So today saw the launch of the long awaited Raspberry Pi Model B.. This small yet perfectly equipment little circuit board is almost certainly going to change many peoples lives.. Booting from an SD card the Raspberry Pi is currently able to support a hand full of Linux Distributions, including Raspbmc, OpenELEC, Debian GNU/Linux, Fedora, Arch Linux.
“So what?” I hear you cry.. Well look at it this way, how many other functional machines can you get for a mere £21.60! Sure, the Pi looks tiny, but check out the list of features below..
Features
- Broadcom BCM2835 700MHz ARM1176JZFS processor with FPU and Videocore 4 GPU
- GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
- GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure
- 256MB RAM
- Boots from SD card, running the Fedora version of Linux
- 10/100 BaseT Ethernet socket
- HDMI socket
- USB 2.0 socket
- RCA video socket
- SD card socket
- Powered from microUSB socket
- 3.5mm audio out jack
- Header footprint for camera connection
- Size: 85.6 x 53.98 x 17mm
Not only that, put the Pi supports AirPlay, making it a cheap customisable stand in for the Apple TV devices.
Popular desktop based applications have already been ported over to Raspberry Pi including XBMC, which as you can see from the YouTube video below suits the device perfectly!
That’s the exciting stuff out of the way, now for the bad news.. This device is almost certainly going to sell out in seconds.. So if I was you, I wouldn’t get my hopes up of getting one too soon. However to stand a better chance, you might want to register over at RS Components website, who will let you know when there available
When I very first got my Mac I loaded up the OS X Dashboard with countless widgets, doing all sorts like checking share price levels to little puzzle games. However, I soon started to realise that some of my dock items where hogging precious memory, and stealing CPU cycles.. Not to mention the fact the only time I saw the widgets was when I accidentally ended up in the dashboard view.
Because of this I have been looking at ways to disable the Dashboard all together, sure, it’s a cool place to hand out, and a nice party trick.. However I’d much rather have the free memory and CPU cycles!
So, if you’d like to disable OS X Dashboard, launch a new Terminal session fro the utilities folder and copy/paste in the following commands:
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
As the Dashboard Process is controlled by the Dock, you will also need to relaunch the dock, to do this simply copy and paste the following code into the terminal window:
Killall Dock
As with all of the terminal tutorials I post they are easy to reverse, to re-enable the OS X Dashboard:
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO
Then you will once again need to relaunch the dock:
Killall Dock
It really is as simple as that..
If your a heavy user of the iPhone Mail application, I’m sure you’ll know just how much of a pain retrieving half written draft emails can be.. Half way through typing up your email a notification comes through, forcing you to have to save it to drafts, only to have to stumble through mountains of folders and sub-folders to find it again.
Well.. Luckily Gizmodo have come up with a quick tip to save lots of time.
In the mail app press and hold the compose button, this will launch your most recent mail draft and not a blank mail..
Sure, it’s not perfect.. An the iOS mail app needs lots of work in my opinion! But it’s tips like this that keep the road warriors happy!
If you’ve got any more iOS tips let me know in the comments section below.
Unfortunately this has now expired. Please check back soon for a new code.
The kind folk over at SurgarSync have recently come up with a cunning plan to make you ‘cloud’ storage users very happy people! They are offering a massive 50% off the subscription plans, however this offer is only available until Feb 29th 2012. The chart to the right is the current pricing structure before the discount. So for the 30GB storage plan, you’d only be paying $24.99! What’s more, if you take out a subscription plan, and then change your mind, as long as you cancel within the first 30 days you won’t be charged. That’s right.. Not one penny!
SurgarSync is rapidly becoming top of the game in cloud based storage.. If you’d like to see how SugarSync measures up against is competition check out this chart
If you have not yet had the pleasure of checking out the SurgarSync client I strongly recommend you do. I personally prefer it to the DropBox client.
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Traceroute is an important part of any IT experts toolkit who’s worth his salt.. Traceroute enables you to track down potential routing issues between your Mac/PC/Device to your Router/DNS Servers/Web Host.
If, like me you migrated over to Mac from a PC, you will be used to launching a command prompt and firing off the tracert command. However, in OS X the command is slightly different. Some may say it makes more sense..?
To use OS X Traceroute you need to launch a new terminal session, to do this open Applications > Utilities and click terminal.
When the terminal has launched simply type Traceroute followed by the address you want to trace the route to. So for example, if you wanted to check how your devices browser gets to Google.co.uk you would type:
Traceroute www.google.co.uk
Your mac will then resolve Google.co.uk to it’s IP address, and then trace each ‘hop’ from your device to the address. This can be very handy when trying to figure out if the routing issue is your equipment, your ISP’s equipment or the web host it’s self.
