Working powered hub for the Raspberry Pi

A cheap 7 port Staples-branded powered hub gives my RPi problems, but a new 4 port Staples-branded powered hub works just fine.


root@raspberrypi:~# lsusb|grep -i Port
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 05e3:0608 Genesys Logic, Inc. USB-2.0 4-Port HUB
root@raspberrypi:~#


Just a random data point for people to find via google ;-)

President Barack Obama at Windham, NH (18 Aug 2012)

Yesterday I took these photos of the President Obama event in Windham, NH yesterday. They are all available under a the attribution Creative Commons license.

Full set of President Barack Obama at Windham, NH (18 Aug 2012)

Lunchtime hack

It started with my tweet this morning:


"I need a webcam on the downstairs coffee machine #firstworldproblems
https://twitter.com/MarcNo/status/227409428863926272

So I grabbed Son #1's old busted original droid, installed IP Webcam from the android market and put it in front of the coffee machine in the kitchen.



And then could see the coffee level. (hint: time to make more coffee)



With 6 kids in the house, there is no way that the hack will stay there more than a few minutes.

So I dug up a long extension cord and relocated the setup to the backyard and turned it into a "chicken cam".



Perfect.

HP Tablet running Android ICS

I picked up a 32GB HP Tablet from the firesale and have been running the stock WebOS.

In the last few weeks some of my kids have complained that the new gmail interface is no longer fully supported by the WebOS browser. Basically it won’t load unless you switch to the basic HTML version. And then you lose the gtalk chat capability – apparently the killer app for teen girls.

This morning I had one of the college kids install Android Ice Cream Sandwich (v4.0) on it. It went smoothly and works well with the exception of the camera and microphone. At the initial bootup, I connected the tablet to my google account and apps started to automatically download to it.

What is very nice is the install doesn’t overwrite the existing WebOS and can boot back to that if wanted.

The starting point for installing CyanogenMod here: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/install-android-ice-cream-sandwich-hp-touchpad-minutes/

Raspberry Pi Show-n-Tell @ManchLUG

Tonight I brought my Raspberry Pi to the Manchester (NH) Linux Users Group for a show & tell session.

Here are my slides:

• OpenOffice format



• PDF Format

For the record, some of us were drinking Lindemans Framboise Lambic Beer in honor of the topic.

ThinkUp on Raspberry Pi

Tonight I installed the cool social networking monitoring tool ThikUp on my new Raspberry Pi with the lastest debian code drop.

1. Downloaded the new (11-Jun-2012) test Debian/Wheezy image as announced on http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=8071
   
   
2. Since I'm using a new 4GB MMC card and the image was built for 2GB, ran "sudo rasp_config" to resize the disk and bias memory toward SoC instead of the video card. Rebooted. Realized it didn't reboot, pull power and boot
   



3. 
   
   3) I run a a local apt-proxy to save bandwidth, so created /etc/apt/apt.conf that contains:
   
   Acquire::http::Proxy "http://192.168.2.109:3142";
   



4. 
   
   4) Update the apt-cache:
   
   sudo apt-get update
   




5. Install useful bits:
   
   sudo apt-get install emacs screen mysql-server php5 php5-curl php5-gd php5-mysql
   
   This installs ~61M of new packages and pulls in a suitable apache server.


6. 
   Now time to install thinkup:
   
sudo -i
cd /var/www/
unzip ~pi/thinkup_1.0.7.zip
chown -R www-data /var/www/thinkup/data/
sudo touch /var/www/thinkup/config.inc.php
sudo chown www-data /var/www/thinkup/config.inc.php

   




7. point a browser to http://192.168.2.120/thinkup/install



8. Since I didn't bother to setup outbound email, need to manually
   update the thinkup table. See
   http://thinkupapp.com/docs/troubleshoot/common/advanced/directdb.html
   
   mysql -u root -p
mysql> use thinkup;
mysql> select id,full_name, is_activated from tu_owners;
+----+-------------+--------------+
| id | full_name | is_activated |
+----+-------------+--------------+
| 1 | Marc Nozell | 0 |
+----+-------------+--------------+

1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> update tu_owners set is_activated=1 where id=1;
mysql> commit;
mysql> exit;

   
   



9. Point a browser to http://192.168.2.120/thinkup and setup
   connections to your favorite social media sites.

1940 US Census presentation @ Merrimack Public Library

This evening I gave a presentation on using the newly released 1940 US Census records for genealogy research. Twenty-one people attended and my slides are available here: 1940-US-Census-Marc-Nozell-29-May-2012.pdf