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
Back in December 2008 I posted a link to a tutorial on how to create iPhone ringtones. Which worked well, as long as you had the patience to pin point the timings of a track. Well since then I have had to get a little bit more ‘technical’ with my ringtone creation. Mainly because of the music I was trying to clip.. So I thought it was about time I put another tutorial together, but this time a little bit more in depth, covering all the aspects of clipping using the wave display.
Now, all you need to do is locate your MP3WavSound file through the built in menu system, or drag and drop it into the dark area in between the menu bar and status bar. Once it’s done loading the music file you should be presented with a window which looks like this (obviously this will differ for each sound file)
Using the built in menu bar you can play the track, and locate the section you want to clip. Remembering that most devices using 30 seconds of the clip for the tone. Once you have found the section you want click on the wave table where it starts, and drag you mouse whilst keeping an eye on the field under the ‘Length’ radio button until you have grabbed 30 seconds worth. You should notice the highlighted section will turn a slightly darker grey colour:
With the section highlighted, if you press the ‘Play’ button Audacity will play the section you have selected. If you are not happy with it you can move the highlighted section back and forth with your mouse until you find a section you like.
Once done simply click Edit > Cut in the menu bar, or ctrl + x on your windows keyboard (cmd + x on Mac) to cut out the section of track. Now click File > New to open a fresh project window and paste in your clipping. (Edit > Paste etc)
Check you have clipped the correct part using the play button, and once you are happy click File > Export. Give it a meaningful name and select a location for the file, in the format drop down box select “M4A (AAC) Files (FFmpeg)” and click ok.
Once the export has completed, locate the file and rename the extension from .m4a to .m4r.
Now open iTunes, select the ‘Ringtones’ sections and drag in your newly created .m4r file. All that’s left to do now is sync you iPhone, select the new file in the settings menu and your done.
So hopefully, you will never pay for a ringtone again 
Each file stored inside the local Dropbox folder contains an addition to it’s icon, in the form of a tick. This is a quick and easy way of checking the status of files in your local and remote Dropbox locations.
….. No, not A GIMP – just GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program. Everyone knows just how powerful Adobe Photoshop is, which is all well and good if you are a professional user who can claim the costs back against your companies funds.. However for the average home user, wanting to edit their holiday photo’s from Costa France, there are few alternatives that provide similar ability and tools..
Although I am starting to get used to the completely different approach of the Mac OS X, and actually starting to think it’s faultless, I still have a need for a Windows based operating system. Mainly for development works but also to run some of the apps which don’t yet have Mac equivalents.
