Roll your own Dropbox with a Raspberry Pi

January 7, 2013 | Comment

Following the success of hooking up my Raspberry Pi to my BT Home Hub the next step was to do something useful with it.

I am a very active user of cloud services, particularly Dropbox and Google Drive. Both work well but in order to gain additional space you have to pay but what if you could run your own service and add as much storage as you liked? Enter ownCloud a Dropbox lookalike that you run on your own server.

In my case the server is my Raspberry Pi and a 500gb harddrive attached providing the storage and it … Read the rest

Pi Powered

December 30, 2012 | 1 comment

The Christmas break has given me an opportunity to get leave aside the pie and get out the Pi. In doing so I have discovered a really neat way of being able to keep the device permanently powered and connected.

Our broadband is provided by BT and as part of the package you are supplied with a router called a “BT Home Hub”. I have always known that there was a USB port on the back of the hub but until yesterday it hadn’t occurred to me to plug in the Pi. Lo and behold it provides enough power to … Read the rest

Acoustic Speaker for iPhone

December 27, 2012 | Comment

Just a quick update with an interesting gadget received this Christmas, the odd looking object shown on the left. When I asked my Facebook friends what they thought it might be I received a few responses that I cannot reproduce here.

It is, however, an acoustic speaker for an iPhone or an unpowered speaker booster, if you prefer. As you can see from the picture below you shove your iPhone into the slot at the top and all sound get amplified as it is redirected out of the large hole in the front.

I can confirm that it works well … Read the rest

A Weekend Pi Project

November 8, 2012 | Comment

… Read the rest

pIO – microSD Adapter for Raspberry Pi

November 7, 2012 | 2 comments

The Raspberry Pi is a great little device – cheap enough that it can get into the hands of just about anyone and challenging enough to pique the curiosity of most. As a lifelong software developer and gadget freak I am fascinated with mine. I have decided though that it is pointless (for me) to use it for development as I have some many other outlets for that. I have decided therefore to use it to look at interfacing with hardware and have ordered a breadboard and other bits and pieces to do some simple tests. Nothing more challenging than … Read the rest

The HAND Stylus – the perfect stylus?

September 28, 2012 | Comment

I have written previously of my love of styluses. I thought that I had settled on the Kensington Virtuoso, which is a fine stylus, but it suffers from having a fat tip like every other stylus. This makes fine work, such as handwriting almost, but not quite, impossible. I had thought that the answer to this would be the Cregle iPen that uses a dongle plugged into the dock port to allow it to get much better accuracy. Unfortunately it was let down by having awful calibration and a dearth of apps.

Step forward the HAND Stylus (shown left). … Read the rest

£25? That’s Taking the Piss

September 13, 2012 | Comment

So yesterday was the big iPhone 5 launch day, somewhat of an anti-climax due to the fact that just about every aspect of the device and it’s accompanying accessories had been leaked in advance. What hadn’t been announced, however, were the prices.

As part of the “updates” to the iPhone Apple introduced a new connector to replace the existing 30-pin version that has been around nine years. While the rest of the industry has standardised on the microUSB connector Apple has introduced a new proprietary standard. Recognising that there are millions of existing cables and accessories that have the existing … Read the rest

Politically Expedient

August 8, 2012 | Comment

Steve Jobs announcing the Microsoft partnership at Macworld 1997 and that Internet Explorer was going to be the default browser on Macs:

“Since we believe in choice we’re going to be shipping other internet browers on the macintosh and the user can, of course, change their default should they choose to.”

Wind forward to 2012 and in June, when iOS6 was announced I said that the one thing that I wanted to be able to do was to pick what I wanted as the default browser. It seems that it is no longer necessary to allow users to have such … Read the rest

Jailbroken iPad

August 3, 2012 | 1 comment

Despite being the uber geek that I am for some reason I have always shied away from jailbreaking my iDevices. Partly it is because that despite some frustrations I have been happy with the standard functionality delivered by iOS and hadn’t felt the need to jailbreak it. However, of late I have become increasingly frustrated with the speed of my iPad 2 particularly when it come to web browsing which has always been tardy on my browsers of choice: iCab Mobile and Google Chrome.

So it was of immediate interest to me when I read that a new tweak had … Read the rest

Apple Branded USB Stick

June 19, 2012 | Comment

I recently wiped my MacBook Air and restored it to factory settings, a process that was necessary but added a few grey hairs to my head.

Delivered with my MacBook Air was a neat little USB stick that contained a recovery image for Snow Leopard, however, this was superseded with the introduction of Lion that creates a recovery partition on the hard drive itself. So I did the restore entirely from this recovery partition, at least that was the theory, something and I am still not clear what, went awry in the process and Internet Recovery kicked in. This simply … Read the rest