Smogged Salmon

Anyone up for some smoked salmon? Just hang a piece of that raw fish outside together with your laundry and voila!!! You get smoked salmon, literally speaking :)

*Picture courtesy of NASA

Preparing Your SD Card for Your Pi

Ok. So now you have your Raspberry Pi with you and an SD card on standby as well. What's next? 

Naturally the next step will be to burn the image file of the Linux that you are going to run on your Pi into your SD card. Oh by the way, make sure that your SD card is of 2GB or larger. Else, the Linux system won't be able to fit in unless you custom-make one yourself :)

Here are the steps to start 'baking' that SD card of yours :)

1) Format your SD card to a normal FAT filesystem. 

2) Click here for the download links. For beginners, I would suggest that you install the basic Raspbian "wheezy". 

3) So once you have the file downloaded, plug the SD card into your system and if you are running a Mac, under Disk Utility, click on the Info button to get the drive identifier of the SD card. It should be in the form of "diskX".

4) Then fire up Terminal, go into the superuser mode via the command sudo su and enter your password.

5) Enter the code dd if=/Location/*your-downloaded-image-file* of=/dev/diskX

The process might take a while and once you're done, you can now safely eject your SD card from your computer and plug it into your Pi. And voila!!! Your Pi is alive!!!

If you've connected the Pi to a monitor/TV via the HDMI cable, you can see the console startup process and once it's loaded, enter the username pi and the password raspberry to log in. After that, depending on what you wanna do, for instance you can start by typing out the command startx to go into the GUI desktop of the Linux system.

So, basically that's it to get your Pi working for the first time.

Happy programming and Pi-ing :)

Back to Geek Life

I've been watching a lot of "How I Met Your Mother" and "Big Bang Theory" lately. And naturally, while watching them, I was reminded of my life not too long ago where I was literally a geek with my endless experiments on technologies.

And honestly, I missed that life. Man... talking about the things that I had to give up once I started working. 

So, I've embarked on a quest to re-live my geek self, trying to be myself again.

The first thing that I did was to get myself a Raspberry Pi. Yep, you heard that right, a Raspberry Pi. No no no... not an edible pie, but rather a mini computer the size of a credit card. Fascinating. Really.

It runs on Linux, USB ports, an Ethernet port, HDMI output amongst others and it just needs a mini USB port for power. It even has 26 pins for GPIO purposes. Awesome! Couldn't wait to make it perform some geeky tricks. It's really like getting a dog and training it to do tricks :p

Anyway, it costs a mere RM111, which is not expensive IMHO for a development kit with the limits being my imaginations and programming skills. The only thing that I don't really fancy about it is that it came in a pink box. 

So I was off learning programming again!! Yippeee!!! And this time it's Python as well as the loads of hack-styled Linux command lines :)

As I progress along, perhaps I shall share some codes here on this site as well as codes shared by others :) No worries, credits shall be given to the rightful generous souls who showed the way :)

In the mean time, wish me Happy Programming!

Cheers