Raspberry Pi

After talking about them for weeks on end on my podcast, I finally decided to bite the bullet and order a Raspberry Pi. After all, one only costs $35 and everyone's talking about it like it's the latest thing from Apple (including myself), so what could be the downside?

The Raspberry Pi was primarily designed to help kids learn how to program. But in reality, everyone is buying them because it is a tiny computer that can be used for a wide range of applications. People have made arcade cabinets, home theater pcs, and like all platforms, web servers.

A Raspberry Pi

Unfortunately, I didn't quite have everything I needed, and needed to buy a few more things than just the Pi to get it to work. I already had a monitor, HDMI to DVI cable to connect to it, a 32 gig SD card, an old USB hub, and a USB mouse. When I actually got the thing, I realized that the Micro USB plug that's on the Pi is quite different than the Mini USB cables that I have lying around. Fortunately, a correct cable and wall plug was already well on its way. I also bought a cheap keyboard and mouse to use with it. Just to be nice, I also bought a case and heatsinks.

Getting an operating system onto the Pi was easy enough. Choosing one was really easy: the recommended one is a variant of Debian called Rasbian. I've decided my laptop doesn't really like that SD card too much (errors out after a time), but I bought an external card reader a two months ago. The USB implementation is kind of quirky. My desktop keyboard worked fine plugged in directly to the Pi, but would repeat keys if plugged into the hub. It couldn't have been a power issue, since the hub is self powered. The cheap one I bought works without incident, aside from a key literally sticking on the keyboard.

I figured out an interesting way to hook it up. Plug the hub's wall wart in (giving 2.6 amps), plug the Pi into the hub (giving the Pi power), plug the hub into the Pi (giving the Pi extra ports), then the keyboard and mouse into the hub (so they aren't using the Pi's power). Then HDMI and headphones into the Pi, of course. Its sort of weird having two cables going between the hub and Pi, but it works.

One word of warning about Raspberry Pi: its slow. Very slow. Slower than Youtube on FIOS slow. I had to alter the boot parameters to the kernel to slow down the USB refresh rate so moving the mouse around wouldn't cause an MP3 to skip like a record player.

So now its working, but as I expected, it is a solution in search of a problem. I wanted to try to run a PowerPoint on a TV at church. I figured that it would be pretty good at it (at least smooth transitions), since it has enough RAM and a good GPU. Turns out that it's not better than the laptop we already use for that purpose.

So now, I'm looking for a place where a computer would be nice to have, but a computer would be too big. That's the place where a Raspberry Pi would be ideal.

Maybe a set-top box? Use it as a Amazon Instant machine? That would probably work better if Amazon stopped using Flash already.

@Ian: Like our good friend Ryan, I don't watch TV. I don't even have a TV.

You can't complain about this anymore. It's perfect!

Since you've made it this far, you might be interested in reading:

King's Quest 6
So after toying around with my Raspberry Pi, I discovered that ScummVM supports King's Quest 6. Good thing that I kept that disc from the very first computer that the family had. I imaged this disc a few years ago, so it should be saved from bit rot. So I copied the ISO over to my Pi and fired up ScummVM.
Toilet Blog Engine, Version 8
Since I've been stuck at home for a few months, I've been updating this blog. There's been some major improvements, because the whole stack has been upgraded: the OS (Xubuntu 16.04 to Xubuntu 20.04), Postgres (9.5 to 12), JVM (8 to 11), and web server (Payara 5.191 to 5.2020.3). (There was one Payara version that enabled TLS 1.3, but it's bugged. Maybe I'll try next time!) With PostgreSQL 12, I finally have access to the websearch_to_tsquery function for searching. You can use quotes to force include something, and hyphens to exclude something. However, naively connecting trigrams to it like how I did destroys the cool functionality, so I dropped it. I've built a search suggestion feature to cover for it; try it out.
Background Text and Fake jQuery
I love having a fast website. A lot of it comes down to not having a lot of frameworks and libraries running. On my page, I only have one stylesheet, and one script. That doesn't mean that I can't get creative. My favorite is the glowing links when you hover over them. The summaries that look like rockstar autographed posters on the homepage are pretty sweet. (Those posters might be my favorite, if it wasn't for the difficulty in getting it to work just right.)
Multithreaded Rockstar AMP
Despite the fact that this blog does what it's supposed to do (I hope), I can't help but keep messing with it. I guess with my day job being mostly backend work on internet shopping websites, this is my way of venting. Sometimes, it gives me an idea of what is going on behind the abstractions beneath what I work on, like search indexes. Other times, I want to toy around doing visual design.
Responsive Images & Remote Debugging
I got a new phone last month, because the screen on my old one broke. My new phone has a 5-ish inch 1080p screen. That's means it has an insane pixel density! On my podcast, I occasionally talk about some new program that increases efficiency, but doesn't change standards and fits within existing ecosystems. My favorite is MozJPEG. It's a program that encodes JPEG images much better than (almost) all others. Since I keep high resolution images of almost all the images on my blog (and share them), I experimented.
Welcome to the New Andrew Bailey
Hello and welcome to my blog. If you've been here before, things might look a little different, especially if you came in through the homepage. I have implemented a few things I have gathered by doing research for my podcast, and several hours of toying around.