Category Archives: OSes

Moving Linux to Smaller SD Cards

February 19, 2014 John Aldred Leave a comment

SD cards are pretty cheap these days, but that doesn’t mean we should let our smaller ones go to waste, especially when a system doesn’t fully utilise the space of a larger one that could be more useful elsewhere.

So, what can we do?

Normally, to backup and restore SD cards, I use Win32 Disk Imager.

The main problem of Win32 Disk Imager is that it creates an image file the same size as your SD card, no matter how much of the card is actually being used. If you’re using a 32GB card with a 4GB partition and the rest is unallocated space it will still create a 32GB image file.

Typically, however, I think most of us will allocate the full size of the SD card to the system.

Continue reading Moving Linux to Smaller SD Cards →

CubieTruck, Linux, Photography, TTSOL

Eye-Fi on Linux Part 2

January 31, 2014 John Aldred Leave a comment

When the Eye-Fi works so well with the iPad, why would I want to seemingly make life more complicated for myself by adding more hardware into the mix?

Well, transferring to a Linux based machine like the CubieTruck offers me some advantages over the iPad. Some of them I alluded to in my previous post on this topic, but at the time, my primary thought was really just on-site backup (after making the switch from SanDisk Eye-Fi cards to Eye-Fi Pro X2 cards).

No real interaction, no file serving to viewing devices, just straight up copy the images to the CubieTruck, and then copy it all onto my network when I get back home.

Continue reading Eye-Fi on Linux Part 2 →

Linux, Windows

VirtualBox vs. Dedicated Linux System

January 20, 2014 John Aldred Leave a comment

I mentioned in an earlier post that I’d write a little bit more about my decision to run Debian through VirtualBox on a Windows machine.

So, here we are.

This post is more of a ramble than anything else. There’s no real substance here (and feel free to agree or disagree with that), I’m just jotting down some thoughts and providing a little background for other posts I plan to make.

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Linux, Mini Computers, Photography

Eye-Fi on Linux

January 18, 2014 John Aldred Leave a comment

My current WiFi situation on Location works for me at the moment.

As I shoot, a couple of seconds after hitting the shutter, the images come up on my iPad screen. I can immediately see which images have hit their focus and are nice and sharp without unwanted motion blur.

I can get a better overall view of the scene on the iPad so I don’t have to spend hours fixing something in Photoshop that I missed on the tiny LCD on the back of the camera. I can just see it and fix on set before taking another shot.

As I’m planning to turn the CubieTruck into a portable backup storage device for use on location, I thought “What if I could transmit via WiFi to the Cubie (or Raspberry Pi) instead of the iPad?”

Continue reading Eye-Fi on Linux →

Photography, TTSOL, Windows

TTSOL – Eye-Fi on Location

January 16, 2014 John Aldred Leave a comment

I’ve talked about some of the pros & cons of the Eye-Fi card before, but on location these days, it’s something I find difficult to live without.

It’s a luxury, not a necessity, but it does allow me to speed up productivity and waste less time on a location shoot wondering whether the image I just shot is adequately sharp, if I’ve hit the correct point of focus (the camera LCD is just too unreliable – especially when you need to manually focus), or just to see the overall composition on a larger screen.

Continue reading TTSOL – Eye-Fi on Location →

CubieTruck, Linux

The CubieTruck has Landed

January 15, 2014 John Aldred Leave a comment

So, I’m now officially a Trucker. A CubieTrucker, that is.

It arrived yesterday, sadly about half an hour before I had to go out, so I pretty much just had chance to put the case together (almost), and didn’t really get to play with it properly at all.

But, it’s beautiful, look at it!

Continue reading The CubieTruck has Landed →

Linux, Raspberry Pi

The Joy of rPlay (or not)

January 14, 2014 John Aldred Leave a comment

This is a bit of a mini follow up to my recent post on AirPlay (I’ll be doing a longer one once I’ve got everything running the way I hope it will – Edit: never mind, scroll down to the bottom).

After discovering Reflector, and having a good play with it, I started to wonder if there were any Linux AirPlay clients out there.

It took some digging, but it turns out, there are! Well, there’s at least one. rPlay.

Continue reading The Joy of rPlay (or not) →

Linux, Windows

The Joy of Airplay

January 11, 2014 John Aldred Leave a comment

When I first heard of AirPlay, I figured “Apple only”, being the proprietary types that they are. I’d always seen it bandied about with words like “Apple TV“, “iMac” and “Macbook Pro“.

As the only Apple devices I own are iPhones and iPads, I never really looked much further into it.

A few days ago, I started trying to see if I could find an application that would allow me to record my iPhone or iPad display to a video file, for including in a tutorial video I was putting together.

As it turns out, there ain’t an app for that – at least not one that runs on the device itself.

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CubieBoard, CubieTruck, Linux, Raspberry Pi, Windows

BitTorrent Sync – Making Your Own Cloud

January 8, 2014 John Aldred Leave a comment

I’ve been using DropBox for probably about 3 years now, and it’s rather good. Overall, I’ve been quite impressed. It’s reliable, fairly quick (bandwidth permitting), and fantastic for delivering work to clients and models.

Delivery of final work to clients and models I’ve shot with has been pretty much my sole reason for using DropBox, and it will probably remain that way, at least for the foreseeable future.

I don’t need masses and masses of space for that, but I’ve still never really been all that keen on the idea of keeping things online in “the cloud” (which is basically just a fancy new term for the same old servers we’ve always had) as a form of file backup.

After recently having had a pretty major crash on one of my machines (motherboard died, taking the processor, RAM and a 2TB hard drive along with it), I’ve rebuilt and started looking into other potential backup solutions.

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CubieBoard, Linux

Taking a Stab at Cross Compiling

January 6, 2014 John Aldred Leave a comment

Cross compiling is something I’ve never really had a need to do before. All of my past Linux machines have been your standard 32Bit or 64Bit x86 based PCs, and have been fast enough that I’ve been able to compile on the machine it’ll be running on.

But, if a 15 hour XBMC compile taught me anything (other than the fact that XBMC doesn’t work fantastically on the CubieBoard), it’s that I need to setup a decent Linux box, and learn to cross compile for ARM based hardware.

I’ve also always wanted to create my own Linux setup from scratch for a long time. The CubieBoard gives me the opportunity to do this, but it will require some cross compiling to get things started.

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Photographer / Writer / Geek