Finally found some time playing with a RaspberryPi and an attached PiFace Interface board to control some garden pumps and potentially an Aquaponics setup in the near future.

Requirements

• Raspberry Pi (Model B in my case, but any will do)
• PiFace Interface board (http://www.piface.org.uk)

Base Raspian (Debian Wheezy) Install (I prefer the clean minimal install via https://githutb.com/hifi/raspbian-ua-netins).

Configure the base system as per my previous base install.

As with most hardware manufacturers of hardware Foscam utility software is Windows or Mac only. The actual unit tested with the below is a FI9805E Outdoor POE camera.

Installation

The installation is relatively painless as the unit is set up to get the IP assignment via DHCP (check your routers DHCP assignment list).

https://IP.ADDRESS.OF.CAM

should get you to the web-admin interface. The default user is ‘admin’ with no (empty) password.

I have switched most of my Social Media postings to Google+ over the last year. Despite popular opinion being that Google+ is some ‘ghost town’, I find G+ the most useful environment for my particular needs & interests (specially since the introduction of groups). It has in my experience a vastly better signal-to-noise than other social media in particular Facebook.

However I would still like to feed postings through to my Twitter stream. Unfortunately Google has (stupidly / purposely / nastily) not included RSS support to make this possible without much work. There are a few publicly accessibly services out there, but they generally are either not updated or tend to fail very frequently as they hit the API Access limits as soon as they get a few users on their services.

This is the last of a series of alternative mobile OS installs and the easiest install by a country mile !

Install

Everything is quite well documented here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Install.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:phablet-team/tools
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install phablet-tools android-tools-adb android-tools-fastboot
phablet-flash ubuntu-system --channel devel --bootstrap

That is it really ! This is how a OS change on a mobile should work !

Issues

Ubuntu touch can not yet handle the radio firmware past Android 4.3 devices. So if your N4 was upgraded to Android 4.4 (KitKat) you need to flash the radio to the Android 4.3 (up to Version 2.0.1700.84) else WIFI will not work.

In my never ending quest to find the ideal text editor here is another installment. Since I have been using VIM as my default command line editor for years I thought I give it a try for basic GUI editing as well.

Install and set desktop app & icon

sudo apt-get install
vim vim-gnome
sudo wget --output-document=/usr/share/applications/gvim.desktop https://raw.github.com/leogaggl/misc-scripts/master/gvim.desktop
sudo wget --output-document=/usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/gvim.svg http://gfxmonk.net/images/vim-logo/vim-logo.svg
sudo update-desktop-database

Set MIME defaults

vim ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list
#add or edit the following mime type and add others as needed
text/plain=gvim.desktop;

I just had one of my old hand-me-down phones returned by my offspring in a great condition (junior is very careful with his equipment – well done young man !). This doesn’t happen all too often shows that the Nexus S is a decently built phone. This is also a good example of breaking the built-in obsolescence of modern phones. This particular unit has served me well for nearly 2 years (my average is one year) and served 2 kids after that.

I am currently looking into the use of Django for one of my extra-curricular projects and needed to set up a development environment on Ubuntu. This is the log for future reference and hopefully useful for anybody needing to do the same.

Dependencies & Django Installation

Core Dependencies & Django

sudo apt-get install apache2 apache2-mpm-itk libapache2-mod-wsgi mysql-server python-django python-mysqldb

Optional add-ons

For my purposes I need a few more additional modules

There are several reasons why you might want to run different Apache Virtual Hosts as separate users from the Apache user account. My most frequent usage is on my development machine to allow running from my home directory.

The most commonly recommended option for this purpose is MPM-ITK (a quick hack would be to add yourself to the www-data group using “sudo usermod -a -G www-data USERNAME”)

sudo apt-get install apache2-mpm-itk
sudo a2enmod mpm_itk

Modify the virtual host config file in /etc/apache2/sites-available

One of the annoying things with Synology NAS servers is the fact that a video file moved to the filesystem does not automatically appear on the DNLA share on client devices. It needs a re-index of the media files.

You can log into the HTML Admin Console and start a re-index, however this will be a full re-index and most likely take ages to complete. A quicker way is to connect to the SSH Console and issue the following command:

With the demise of the Medibuntu repository and libdvdcss not being hosted in the main Ubuntu repos due to licensing issues a new repository is needed from 13.10 upwards. Thanks to the good folks at VideoLAN (makers of the awsome VLC Video Player) there is a ready and updated source available.

wget ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/debian/videolan-apt.asc | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/debian/stable ./" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/libdvdcss.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:rolfbensch/sane-git
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sane sane-utils imagemagick tesseract-ocr pdftk libtiff-tools libsane-extras exactimage wput

Install scanbuttond

Download the “Debian Experimental” package from http://pkgs.org/download/scanbuttond

sudo dpkg -i scanbuttond_0.2.3.cvs20090713-14_i386.deb

This step is only for the Fujitsu ScanSnap support. For other scanners you can probably install from the Ubuntu Repository

Scanner config

vim 40-libsane.rules
#add this line
ATTRS{idVendor}=="04c5", ATTRS{idProduct}=="11a2", ENV{libsane_matched}="yes"

Permissions

sudo adduser saned scanner

Useful command lines for troubleshooting

Since I had a few trouble getting this scanner to work properly I found the following commands highly useful in locating the issue.

Whilst EVINCE is a very capable PDF Viewer, if you have a need to fill in editable PDF forms it is required to install the Adobe PDF Reader.

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ precise partner"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install acroread

PS: If anybody is aware of an Open Source alternative to the Adobe Reader for editable form please leave a comment !