CoderCoderCoder

I was browsing the SparkFun website and, curious about the tab " Data ", clicked on through. What I found was a free service where you can upload data from any of your projects and share it with the world. Choice bits from their data page include: Why are you building this? We want to bring a dose of reality to the Internet of Things hype. data.sparkfun.com  is a free, robust service for use with all of your projects.  What types of projects would benefit from this service? Almost anything. Your weather station in the backyard. A classroom of kids working on science experiments. A community concerned with pollution and crowdsourcing data collection. The weight of your pug's food dish. You get the idea. If your project can send an http request, you can push data out to our servers. Can I publish a stream anonymously? Yes. But all streams are public and can be accessed by anyone with the url. Be sure to explore various streams ( https://data.sparkfun.com/s...

In my previous post concerning weekly Raspberry Pi maintenance , not much was said about keeping the Linux kernel and Raspberry Pi firmware up to date. I finally had some time this week (and found the motivation) to look into the issue. As it turns out (and as expected), the kernel and firmware are Debian packages, so they are indeed checked and updated by apt-get . So, as long as you're running apt-get update and apt-get upgrade or apt-get dist-upgrade , your kernel and firmware will remain current. The versions pulled by apt-get, though, are the current stable releases. Stable releases of the kernel and firmware undergo quite a bit more scrutiny than other packages may. As a result, updates and the new features and optimizations to the kernel and firmware may take longer to get into the stable release than similar changes within other packages. If you're the daring (or trusting) type, then you can run more recent and experimental versions. The easiest way so far to ma...

I have three Raspberry Pi Model B  machines I use for Mono experiments. Like any other system, these require periodic maintenance. Prior to getting the Raspberry Pi machines, it had been years since I did anything with Linux (mostly Slackware and Red Hat Linux, circa 2000 or so) and, as a result, I was forever looking up the steps and parameters I need to keep the software up to date and the free space maximized. So, mostly for my own sanity, I've listed my weekly maintenance steps here. sudo apt-get update Use this to download the list of package from the repositories and discover the newest versions of packages and their dependencies. sudo apt-get dist-upgrade Since these aren't production machines, I'm comfortable using dist-upgrade rather than upgrade . If these machines were for something other than goofing around, then I'd be concerned with system predictability and switch over to upgrade . sudo apt-get clean This option clears out the local repository of...