Who ate all the Pis? 10/11/2012 I want a Raspberry Pi. I must have a Raspberry Pi. My home PC is drab. My Mac Mini is dusty. My iPad, which in my case I have not got, is a fatuous slab of plastic. Let me see the glimmer of the surface-mounted LED, and smell the green, green circuit board of 'Made in China'. But a Raspberry Pi is an example of …
The odd thing is that they will sell you a model B Pi, a keyboard, a mouse, a WiFi USB dongle, a powered USB hub, a USB power supply & cable, 4GB SD card with Rasperian Wheezey installed and a HDMI -> HDMI cable for £75. Looks like you could buy the kit, throw away the Pi and be under their RRP on the other bits.
And it's the same electricity! Mind you, there was a Reg article claiming that the video output from a Mac mini was much better run though an HDMI->DVI adaptor and then to a DVI monitor than direct to an HDMI monitor. Suggesting that the audiophiles have joined the computer age. Directional monitor cables, anyone?
PS Verity, I bought a cable with an HDMI connector at one end and a DVI one at the other from eBay. Cost four quid, including postage from whatever labour camp for disobedient children in China makes 'em. Works fine.
Word documents have a habit of containing metadata revealing rather more than their senders intended, e.g. the dodgy origins of a dossier claiming that a certain middle eastern tyrants had access to weapons of mass destruction. Another example was a quotation we once received for a batch of computers sold more cheaply by the same vendor to another university. The salesman never discovered how we knew, but we got a match on the price.
I use it as a media centre myself. XBMC runs reasonably well if a little laggy sometimes. I did get the older version with less memory but dont know if the new one would fix the lag issue.
The HDMI cable is stupidly expensive but people want them so they make their money while the technology is popular. I did intend writing a few simple games for it and maybe some apps but my gf likes the media centre so much I barely get a look in. Even to watch my movies!
It isnt easy finding like minded individuals wanting to make the board do stuff so playing becomes expensive and can be hindered from only 1 persons experience.
@Annihilator - dead right. eBay for the adventurous, CPC / Farnell etc. for slightly more reputable, even Amazon Basics.
Do a bit of homework and you'll generally find that for short cables, there's little or no difference between cheap and expensive cables. Go long distance at v. high resolutions and you *might* get some issues, data rate definitely falls with distance. That said, I can happily play full HD over a 5m cable that I paid less than a tenner for.
One word on the pricey HDMI cable issue: "Poundworld". £1.99, as I recall - I have at least two of their cables, and no Pi>telly display problems with them whatsoever.
Of course, if that's one of the pound-shops that makes use of workfare: find another chain that doesn't (if one exists)...
"Anyway, after a few minutes all the old Unix skills come flooding back: typing backslashes in paths that demand forward slashes"
You think that mistyping slashes is a skill?
There was a time when bottom left to top right was called slash, and top left to bottom right was a backslash. Then DOS came along....
Real DOS experts - and real Windows Admins - know that the forward slash is just "slash". Unfortunately, the ravening hordes of Windows _users_ always get confused. "h t t p : / /" you say. "Is that forward slash or backward slash? And which one is which?" they reply. For the 20th time in the same conversation.
"It still seems ludicrously expensive to me for what is, after all, two connectors and some wire."
Yeah, and I don't know why this iPad is so expensive - after all, all it is is a load of metal, plastic, bit of silicon, all mashed together into a rectangle with rounded corners.
Frankly I'm disappointed that not only is Verity actually using Windows as her desktop OS at work, she's even admitted to using Word regularly. I feel cheated.
The highly accurate VI / fly exit comparison did make me laugh though, I trained quite a few students to use it (VI, not the window) years ago and well remember my own initial struggles!
"getting hideously stuck inside vi, unable to recall the correct exit keystrokes, and so trampling all over the edit I have just made."
That sounds like a normal vi session for me. The only thing more unbearable than vi's wonderful interface (do I hit "ESC" or ":" now?) is trying to reverse-engineer what RMS was tripping on when he wrote emacs. Nano is almost always the first thing I install on a new Linux box. It helps make life worth living as a Linux admin.
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