Monday 31 December 2012

Setup a Raspberry Pi for the first time via a Mac

What you'll need;

  1. Raspberry Pi (Rpi)
  2. Mini USB power supply
  3. HDMI cable
  4. USB mouse and keyboard
  5. 4 GB SD Card (flash)
  6. A HDMI enabled monitor or display (or TV)
  7. LAN cable
Plug all the items in - but not the power yet. First you need to setup the SD card with the bootable operating system.

Instructions can be found here; http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup Though they sound more complicated than it is.
  1. Make sure you've given the SD Card a unique name
  2. At the terminal type "df -h" and you'll be able to look up the device name in the format of /dev/diskxsx as you will see the volume name on the right hand side is what you assigned to the SD card in step one.
  3. Download Raspbian "Wheezy" from here http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
  4. Unzip it by double clicking the zip file that you just downloaded
  5. Go into Disk Utility and unmount the partition of the SD Card, if it can't unmount it, eject it and then reconnect and do the un-mounting.
  6. Type the following in the terminal "sudo dd if=path_of_your_image.img of=/dev/diskn bs=1m" the diskn should be consistent with what you got in step 2
  7. It will ask for your password (the cursor won't scroll) press enter
  8. This kicks off the process and it take's 1/2 - 1 hour or so to do the work - a long time, and it does not indicate any progress as it goes a long. You can check that something is happening by inspecting the dd process in active processes in system monitor - to convince yourself it's doing something (you'll see the processor utilisation varying).
  9. Once that's complete then you are all set, just plug that in the Raspberry Pi and plug it into the power and you will be ready
  10. On first boot it will give you a set of options to set, do so at your pleasure




Sunday 23 December 2012

I really like the new iTunes

Things that I really like are;

  1. Browsing and playing albums is much much better now
  2. Can scroll view albums graphically
  3. Then when you play one it opens up and shows the album track list with the background colour the same as the album artwork (very clever and looks really nice)
  4. You can add albums or individual tracks to the next up list - this is brilliant as it resolves the problem of playing multiple albums that the old iTunes used to have.

Saturday 22 December 2012

How to get photos to appear in iMessage?

Photos Not appearing



Edit photos
There seems to be a bug with my iMessage on my Mac that virtually all the avatar / profile pics had disappeared. Discussing with the genius, we thought that getting rid of the contacts in the address book might resolve it - as possibly a reboot. He left me to manually remove all the duplicates whilst he went on to help other people - but he was happy for me to stay and do this. After removing the duplicates and rebooting the photos did not appear. The Genius was busy at this point. So I was playing around, and then I thought I’d try opening the photos in the address book and re-saving them. This was a master stroke, as the photos suddenly appeared in iMessage. So it was just a case of going through and re-saving all the photos in Contacts and this resolved the problem. Well almost; one message thread still didn’t contain photos when I opened the thread. But scrolling up and scrolling back down the pictures reappeared. So that is kind of a workaround for now, until Apple fix this.

How do I get rid of the duplicate contacts in contacts / the address book?

How do I get rid of the duplicate contacts in contacts / the address book?


Merge and Link

Since Mountain Lion’s Facebook contacts integration, lots of my contacts have two entries, one I created, and one created from Facebook, where iCloud did not realise they were the same person. So the resolution to this one was to select both contacts, and under the “Cards” menu item you can “merge” the contacts or “link” the contacts - this resolved all the duplicates.

Sunday 16 December 2012

Putting twitter and blogger on your website

To put Twitter and Blogger on your website use the following two sites;
Then just paste in the HTML into your site, you are going to want to play around with formatting until you get it how you want it.

See an example here; http://www.kevingordon.org.uk

Wednesday 5 December 2012

Fixing a network card on Windows 7

The problem;
- Windows 7 computer - cannot connect to wifi connection
- Cannot connect to internet via ethernet cable
- At this point I strongly suspected a hardware failure

 Diagnosing and fixing the problem;

  1. Tried letting Windows attempt to fix the wifi and the network card - this did not fix it. Tried going to the network card preferences and it was reporting that is was functioning correctly.
  2. Tried disabling the wifi card and the network card and re-enabling the network card - this did not work. To do this right click on my computer and going to hardware/devices.
  3. Tried uninstalling the network card (do not delete driver), then searching for it again. It came back and re-installed it. Plugged in the ethernet cable, the system tray was now saying "connected", internet browser wasn't giving anything. So tried run > cmd > ping www.bbc.co.uk and it could ping successfully. The retried browser and it worked
  4. Tried re-enabling wifi - unplugged ethernet, wifi still did not work, not even pinging.
  5. Tried uninstalling and re-installing the wifi card, after install it said there was a problem, but if quickly fixed itself. Then I was able to connect via the wifi. Note that uninstalling the wifi will mean you will have to re-enter and re-remember your wifi login details. 

Conclusion
So it was a software problem, and re-installing the network card and wifi fixed the problem. Done.