I recently bought my first Raspberry Pi Zero W, a tiny little computer just 3 inches long and 1½ inches wide (in its case). I intend eventually to get it working with pywws (some weather station software I wrote a while ago) and I’ll be adding to this blog post as I go along, to … Read more
In a previous blog post (My first Raspberry Pi – day 3) I described how I’d set up my Raspberry Pi to boot from an external hard disc drive. In that setup I created a “spare” partition to allow easy migration to a new operating system. Now, 2½ years later, it’s time to find out … Read more
In a previous blog post I outlined how I correct vignetting in digital photographs. In this post I will describe in more detail the software I’ve written to do this. The corrector is part of my Pyctools project and you can download example scripts that use it from my Pyctools-demo project. The picture below shows … Read more
I recently purchased a budget telephoto lens for my Canon EOS 100D DSLR camera. It’s a 500mm f/6.3 mirror lens, essentially a small Cassegrain telescope. Like many budget lenses it suffers from “vignetting”, i.e. the edges of a photograph are darker than the centre. The EOS 100D camera has built in vignette correction (called peripheral … Read more
I have a Topfield 5800 PVR (personal video recorder). It has a USB socket that can be used to transfer software and recordings to or from the PVR. Connecting this USB socket to my Raspberry Pi bare bones computer (that’s on all the time) allows me to do a few useful things: Download up to … Read more
Add normal user account On other computers in my home network I have the user name “jim”. For convenient logging into the Pi it’s useful to have an account with the same name. This is easily created as follows (when logged in as root): Now I can login from my main computer with a simple … Read more
External disc drive setup I need to attach a decent size disc drive to my Pi to store radio recordings from my PVR. It will also allow me to create files, and use swap space, without worrying about wearing out the SD card. Given that I’m using a disc drive, it makes sense to put … Read more
Reminder: this is not a tutorial on how to set up a Raspberry Pi. I’ll be going a long way “off piste” compared to the usual way of doing things. This illustrates how flexible and customisable Linux can be, but when I get into difficulty there’s no support to help solve problems. Memory usage I … Read more
I’m a bit late to jump on the bandwagon, but I’ve finally got round to buying myself a Raspberry Pi bare bones computer. There are many web pages out there with good tutorials on how to set up a Pi. This is not one of them. It’s just a brief account of what I’ve done … Read more
A much neglected task for any photographer is labelling one’s photographs. In the old days one could write on the back of a print, but as I always preferred slide film this wasn’t an option. So I created a database in which I stored a simple title and description of each slide. However, as it … Read more