Month: December 2015

Pi Zero Fired Up

There’s been a fair amount of hype in the technical press about the Pi Zero (see https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/pi-zero/) recently — and fair enough. Very cheap, reasonably powerful, and as small as you could ever imagine for a fully fledged linux computer. I’ve been showing mine off to friends and family, just because it’s been small enough to fit in my pocket without noticing it.

But what’s the point if it’s not doing something useful. Tonight I finally fired it up.

I am, in fact, writing this post on the Pi Zero.

First impressions, when I got it free with a magazine, were “wow! Tiny, cheap, powerful — the world’s my oyster!”

Second impressions were less positive. [Read more…]

Pi Zero

When the Raspberry Pi Zero appeared in the tech news, I phoned a local retailer and had them put aside a copy of  MagPi magazine for me — a computer cheap enough to come with a magazine!?

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Raspberry Pi Zero – a £4 computer (or free with a magazine!)

It will normally retail for £4 — pretty amazing. I only just downloaded NOOBS to install on it – not plugged it in yet. Slightly disappointed there’s no ethernet onboard but otherwise it looks great.

 

French Polish!

A local expert French polisher has made me up a starter kit. [THANK YOU!] I’ve got to finish the skirting at either side of our fireplace, so it’s a nice small project to start with. Instructions are thus:

  • Apply wood sealer with brush – and allow to dry
  • Sand it down smooth
  • Make up polish, adding a little pre-made stain to get the right depth of colour.
  • Apply to wood
  • …then what?  I’ll let you know how it goes

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DD-WRT Router

I purchased a new wireless router for the house — mainly to be able to install DD-WRT on it, a custom firmware. It works a treat, sitting behind my original modem-router.

I bought a Linksys E1200 v2 for just over £20 – and DD-WRT is free. Brill.

The main benefits for me are:

  • internal DNS – i.e. I can now use “nas” from any device in the house and it resolves to my internal network storage;
  • customisable firewall and logging – I am sending firewall logs directly to an syslog server running on my internal network;

There are a million other things you can do with this system. So far so good.