computoman

Do  you feel as if your palmtop is a one trick pony now. Can your palmtop do all this? They can! Either through a web browser or a remote desktop viewer.  having a local web server, you can install applications that will run without the internet but do work with the local intranet.There is even software that will emulate a computer desktop. Most palmtops have terminal server clients.  With the remote desktop viewer you can access another working computer on the network be it Linux, OS/x, or even Mswindows. You start the rdp (remote desktop protocol viewer) software and then enter the hostname address. Of you will need to set up a login and password on the host for if nothing else minimal security restrictions. Once your in, you can use the hosts as if that operating system was on your palmtop! Here we have access a remote Linux computer. You can even get a remote Raspberry Pi desktop, so the RPi does not need a monitor. For more inform...

Try this at your own risk. From the kodi wiki: Follow this simple procedure: Open the receiver's plastic case using a small screw driver. Carefully pry around the case. Solder the wire to the receiver using the picture below Note: This might damage the casing of the dongle. 1 Color Coded Pinout If you're using a standard USB cable you should just be able to match the colors and solder away, but to be sure check your cable with a continuity tester according to the USB spec provided here .  Red = Positive Power (+5V DC) White = Data - Green = Data + Yellow = Unused Black = Ground (0V DC)   Normal usb connections: Pin Name Cable color Description 1 VCC Red +5 VDC 2 D- White Data - 3 D+ Green Data + 4 GND Black Ground   2 Lirc Config /etc/lirc/hardware.conf : #Chosen Remote Control REMOTE="None" REMOTE_MODULES="lir...

Ideas on holding several Raspberry Pi's together, or put them into individually stackable cases

Ever go somewhere and you need to have several systems be able to access their network, but they say all you can have is one Ipaddress. An Ipaddress is like a phone number for a computer.  You can only have one per system under normal circumstances. Here with an extra system, we will show you how to do this. A multitude of reasons exist as to why one would want to build a custom router vs. suffer with the performance, reliability issues, and limitations of an off-the-shelf solution. In the spirit of keeping this post short, I won’t launch into a long diatribe on the pros and cons of each here, but I have plenty of thoughts on this, so if you are interested, just ask. What we are about to do is configure an incredibly fast and stable router/gateway solution for your home/office in about 15 minutes. (Note: This post assumes you already have your machine loaded up with a fresh copy of Ubuntu 14.04 or an equivalent and you have the two needed NICs installed.) T his is not a f...

Now let us take a look a remote music controller called mpd. With mplayer we could do everything from the command line, mpd we should be able to use the gui on the remote machine. We will not need to use ssh here either. You will want to set up your host machines with speakers as before. Then we need to add a new piece of software called mpd. It is available for a wide variety of systems including Android. http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients $ sudo apt-get install mpd Server does not have to have gui installed. Copy your music files to the server if they are not already there. Then you will want go edit the config file for you file settings and etc. $ sudo vim /etc/mpd.conf Once you have that done, you will need to go to the client machine and install the following: $ sudo apt-get install mpc gmpc Then go to the gui menu for the  sound and video.   Choose the gnome-music-player-client. Everything is gui from there. You will need to set the servernam...

Touchpads are great. The super portable computer. You can spend several hundred dollars for the Microsoft  surface or save yourself some money if you have access to a Microsoft Windows desktop machine. All you need is a remote desktop software.  Accessing my old XP box with a touchpad. Then again you can also access a linux server with the same software. Raspberry Pi What is below the surface of your touchpad?

The Rasberry Pi or RPi for short is an amazing little unit. It can be a desktop, thin client, server, or a multitude of other devices. It is a sort of jack of all trades. At http://www.instructables.com/id/Raspberry-Pi-Jack-of-all-trades   we look at some of the options of what the RPi can do. One such option is to let the Rpi be a private eye or spy device. Compared to some the commercial video units, it is a bargain in price. Security is an important subject these days. With the RPi you can easily install yourself a spy setup without bringing in an expensive consultant. Check it out.

The Rasberry Pi or RPi for short is an amazing little unit. It can be a desktop, thin client, server, or a multitude of other devices. It is a sort of jack of all trades. At http://www.instructables.com/id/Raspberry-Pi-Jack-of-all-trades   we look at some of the options of what the RPi can do. One such option is to let the Rpi be a private eye or spy device. Compared to some the commercial video units, it is a bargain in price. Security is an important subject these days. With the RPi you can easily install yourself a spy setup without bringing in an expensive consultant. Check it out.

Old hardware can be used for doing electronics just like the Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and etc. Parallel port can be used for digital interfacing. You can use the joystick port for analog input just like the Arduino. (less accurate though). The serial port allows you to do communication.   Some vga cards even have i2c interfaces http://www.instructables.com/id/Electronic-Guides/

Simple Raspberry Pi electronics example. The Raspberry Pi per se does not have analog ports like the Arduino. though you can get converters that can be attached to the gpio or use an r2r setup. To light an led, you will need to use at least two pins. A gpio and a ground pin. You will also need an led and an appropriate resistor. Once you master these simple steps you can additional electronics and control quite a few things. Remember the gpio only uses very low voltage. Additional safety circuitry is needed for other projects. # Turn light on cd /sys/class/gpio # Turn on pin but defaults to low. echo 17 > export # Set port direction in this case we aredoing output. echo out > gpio17/direction # Set pin high and turn on led. echo 1 > gpio17/value #Turn light off echo 0 > gpio17/value ================================ Using a button Controlling the LED with the button Now let’s put input and output together, and use the state of the button to turn the ...

Watching what is going on in your own home or even at your business is becoming more and more of a requirement for peace of mind. Schools even use them to prevent and or document cheating.  Had to set up the web cams in the testing center where I use to work just to do that. You probably do not want to spend a lot of money at first. If you have a Raspberry Pi ($35 us), Memory card ($10 us) to install Debian linux,  and a cheap web cam (under $15 us), you can set up your own system very quickly.  For more information see: http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads and http://www.instructables.com/id/Raspberry-Pi-Jack-of-all-trades/ .   It is wonderful that the Raspberry Pi (aka RPi) is supported by Debian linux. There already so much software for Debian that the Raspberry Pi can take advantage of. One such piece of software is Motion. Motion is a security cam server software than does not require a gui, That is you can run Motion without a gui installed or activ...