A tutorial (with step by step instructions) and a video demonstration will be coming out on Saturday, so stay tuned!

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!”

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!

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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

As of July 29th, Livescribe will close its third-party developer program. With cloud technology and mobile information access becoming increasingly important to our customers, Livescribe is realigning its focus and resources on cloud access, storage and services. Our recent introduction of Livescribe Connect, which enables customers to easily send notes and audio, as a pencast PDF, to people or destinations of their choice like Google Docs, Evernote, email, and Facebook, is an important step in this direction.

Applications in our online store will remain available for download and purchase pending compatibility with future Livescribe software updates. We will continue to accept applications submitted for publishing in our online store, as well as pattern credit requests through July 22nd. At this time, the SDKs and developer website will no longer be available. If your application is close to completion and you would like to have it posted in our store, please contact us atdeveloper@livescribe.com for support.

We greatly appreciate the time, effort and support you have given to Livescribe and our platform over the past three years.

Thank you again for your contributions.

Sincerely,

Joyce & Michael, Livescribe Developer Programs Team

Byron Connell, Livescribe CMO

The full announcement is available on Livescribe’s website here: http://www.livescribe.com/errors/developer.html As one of the major custom paper developers, I was rather disappointed with Livescribe’s decision as Livescribe’s platform is one that I have greatly enjoyed developing for. I get between 4-5 thousand page views a month on this website and at least half of those are from people who are interested in using my custom paper products. Within the weeks that followed, I saw many, many forum posts, emails, and comments on this website all filled with one message:

I’m a new Smartpen user. Now that Livescribe’s closed the Developer Program, is it over? Am I too late to join in and use Custom Paper?

The preceding is my paraphrased version of several Private Messages sent to me through the Livescribe Forums. Unfortunately a recent forum overhaul has prevented me from accessing any of those Private Messages and I was forced to paraphrase from my memory. At first, I was forced to tell them that yes, they were too late. But that soon changed with the release of my Custom Paper Deployment Tool. Since then, I have been getting many requests from users to develop different kinds of custom paper including music staff paper and I have been forced to tell them that I cannot simply because I do not have access to any additional pattern license. I have been directing users to this thread on Livescribe’s Get Satisfaction page: http://getsatisfaction.com/livescribe/topics/tommy-1l7gjj and asking them to add their voices to the people asking Livescribe to bring the Developer’s Program back. Jeff, a member of Livescribe’s customer support team is working internally to make sure that people inside Livescribe know that we want this. If you want the Developer’s Program back, which will allow the creation of additional applications and custom paper products, please go here: http://getsatisfaction.com/livescribe/topics/tommy-1l7gjj and tell Livescribe that! The more people that voice this sentiment, the greater the chance that Livescribe will listen to us and bring back the Developer’s Program.

New Features

• Today I am happy to announce that using the “File” –> “Open” menu options, users can manually select .afd files and deploy them using my Custom Paper Deployment Tool. Under the “Open” menu there are two options “File” and “Folder”. “File” allows users to deploy .afd files one at a time. However, if you have a directory full of files and want to install all of the .afd inside it at once, you can use the “Folder” option to select the directory with the files in it, and it will install all of them at once.
• The “Tools” –> “Smartpen” –> “List Installed Packages” function has been enabled and is now functioning. This allows users to connect their smartpen and view a complete list of all installed packages on their smartpen. This includes all Livescribe packages as well as all custom packages.

I would also like to note that as of now: http://xname.org DNS is now back in sync with all three of their DNS servers so my domains are routing correctly now. The plan is to eventually setup cname records to push out a new update (or two) with a seamless transition for user back to the install.rohankapoor.com install domain while still hosting on Amazon’s S3 platform. This should be seamless with an estimated 3 updates to the Custom Paper Deployment Tool. If you have not downloaded the new version since I changed the url, it is recommended that you do so, so as to not miss the updates.

I’ve noticed that many users are having problems connecting to the download page (http://install.rohankapoor.com) and have traced the problem with it. The DNS servers I use, run by http://xname.org are having a replication problem and the primary DNS server is serving the correct data while the secondary DNS server is serving incorrect data that is two months out of date. As far as I know, XName is aware of the problem and will hopefully have a fix soon. I’ve also noticed much higher load on my web-server as the download files are quite large and the demand is quite high.

The solution appears to be providing an alternate download location (which I will probably use Amazon’s S3 service for). Unfortunately, I am currently quite far from the my development computer and will be unable to modify the manifest file to change that location until I return. I can recommend trying to use Google’s DNS (8.8.8.8) until I am able to resolve this as it is bringing more accurate results. I apologize for the delay.

With the end of Livescribe’s Development Program, it is no longer possible for end users (or even developers) to download the SDK and deploy any of the numerous Custom Paper Products made by developers such as myself (among others). For a while now, I have been discussing the possibility of Livescribe creating and releasing a tool that installs third party Custom Paper Products to their smartpens. For various reasons, none of which will be discussed here, Livescribe did not release such a tool. I have been toying with the idea of building one myself for the last year, however I have not done so assuming that Livescribe will at some point do so. At this point, with Livescribe closing their Developer Program, it is obvious that they will not be releasing such a tool now.

The other reason I was hesitating with building this tool was that it would be coded in C# which I have had zero experience coding in before. I’m primarily a Java programmer with experience with both C++ and PHP (all of which use very similar syntax). Seeing no tool forthcoming from Livescribe and not wanting Custom Paper Products to be a product of the past (no pun intended), I finally dove right into it! I During this process, I learned that C# is nowhere near as complicated as I feared and most of the Syntax still applies from C++. With minimal googling, I was able to build a fully functional Custom Paper Deployment Tool using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 as my Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

Please note that the Custom Paper Deployment Tool is not supported by Livescribe in any way, shape or form. As the Developer Program has ended, this tool is not associated with it at all. There is no warranty (either explicit or implicit) on the tool. I do not take any responsibility if anything adverse were to happen to your smartpen because of my tool. By going to the bottom of the page and clicking-through to the installer page, you agree to the terms and conditions listed above.  This tool is available freely to all users by following the download link at the bottom of the page.

You can download the current version (1.0.0.13) from the Custom Paper Deployment Tool homepage. Further information regarding Custom Paper Deployment Tool is available there. Along with the Custom Paper Deployment Tool, I am today releasing eight 150 page Lab Notebooks along with eight 25 page Unlined Notepads. Simultaneously, I have increased the number of all notepads to eight of each type. Stay tuned for their individual release pages coming up along with individual download links. The download for Custom Paper Deployment Tool includes all of the files needed to deploy and print all 32 of these Notepads so there is no need to download them individually anymore! As with all of my Livescribe related downloads, Custom Paper Deployment Tool is compatible with both Echo and Pulse Smartpens.