What can I say, my Raspberry Pi camera arrived today, and here it is, looking out my window
(click on camera)My Raspberry Pi camera arrived, look out my window
(click on camera)
DIY server
(click on camera)My new Clevo W240EUQ Laptop from PC Specialists
This is the Laptop I have moved to. No longer a Mac user, never more than a PC user and never a Windows fan. I’m now entirely into my custom built Clevo W244EUQ laptop, built to my configuration by PC Specialist in the UK. Having done a lot of research and agonizing over prices and parts, my system was constructed and sent to me in, call it 10 days including shipping and weekends. And yes I’m writing this post from it. and I’m doing it from Mint 13 with the Cinnamon interface. Everything works, with the single exception that the SD card reader is not picked up. It also has one ‘hot’ pixel which only shows up during boot time, and I can live with that. I was amused and gratified that the laptop was NOT an exact match to the photos on the PC Specialist site, but I don’t think it was their fault as the Clevo site have many different configurations of this model laptop. On the positive, the laptop is better looking, and has a better keyboard than shown in the Clevo or PC Specialist photos. Mine photos are included below, though the first one isn’t perfect, because the top cover is so black that the auto focus couldn’t lock in.
The Specs are not stunning, about the same as a MacBook Pro. A Intel i5-3210M processor, 8 GB of ram, a 500GB 7200rpm disk with 16MB cache, 14″ screen 1366/768 HDMI, 1000 base ethernet, A/G/N Wifi, 2 USB 3 and 1 USB 2 port and a (currently) non-working SD Cardreader.
UPDATE:
Benchmarks
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CPU Blowfish 4.070
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CPU CryptoHash 343.235
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CPU Fibonacci 1.819
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CPU N-Queens 5.411
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FPU FFT 0.972
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FPU Raytracing 3.688
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The Raspberry-PI Blinks too!
The Raspberry-PI is now operating like an Arduino, sorta, just not as easily or with as many GPIO ports as the Arduino.
My Chosen ‘Case’ for my RaspBerry-Pi
My Case of choice arrived for my Raspberry-PI today and it looks, and works fine. As I fancy myself as a ‘Maker‘ I chose this case from www.skpang.co.uk
Now which wire is connected to what pin??? The knee bone is connected to the jaw bone HOW, via the foot?
My New Computer
My new computer…
Now where did I put that soldering iron….
Rejected out of hand!
I find it amusing that after I submitted my sites to the Social Media Award section of The Irish Web Awards none of them has even been visited. Rejected before even viewing them. That either is an indication, that your efforts are not worthy of examination, or that you are not acceptable. While none of my sites has ‘hit the big time’ it’s not a precursor to exclusion.
What do you think:
- Idea Forecasting (@ideaforecasting on Twitter)
- Querynet (@querynet on Twitter)
- Fleeting Thoughts (@fleetthoughts on Twitter)
A Picture of a DYI Server
This is a mythical DYI home server that just might be in my house.
Twitter Marketing
I’ve been browsing the Twitterverse for anyone discussing ‘Ideas’ or Forecasting and I’ve started following them using the @ideaforecasting twitter account. I’m hoping to stimulate some interest, or at least some hits on the ideaforecasting.com site. We’ll see. My expectations are high, but I’m not deluding myself, there may be no reaction. I believe that it may be true that any marketing solely dependent on Twitter, will fail. I’ll followup on this by blogging this over time.
Free Beer, not a good advertising campaign
In the area of advertising, outside of posting nude pictures of celebrities and offering Free Beer I’m out of my league. When I talked about my new projects to the Open Coffee Cork gang, I got what I thought was pleasant interest. But outside of the amusing use of my @querynetTwitterBot asking about jaegerbombs, no one else bothered to visit my projects.
I have been seeking any feedback on Idea Forecasting, Query-The.net (@querynet) and fleetingthoght.com (@fleetthoughts) but if I can’t get a reaction from a more or less friendly crowd, it’s unlikely to get much of a reception from anyone else.
SEO and the Robot Races
If you have been paying attention to this site and my attempts to join the ranks of the super wealthy.
I created a DIY Server which sets under my desk at home, connected to a modest DSL line with crappy uplink speeds. It currently hosts five (5) domains, but is essentially unadvertised on the internet and yet I still get visited by up to 10 Robots repeatedly every day (see below) in the form of GoogleBot, Yahoo Slurp, MSN, MSN-Mobile, Baidu and other miscellaneous Curl and Java skimmers.
So what is it that a SEO specialist do, that won’t happen completely natural just by putting any domain up on the internet?
Creating ANY content, or rather interesting content will draw down the bots onto you site, the job of SEO is easy, content creation is the hard part. Let me know what you think.
My Query The Net Project – Part One
My current project, query-the.net now has a prototype, but you don’t have to visit the website, which is more or less a placeholder. Instead, use your favorite Twitter client and direct a question at @querynet {and a question} and wait for a reply. You should (assuming it’s working) get a Twitter response to your query. It’s currently only sending responses every 15 minutes so don’t expect an instant response. Let me know what you think.
I’m at it again.
I must look like I’m out to buy up all the free domains in the internet, now I possess the mighty domain query-the.net! Now what to do with it, not a problem, I just have to make it happen. I hope I’m up to it.
More Fleeting Thoughts
My new project fleeting Thoughts has more or less grown out of my other project, Idea Forecasting! However Fleeting Thoughts is a lot more modest.
Fleeting Thoughts is a Twitter related application. The basic concept is that most Twitters are temporal and transitory communications. But the thought came to me that some of your twitters might best be preserved, bookmarked, in a way that you can retrieve them. So the basic Idea of Fleeting Thoughts is that if you add @fleetthoughts to any tweet, either as a reply, or added to a re-tweet that ‘thought’ will be captured and saved on the site http://fleetingthoght.com (yup, misspelled) and sorted by owner, where they can be viewed latter. The can even be commented on by either the owner, of other visitors.
Give it a try, Twitter It 🙂
When having a Fleeting Thought, spell check.
I was thinking, or rather having, a Fleeting Thought and decided that I had a great idea, so I sought to buy the domain fleetingthought.com, and didn’t realize I’d mistyped the name, so now I’m the proud owner of fleetingthoght.com, 🙂 you can see now, how Fleeting my thoughts have been lately. It actually might work out anyway as the real domain owner of fleetingthought.com is little more than a squatter.
The substance of the Idea is sound, and I’m building out the Thought now as another project. It’ll be associated with the Twitter Client @fleetthoughts. And when I finally organize my thoughts properly, I’ll write more about it.
ZFS, Boot Zones and data loss
Note to Self: One must remember not to accidently pull the power cord out of your OpenSolaris server.
Somewhere between the sudden power down, and booting into different Boot Zones my MySQL database has lost records and the Apache HTTP server logs are missing whole time periods in the access logs. I have been digging through the OpenSolaris Bible looking for a reason the data is missing. There appears to be no ZFS snapshots missing, and MySQL show there have been no deletions from the tables and they aren’t corrupt, the Data in the logs and MyISAM records are just missing.
I can point to the File buffering of the file system for the loss, except for the fact that the MySQL database records have been in the database for days, and the Apache Logs have lost whole days worth of records.
I’ll keep you posted, if I find out, as this does not bode well for OpenSolaris if it looses data. In the mean time I’ll be more careful of the power and switch the power connection to the Telecom USP.