[sclug] Pi has arrived!

[Pete Deas]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 02:06:00PM +0000, Neil Haughton wrote:
> Much excitement here - my Pi has finally arrived, after a delivery period
> that would have made even Clive Sinclair blush. The good news is that I was
> 'upgraded' to a  512Mb model and I expect I have the advantage of a whole
> heap of other improvements since I first ordered it (which was when
> exactly? Well before the start of my memory frame!)
> 
> My burning question is: has anyone of you actually used on of these in a
> real project, and if so, for what? I don't need to learn to programme (or
> at least I hope not - it's my living) so it needs to be something genuinely
> useful. My first thoughts are possibly a low power consumption NAS with
> Raid, but I am open to other useful ideas. I know there are websites full
> of project ideas, but I'd like to hear what sclug people have done.
> 
> Neil.

Mine has been pressed into service as a general-purpose shell server: I
keep tmux's on there for IRC, mail, and a couple other things.

The theory was that this would let me reboot to my Windows partition
with impunity and nobody would know through quit messages, etc., and
then I could use the same software I'm used to from Linux via ssh.

In practice, I haven't used my Windows partition in months, so all I've
really gotten out of it is disconnect-proof IRC when my laptop starts
misbehaving (usually when compiling a new Firefox or LibreOffice).

Nota bene: don't expect much by way of performance. For example, my
irssi sporadically lags to the point where it will queue keypresses and
insert control characters as literal control characters. Sometimes this
leads to text being sent of the form "the qiu^Wquick brown fox".

For slightly more exciting things you could do, I'm told by other owners
that OpenELEC runs excellently on an rpi these days.

- Pete

(fingers crossed that mutt's list-reply does what I expect it to)