Happy Spring

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Happy Spring in the New York area!  I feel terrible about not updating this blog recently.  I bought a few more .com’s with the hope of blogging more, but in fact I’ve done less!  Each day when I come home I feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day. Don’t we all feel that way?    Perhaps the trick is to go to the library, or another place where I can focus on writing, for both my own sites and the Gadgeteer.  This should help me queue up some blog posts and get the ball rolling with some of the ideas I have!

 

I’m a Gadgeteer!

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My college friend Jackie Cheng informed me about audtions for The-Gadgeteer.com, a gadget reviews and news website by Julie Strietelmeier.  I figured it was worth a shot to try out, and after a couple of weeks – HURRAY, I was accepted!  I now will get to do gadget reviews of my own, as well as post news stories on anything I find interesting.  So far it’s really taught me a lot about writing, reviewing, and editing what I post.  Strangely, I never realized how much work it actually was to write professionally and give my opinions on a product.

I can’t wait to contribute more!  Thanks for the opportunity Julie!

MK802 Mini Android PC

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Today’s “hack” comes to you by something I saw on one of my fave podcasts from Hak5.  I decided to purchase the MK802 from Amazon.com for only $35 USD! There are newer models with slightly different hardware, but this one was cheap enough for me to want to play with.  

For my first try, I followed the instructions from this forum over at Rikomagic.  I did have a bit of trouble downloading the Lubuntu image since it was so big, but after a few tries I got a successful image.  I was able to boot into it from the micro SD card, and viola, Lubuntu on my (other) $35 PC!  I definitely recommend giving this fun PC a try, since it’s so affordable and pretty easy to install other OS’s if you don’t like the default Android OS that’s on there (it comes with Android 4.0).

 

Android to Ubuntu

 

 

 

Happy New Year!

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Resolutions

Happy new year 2013! I have many resolutions this year, as many of us do.

1. Start blogging more – at least once a week!
2. Keep myself busy with my new laptop and projects (this ties into number 1).
3. Save money and pay off debts – this one is pretty common for many of us. I think not going out when not necessary will help since I often get bored during lunchtime at work. Preparing my lunch at home will have some benefit. It will help me save money, and let me work on a project for an hour. Maybe I can focus on drafting some blog posts then via my laptop or iPad.
4. Lose weight, which will be a very gradual process. It’s winter now so tougher to keep active outside, but I’ve set up a nice treadmill with laptop and headphones in my basement that I need to take advantage of every evening. When the weather gets warmer, I hope to start training for a 5K race outside – or at least be more prepared for Warrior Dash this August :)

EDIT:  I’ve added 5. Take a photo a day for the entire year of 2013 from any device (iPhone, camera, etc). Will I be able to do it?  I’ve made a collection on my Flickr account!

What are your resolutions?

Raspberry Pi with BerryWebServer

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Today I decided to install a new OS onto my Raspberry Pi, since I want to try it out as a light web server for a local blog or website.  After reading the raspberry.org site, I gave BerryBoot  a try.  I unzipped the required files onto my formatted SD card, and booted up the pi.  I chose the OS BerryWebServer that gave me the option to install Lighttpd + PHP + SQLITE.  Perfect, or so I thought!

When I installed everything, it booted and let me change my default password. It gave me the web address of the Pi, and I went ahead and FTP’d into my new pi web server from another machine.  Since this install doesn’t come with an SQL manager, I installed PHPLiteAdmin.  I ran into a few issues after uploading my wordpress files and edited my wp-config.php to match my server:

Although this installation is running SQLite, WordPress needs to be told this specifically since it uses MySQL by default. We need to install the PDO (SQLite) for Wordpress plugin.

To install PDO For WordPress we need to:

  1. unzip the files in your wp-content directory. The structure should look like:
    wp-content
    ->plugins
    ->themes
    ->pdo
    db.php
    index.php[maybe]
    Then in wp-config.php, right after the define(‘COLLATE’,”); line, we need to add

 

define(‘DB_TYPE’, ‘sqlite’);    //use sqlite

After much trial and error, I still couldn’t get my database installed properly.  I was puzzled by the fact that phpliteadmin couldn’t see the database WordPress would have created, as well as why I couldn’t log in once I WAS able to run the install.  I found my answer here:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-pdo-sqlite-for-wordpress-does-not-give-the-password-on-install-in-301

Turns out I had to add

function wp_install($blog_title, $user_name, $user_email, $public, $deprecated=”, $user_password = ”)

then

$message = __(‘Note that password:’ . $random_password . ‘ carefully! It is a random password that was generated just for you.’);

in the file  ”wp-content/pdo/wp_install.php”.  After that, I was able to see the randomly generated password on the page, and log in with that.  (This will happen even if you do choose a password.)

 

I then found out after all this that the PDO plugin wouldn’t really work unless I went back to WordPress 3.1.2!  Someone says that if you update WordPress after everything works, it will stay working as it should.

Either way, I’m happy I persisted, and now have my very light PiServer running at home :)

 

 

Military Studded Backpack

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I was browsing one of my favorite stores online the other day, FreePeople.com, and noticed an amazing distressed, studded backpack. Noticing that this backpack was pretty expensive, I decided to try to make the same on my own!  These are the items I purchased:

Rothco Khaki Vintage Backpack

2 x 100 pack of conical studs

and lots of time and patience!  It took me about 10 hours, studding by hand total over a couple of weekends, but I really love the way it came out! I decided to not mess with bleach and/or dyes – but I think it would have come out much better if I did.

Backpack from Freepeople.com:

Bess Marlow Studded Backpack from FreePeople.com

 

And my own creation:

My own hand studded backpack!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All for 1/10 the price, and the satisfaction of DIY –  I definitely recommend anyone else giving it a try!

 

 

:D

Boxee alternative

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I recently wanted to catch up to all of my podcasts that I’ve missed due to my recent trip to California (post and photos coming soon!), so I fired up my HTPC/Server, only to find out that Boxee for Windows no longer runs properly on my machine. The software will run, but no internet content will be downloaded.  I ensured internet access was running on my server, and no go.  I know that they stopped supporting Boxee on the desktop a while back due to wanting people to purchase a Boxee box, but I figured I’d hold off since I didn’t want to purchase another box just for that.

So now I need to look into another alternative.  I really liked Boxee due to it’s easy to use interface, including being able to view popular apps to stream podcasts and TV shows.  I’ve heard of XMBC, but never gave it a proper shot.  So I proceeded to install XMBC, and finally took the time out to check what it has to offer. I was looking mainly for ability to stream my favorite podcasts online.  I discovered that I can install TONS of video plugins, including my favorite channel on Revision3.  I also like that it can run on any popular OS, including Mac, Windows and Linux.  I’m very  happy!