Archive for 2012
As I just posted on Twitter, I have successfully gotten my Raspberry Pi to function as an AirPrint Server for ios devices. This allows any of the ios devices connected to my WiFi network to print to my network printers which do not support native AirPrint functionality. It was a bit convoluted to set up and did require a heavy usage of the terminal but in the end it was totally worth it! It took me about 35 minutes to setup (including the 2 minutes I spent wondering why the iPhone couldn’t find the printer before I realized the WiFi was off)!
A tutorial (with step by step instructions) and a video demonstration will be coming out on Saturday, so stay tuned!
The Raspberry Pi is made by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a UK charity organization. For this reason the Debian SD card image (and presumably the others) default to the English – UK locale, timezone, and keyboard layout. For those of us in America, this is clearly not going to work! Clayton Smith excellently documents the procedure for Canadian’s in this post on his blog. I followed his procedure, replacing en_CA with en_US. To make it a little easier to follow, I have turned this into a photo-tutorial using PuTTY to remotely SSH into the device from my Windows 7 running Desktop PC.
First up is logging in, which uses the username pi and password raspberry.
Next, change the system locale from en_GB.UTF-8; to en_US.UTF-8 by running the command sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales.
Use the arrow keys to move up/down and highlight options. Use the spacebar to select/deselect the options.
Press tab to select <Ok> and then press enter.
Confirm your selection.
The Raspberry Pi will now generate the selected locales.
Now, it’s time to set the keyboard layout. Run the command sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration.
Next, we need to set the timezone. Run the command sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata.
Use the up/down arrows to select the appropriate location and press enter.
Use the up/down arrows (again) to select the appropriate timezone (closest city in your timezone) and press enter.
The Raspberry Pi will acknowledge the timezone change.
Next up is to modify the Debian packages source to use the US mirror (rather than the British one). Run the command sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list.
Change the uk to match your two digit country code (us for me).
Write the changes to disk by pressing escape and then entering :w and pressing enter.
vi (the text editor) will confirm that the changes were written to the disk.
Quit vi (the text editor) by entering :q and pressing enter.
Then, run sudo apt-get update to update the package lists with the new source.
Finally, run sudo reboot to reboot the Raspberry Pi and confirm your changes.
Congratulations, your Raspberry Pi has been “Americanized!”
I first heard about the Raspberry Pi last September and was immediately excited thinking about the endless possibilities of such a device. It truly could serve as the center of many things including a small linux server, a security camera to IP Camera converter, a small television mounted media center, and even the brains behind a small robot. At a price of $25 for the Model A version and $35 for the Model B version, it certainly is much more affordable than other such boards with this level of hardware. Both variants have a Broadcom BCM2835 – Arm11 CPU running at 700 Mhz with 256 MB of RAM and a Videocore 4 GPU. The only differences between them is the inbuilt USB hub and Ethernet ports providing two USB ports and 1 Ethernet jack directly on the board (Model B). This makes the Raspberry Pi a tremendous deal at $35 (for Model B).
After several manufacturing delays, the Raspberry Pi finally went on sale on February 29th with 10,000 available to buy. At this time, it was announced that the Raspberry Pi Foundation would not be the ones selling the Raspberry Pi (as was previously announced). To ramp up production quickly, Premiere Farnell and RS Electronics would be producing, selling and distributing Raspberry Pi’s. The first 10,000 were ordered by the Foundation and would be distributed to Element14 (Premiere Farnell) and RS Electronics when they arrived. I placed my order at Newark within minutes of the announcement, as the web-servers running the respective websites of Element14 and RS Electronics crashed. I was hopeful that I might have gotten one of the first 10,000 but cautiously so. At the end of the day, it was estimated that more than 100,000 Raspberry Pi’s were preordered.
It is now clear that there are in fact more than 350,000 preorders placed for the Raspberry Pi at this time. On Monday, I received an email from Newark stating that my Raspberry Pi had been shipped and I was ecstatic to hear that I had in fact, managed to get one of the first 10,000. After obsessively checking UPS for several days, my Raspberry Pi arrived on Thursday to my utmost delight!
After unpacking the Raspberry Pi, I burned the Debian release to my 8GB SD card and connected it all up and was greeted with… nothing. I had forgotten to actually put in the SD card (oops)! After putting in the SD card, the Raspberry Pi booted up with a proper terminal.
Next step: “Americanizing” the Raspberry Pi.
See below for a series of pictures of the Raspberry Pi and my setup!
Disclaimer: NetSDK Software provided me with a free Professional License of S3 Browser as I am a freeware developer in exchange for an unbiased review. I was going to publish a review anyway but when I was given a Professional License, I modified it to include the additional unlocked features. However, my original thoughts and feelings about S3 Browser have not changed.
With the release of Custom Paper Deployment Tool last August, my server was flooded with users trying to download it. If you have used Custom Paper Deployment Tool at all, you know that it is a fairly hefty program with more than 500 MB of required files (This is due to the 32 PDF Notepads included within). My VPS (Virtual Private Server) with 384 MB of RAM and a 100 mbps network connection was unable to cope with the stress. I was forced to restart the server once per hour and the vast majority of users were unable to successfully download the program as the Apache Web Server would cut the connection when it got overwhelmed.
Needless to say, this was not a viable solution at all! As I was searching for something cost effective with the scalability needed to handle the load spikes when many people want to download Custom Paper Deployment Tool at once, I remembered that I had been playing with Amazon’s S3 (part of the AWS platform) and that it was designed to do exactly that! After verifying that S3 would allow me to utilize Microsoft’s ClickOnce deployment technology, I next needed a way to reliably move 500 MB of data to S3 and update it as necessary.
At first, I looked at S3Fox a FireFox extension I had used back when I still used FireFox. However, I was not thrilled with the idea of firing up FireFox (in addition to Google Chrome, my daily-use browser).
This led me to look for desktop clients for Amazon S3 and the two that I tried were CloudBerry Lab’s CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3 & NetSDK Software’s S3 Browser. After trying out both of them, I decided to use to S3 Browser primarily because I preferred it’s user interface and it felt more comfortable to use (at least to me). I disliked Cloudberry Explorer’s dual pane approach (local and remote storage) as it led to confusion during my informal testing. S3 Browser allows me to upload the files I need to quickly, efficiently and reliably.
The freeware version allows you to transfer 2 files simultaneously to Amazon S3 while the Professional version eliminates that restriction and allows you to transfer as many files simultaneously as your internet connection will support. S3 browser easily allows the creation of new buckets and completely and simply manages your entire Amazon S3 account.
S3 Browser has been the perfect solution I have been looking for. So far, I have published several updates of Custom Paper Deployment Tool to S3 after testing them locally and each time S3 Browser has quickly and efficiently uploaded the relevant files to Amazon.
I would most definitely recommend S3 Browser to anyone who needs to quickly move files to and from Amazon S3. I have attached a comparison table showing the differences between S3 Browser’s Free and Professional versions as provided by NetSDK Software.
Provided by NetSDK Software
Video: Introduction to Custom Paper Deployment Tool
Over the last couple of hours, I put together a quick little demonstration of the functionality available in Custom Paper Deployment Tool. This video walk through will take you from starting Custom Paper Deployment Tool, to deploying Custom Paper and retrieving diagnostic information from your Livescribe Smartpen!
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