[Ed P]

Corrosion/bad earthing can really screw up sensors, and is something to investigate if more than one sensor is involved.

[Ed P]

Dan, given your interest in using Blender, I wonder if a Ryzen might not give you much better bang for your buck. link

Since this was published Ryzen have upped their game very substantially. link

I have a Ryzen 7 1800 (old stepping) and I am very happy with it. I’d be even happier if I had left it until the Ryzen 2 series had come out! I’ve also got an AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100 which was said to be a good graphics workstation GPU with good general capabilities including VR.

[Ed P]

World Cup Footie – more like World Wide Wrestling! link

The grappling to the ground of Serbia’s Mitrovic’ by two Swiss players shows that VAR still does not overcome the dangers of apparently biased match officials. Too much gambling money is involved in Football to allow such antics to go by without full investigation.

[Ed P]

From experience, setting up an SSD boot on a Pi requires a little bit of art. I do the following, but there may be better ways.

a) I use Linux and GParted to format the whole drive as Fat32. Windows will not let you do this without using the command line.

b) I then use Win32DiskImager.exe to burn the .img file onto the SSD

c) I then boot the Pi3B with the SSD installed. If a Pi3B is used it just works. For a Pi3 the mobo needs initialising first link

d) Allow it to boot twice as it does something with the boot partition.

e) After the second boot, change the Pi password and expand the partition. It will say it does not know how to do it, but ignore the warning as it ‘probably’ sets a flag.

d) I then shutdown, remove the SSD and use gparted to expand the Home Pi partition,

e) Reinstall the SSD then use as normal.

I’m not sure if all these steps are required but when I follow them it works whereas I’ve had failures when trying shortcuts. I recommend using the ‘official’ power adapter as I’ve had problems with Chibay ones.

[Ed P]

Steve, I find that my phone (a Wileyfox) also does a variable rate charge, and cuts right down to a slow trickle charge above 80%. One year on, the battery seems to have a very similar performance to its original.

Battery management is an art, and some phone makers unwisely save a few pence in this area. I do agree that the worst thing you can do is to allow the phone battery to go below 20% (ideally not below 50%).

[Ed P]

I suspect that like all jumps in technology it owed much to its many predecessors not  least the French Jacquard Loom.

Unfortunately as usual we failed and continue to fail to honour those who got their hands dirty and did all the real work. Probably the one person we should have honoured was all but forgotten — Tommy Flowers.

 

[Ed P]

LXDE is my choice for old systems. Not perfect, but reasonably flexible. It is also a good intro to the Pi environment.

However if you care to challenge yourself, try E17. It happily runs on old systems but give it a new system and configure it up to the eyeballs in its Bodhi-Moksha incarnation and it can produce mind-blowing results. link

My only criticism is that as it is bleeding edge be prepared for crashes – not a production environment imho.

[Ed P]

I should perhaps have said that this problem is most noticeable when trying to use the Pi to listen to BBC Radio. TV seems OK, but Chrome treats audio-only streams differently.

[Ed P]

It might, but it would lose a kitchen socket

[Ed P]

To completely fix it I guess we really need a rehash of the Pi mobo and action by Broadcom (unlikely). We probably have to wait for Pi4 to do all this as the Pi foundation only uses hardware which is stable and available for many years. (i.e. far from cutting edge). Software changes in Raspbian are also required such as a rewrite of bluealsa and/or elimination of the dependency on alsa

However the cobbled fixes I gave do eliminate the main issues of unacceptable stuttering/crashing by the Bluetooth audio system.

[Ed P]

It will be interesting to hear Dan’s thoughts, but when I had some capital gains which were well below the allowance I was going to include them as a notation, but my accountant said, absolutely not. If you volunteer unnecessary info to HMRC you never know when it will come and bite you in the bum, were his exact words!

[Ed P]

Side walls only look about 3 metres high (i.e ladder jobs) that is why my first thought was wire suspension; Unfortunately this is NOT a cheap solution ~£1500 link

It dos however offer a lot of flexibility and it may offer a trade-off in terms of numbers of cameras.

[edit] Back on cheese, when I was a European traveller the Cypriots swore that Halloumi was the most healthy cheese you could have being made from sheep/goat milk it was most like human milk (apparently you can give this milk to babies who are allergic to cows milk).

I don’t much like ricotta but it is another cooking cheese rather like cottage cheese. Might be a good substitute for yoghurt in mild curries!

[Ed P]

Young, Walker and Sterling were all rated as liabilities by the Beeb.

Sterling has been very disappointing compared to his City performance, he is probably trying too hard. He needs a goal or two to lift him out of his rut.

[Ed P]

They probably introduce pauses to allow the passing of the semaphores of a thread. (e.g. don’t interrupt, ready to pass data etc)

[Ed P]

I’m not sure what you see as the problem.

I get the impression that wall mounting is impractical, if so then ceiling suspension seems the obvious solution.  Either use a pole down from a roof strut, or go the sports viewing system using wire suspension. The latter may offer advantages in being relatively easy to adjust the camera position. link

[edit] Fry the Halloumi. It is the king of fried cheese. (nasty when raw) recipes

Try a Google on ‘suspended camera systems’ for other ideas.

[Ed P]

Agree with PM. You don’t need it for your purposes.

For fixing I just use a couple of dabs of clear Silicone glue from my bodging kik. As Dave says the SSD weighs nothing and has no moving parts, though a good airflow can help life.

[Ed P]

Bob, if you want ‘cheap’ then just connect a usb dvd player to the Bravia link

[Edit] Scrub that, apparently it does not work with PC DVD add-ons.

[Ed P]

I’m in a DAB dead spot. I would have to put in a dedicated DAB roof antenna and cabling – obviously a non-solution!

[Ed P]

Unfortunately the usb solution is too slow. This is really a Chrome hog problem, but what happens is that Chrome gets into a problem writing to the usb cache which results in the Bluetooth speaker going into an unrecoverable under-run state. A cobbled fix(non-ideal) is to use yet another usb stick as dedicated swap.

I agree a Eth0 solution would be ideal but unfortunately the kitchen location does not have an Ethernet socket anywhere near it.

[Ed P]

The only time I have (in the past) noted odd formatting was after importing from a Microsoft docx file. I’ve not had cause to do this for a while.

[edit] Duke is correct LibreOffice is a better choice over OO but the poster was referencing LO.

[Author]

Posts