Playing with the Raspberry Pi - Part 1
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/03/2013 - 21:43For Christmas, I got a Raspberry Pi. This is a $35 computer that you can do all kinds of interesting things with. I'm just starting to explore the device. Here some of the things I've done, or am thinking about doing:
To start off, I bought four different 8 Gig SD cards so I could put different builds on each card. The first card is currently running Wheezy (the default Linux distribution). It is great to get a feel for the machine. I've added Pianobar and use it as a Pandora Box. I haven't started adding much else yet.
I've been downloading distributions and then installing them using the RPi Easy SD Card Setup. Yes, it is very easy to set up cards this way. The one downside is that you end up using small partitions, depending on the image you start with and whether or not there is any automatic repartitioning.
The second card has OpenELEC. A very nice XBMC distribution. I've used it as my media center, similar to how I use my Roku. Very simple. Works great. A little slow at times.
As I was loading pictures off a camera today, and it struck me that I could probably load OpenElec on an SD card in a camera. Then, when I popped the card out of the camera and into the RPi, I could view the pictures. So, I loaded OpenELEC on a 16 Gig card I have for one of my cameras. Sure enough, the pictures are then viewable in XBMC. The video, which my camera saved in .MOV format, however, did not play, although I could hear the sound. The bigger issue, was that it created an initial partition of 125Meg. I haven't found a nice way of resizing. I'll save that for another day.
However, a better approach may be to use Raspbian. That would allow me to install XBMC as well as GIMP so I could take a card out of the camera, load it in the Raspberry Pi edit the pictures, view them on XBMC or share them via Raspbian to social networks.
I also want to play with other operating systems on the RPi. I have a Nokia N900 and I'd love to get some of the development from that community on the RPi. There are instructions for loading Mer on the Raspberry, which provides a good framework for exploring Tizen as well. Likewise, I'm interested in Android on Rpi, and when Ubuntu mobile comes along, that as well.
I like virtual worlds, so I'm wondering if I can get OpenSim running on an RPi, perhaps even with a viewer loaded as a great game machine. Or, since Scratch seems to be working, can I get Croquet or Open Cobalt running.
I also read about a project to Build Your Own Google Glass-Style Wearable Computer. I started looking around and found a promising looking head mounted display, the Vuzix Corp. Wrap 920. It looks like it should connect easily to the Raspberry. For even more fun, it should be possible to connect the The PEREGRINE Wearable Interface - Medium Glove. This would make a great gaming set up.
A possible related project includes AR, Kinect, Head mounted display project which has led me to OpenKinect
So many great projects possible!
Will This Be The Year?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 01/02/2013 - 20:40Each new year brings renewed anticipation.
Will this be the year?
For some, the anticipation may take the form of dread
as they fear an apocalypse or some personal catastrophe.
For others,it may be the hope of transcendence and transformation.
I am seeking the later.The evening sky,
passing on the last light of day,
like a painting
from the British romantic landscape painters,
or perhaps the Hudson River School,
hung over the interstate
on my drive home.
Will this be the year?Yet day after day,
the drive regains its old familiarity
and too easily sinks into monotony or tedium.
Can I keep the image of the nineteenth century romantics in my thoughts as I worry about work, family, and finances? And how do I hold onto perseverance when the cherished event, whatever it might be, continues to be delayed?
Hope deferred makes the soul sick.
Yesterday, I watched Elizabeth Gilbert's TED Talk, "Your elusive creative genius".
She talked about just keeping at it, even when inspiration, her elusive creative genius, did not help carry the load. Yet in the daily grind, the just keeping at it, the repetition, there remains the opportunity for the transcendence, for the transformation to come. My mind wanders to the beginning of Samuel Beckett's Endgame:
Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.
Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap.
When does the pile of grains become a heap? When does one achieve the creative tipping point? When do the blog posts amount to something, some magnum opus?
So, I continue to write my blog posts, to explore ideas, to share, in hopes that the repetition will lead to the impossible heap, the transcendent transformation.
Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit; Resolutions and Resilience
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/01/2013 - 13:24And so, another new year starts. 2012 was a challenging one. We'll see what 2013 brings. I start the new year off, like I try to start every month, with "Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit", hearkening back to a simpler day when hopes for good luck and fortune could be invoked with a child's chant. Life seems harder now. I'm working on ways to be more intentional, to have more impact.
Before I go into my resolutions, I thought it might be good to go back and look at what I've written on New Year's Day in previous years. Last year, I wrote about wanting to improve my writing and learn new things. That's not very specific. What does it mean to improve one's writing? Is it about quantity? I wrote much less last year than I have in other years. Is it about creativity? Has my writing become more creative? I'm not sure, nor am I sure how I'd measure it. Is it having more of an impact? Again, I'm not sure, and I'm not sure how it would be measured.
In terms of learning new things, I wrote about watching TED talks or RSA animations, maybe attending some online classes. I've been doing this, and it has been good.
Two years ago, I was more reflective, looking back over the preceding years. Some of the blogging communities were more active back then and I had more comments.
With that, let me explore a few different resolutions. One resolution is to be more intentional and to try and have more impact. I'm not sure exactly how I'll go about this, and this blog post doesn't feel like it will be as intentional or impactful as I'd like. Another resolution is to be more resilient. This goes back to the Jane McGonigal's TED talk about SuperBetter I've been talking about in recent blog posts. She breaks resilience into four categories, physical, mental, emotional and social.
For physical resilience, there are some simple things. I'll try to drink more water, eat less junk and walk more. I'll work on finding small ways of building physical resilience while sitting at my desk at work. For mental resilience, I'll keep on with my searching of TED talks, RSA animations and other online material that makes me think. Hopefully, some of this will come out in my writing. Perhaps, I'll find ways of being more creative in my writing. For emotional resilience, I'll try to stare out windows more often and look at cute pictures. Perhaps I can view more great art work online. For social resilience, I'll work on more meaningful messages on social media as well as face to face.
So, that's what I'm thinking right now. What are you thinking?
You Are What You Eat, the Online Version
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 12/31/2012 - 10:19There is an old saying that you are what you eat. Normally, it is used to talk about food. Eat healthy food and you'll be healthy. Eat crap and, well, you'll be full of shit. I've been thinking about this recently in terms of our media diets. What sort of media are you consuming? When you play video games, are they making you healthier or less healthy? I've been touching on this in a couple recent blog posts about videos games. What about the shows on television?
I find that I watch very little television these days. Most of them have too much violence for me. Even shows that would otherwise be interesting, like some good science fiction, still has too much violence for me. It is a cheap way of getting audiences emotionally involved. It made me think of what television critic Eric Deggans calls the Persistent Disbelief Syndrome, another cheap trick to get viewers involved. Yes, it is challenging to create a show that is compelling and full of intrigue without resorting to violence or other cheap tricks, but perhaps we need to move away from shows that fail to meet that.
For me, I've shifted much of my media consumption online. I'm following over 3000 people on Twitter and have over 2,500 friends on Facebook. I read a lot of blogs, mostly via blog readers these days, and get a lot of information from other online sources as well.
For quite a while, I was finding blog posts to read through sites which would share who visited your blog. MyBlogLog, BlogLog, BlogFrog and others. These seem to have faded away, but I liked them. I liked the reciprocity of visiting the blogs of people who have visited you. It often made for better conversations.
Then, there were the sites like EntreCard, Adgitize, and CMF Forums. These were bloggers' ad exchanges. They still had some of the feel of reciprocity that the sites like MyBlogLog had. Most of them are gone now as well.
About the only sites that I'm really using much these days to connect with other bloggers is Empire Avenue and Triberr. Triberr leads to some good blog posts and helps drive a little traffic, but it's not especially compelling and Empire Avenue is more about sites like Facebook and Twitter than it is about blogs.
So, I'm looking for ways to find more compelling content. At the same time, I'm looking much more seriously at what I'm reading via Facebook and Twitter. Is the content I'm finding compelling? Is it building mental, emotional or social resilience, to go back to my discussions about SuperBetter? The same can be said about YouTube. Are you watching Angry Orange or TED talks?
One of the great things about online media is that it is a conversation, not necessarily just a broadcast. Each of us has the opportunity to create our own content. What is our content doing for society? Is it echoing anger filled talking points from one side of the political spectrum or the other? Is it divisive and hyperpartisan, or is it hearing what others have to say and working towards common goals?
Thinking back about the CT Health Foundation's Health Leaders Fellowship Program, I come back to key works about intent; what is your intent in what you are posting? And impact, what sort of impact are you actually having? Let's work together towards a more intentional online social media production and consumption, and let's see what sort of impact we're really having.
Uplift: What's your SuperBetter Online Score?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/30/2012 - 15:27As I sit down to write this, I find that my Klout score is current 73, my score on PeerIndex is 65, and my stock is at 229 on Empire Avenue. Klout shows my top topics to be social media and social justice. PeerIndex has news, lifestyle and the arts as my top benchmark topics and on LinkedIn, the skills I've received the most endorsements in are Blogging, Social Media and Social Networking.
Yet I have to wonder, how much does this really mean? Are these the scores that matter? I remember one person describing HITS on a website as How Idiots Track Success. How influential am I really, what sort of impact am I really having? These are thoughts I think about as I struggle with setting my goals for 2013, especially as part of the CT Health Foundation's Health Leaders Fellowship Program.
I've been writing a bit about Jane McGonigal's TED talk, The game that can give you 10 extra years of life which she calls SuperBetter.
In SuperBetter, you work on building up physical, mental, emotional and social resilience. It is a great concept and it made me wonder, what my SuperBetter Online Score would be. How often do I read a post that stops and makes me think (+1 mental resilience)? How often do I stumble across something mind numbing or brain dead (-1 mental resilience)? How often do I see something that warms my heart and causes me to want to do something good for the people around me (+1 emotional resilience)? How often do I see something that makes me want to just quit (-1 emotional resilience)? How often do I see something that makes me feel more connected to friends on line (+1 social resilience)? How often do I see something that makes me want to hide in a cave and not talk to anyone (-1 social resilience)? I have skipped over physical resilience; I'm not sure I get much for pluses or minus physically from my online activities.
Wouldn't it be great if someone came a long with a game, perhaps as a mashup of Klout, StumbleUpon and SuperBetter, where a post could be rated, and optionally shared using these scores? Instead of simply 'liking' a post on Facebook, I could say it gave me a +1 mental resilience. I could chose which posts to share based on this, and make an effort to only share those posts that are increasing resilience in whichever areas I'm most interested in at the time.
At times, I could go back and see which friends have posted things that have been most uplifting. I could thank them for it, tell others about how uplifting I find them. For people posting material generating negative resilience, I could decide if I really wanted to keep following them. Perhaps even a back propagating neural network could be added, but that's probably pushing the envelope beyond the scope of this blog post.
As Facebook, Amazon, Google and other sites continue to refine their searches and recommendations, perhaps I would start getting more uplifting content. Perhaps brands and news organizations could start promoting their material in a more uplifting manner.
I'm probably too busy to write something like this myself, but perhaps I'll find some open source tools I could tweak to get close to this. So, if someone wants to steal this idea and implement it great.
So, what sort of SuperBetter Online Score is this blog post worth?
