a simple story to illustrate how to do basic revision control with Git. I've had a couple of nightmares with Git repositories - it has been a bit of a git getting my head around how it works.

If you don't know what Git is, it's a distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) system.  It's widely used to share open source code and is great for managing your code base with speed and, if you pay at github.com private.

Uninstalling Linux Packages

Advanced Package Tool (Apt) is one of the programmes that make Linux such an awesome operating system.  It allows you to install any of 1000s of libraries, commands, tools and applications and Sourceforge have a good introduction for this.  However there is little info about how to uninstall anything and clean up properly. Vast amounts of hard-drive space can be taken up by files left over after an uninstall.  This post gives you the information to thoroughly uninstall programmes and any extra dependencies that came with them. Keep your Linux machine as clean as Mr. Clean!

Raspberry Pi Motion Detection Security Camera

We have weekly deliveries of meat or vegetables to our home that are left outside our house if we are not there to receive them.  Although they are only there for a few hours and hidden behind some planters someone noticed them and started stealing them. I decided to catch them by using a Raspberry Pi to make a really cheap security camera.

Raspberry Pi Download Git

This is a quick post on how to download a git repository to a *nix machine - in this case a Raspberry Pi. I did it to get some cool code that my colleague had interneted/clouded to download to my Raspberry Pi.