Photo Management on Lubuntu

I was recently asked for advice on photo management software, so I read a few reviews, then set about installing gThumb.

Up till now I've avoided this kind of application, because very early photo management programs just used to save data in a configuration file or database, which was only readable by the parent application.

Organising a photo collection is very time consuming, so I want to be sure this time is not going to be wasted.

Radio Caroline on the RaspberryPi

This is a simple project to create an internet radio and music box which can be attached to your home stereo amplifier.

It is also an excuse to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Radio Caroline, a station that fueled the British popular music industry in the 1960's.

I'll cover the RaspberryPi details later, but let's start with a history lesson.

RaspberryPi Wifi: Slow To Connect

I've just wasted 20 hours of my life trying get wifi to work on a Raspberry Pi.

All I had to do was follow a previous post, and it should have worked straight away. But life's not like that!

The cause of my problem was rather unexpected, and the solution couldn't have been easier.

BirdBox Activity Counter; what can we expect?

Fitting a sensor to the entrance of a garden bird box can provide you with additional data.

But what can you expect this data to reveal about your little feathered friends?

Prompted by ConwayChallenger's recent Blue Tit Monitor, I've just been taking another look at some bird box data from spring 2011.

BirdBoxPiCam 2014; #3 Camera Modification

The RaspberryPi camera board is a great accessory, but the lens does not give a wide enough viewing angle for use in BirdBoxPiCam 2014.

So this is how I modified the camera assembly to fit an M12 board lens.

The first step is to remove the existing lens from the Pi camera without breaking something.

Don't Waste Power With L.E.D.s

I've been playing with a mixed bag of white LEDs to work out how many I need to illuminate BirdBox 2014.

As this project is battery powered, I want to minimise power consumption where possible to extend battery life.

Like all 5mm LEDs, there is no obvious way to determine what exactly they are (i.e. there are no part numbers). And as this is a mixed bag, I need to sort them by type before including any of them in my circuit.

BirdBoxPiCam 2014; #2a Activity Based Power Control Details

Following on from an earlier post, I now have a prototype circuit undergoing testing.

This seems to be behaving as expected, and draws very little current when in standby.

Just to recap, this circuit will power-up my RaspberryPi when activity is detected at the entrance to a bird box (e.g. a bird or an insect breaking the beam between an infrared source and a detector).

What is the difference between a Mapped drive and a simple network share?

The popular internet answer appears to be "very little".

 

But if you are trying to install crappy educational software on a Windows network, you may need to create a mapped drive on any local computers to get it to work.

As I discovered this week, some Windows applications appear to be written such that they expect a mapped drive, rather than simply allowing a user to use a straightforward path to a server shared folder.

Maplin's RaspberryPi GPIO Breakout Board

Just bought one of these little kits to connect my RaspberryPi to a breadboard.

Well, it was cheap...only £3.39.

I was actually looking for a set of jumper leads, and wondering whether I needed male-female, female-female or some other sexual combination, when I spotted this kit from Maplin.