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Category: Life: Work and Techy

Raspberry Pi and RISC OS

December 29, 2012
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For Christmas, my lovely new wife got me a Raspberry Pi Model B from RS Online and today I powered it up. I decided to go with RISC OS for nostalgia reasons (download it from the Raspberry Pi site) which I then copied using Linux Mint using “sudo dd if=~/Desktop/ro519-rc6-1876M.img of=/dev/sdc1” to a Kodak 4Gb SDHC class 4 card (as the 32Gb class 10 cards I ordered haven’t arrived yet). I then put it in a transparent case, powered it up using an Micro USB cable and connected it to our WiFi network using the Vonets VAP11G WiFi Bridge (which I previously configured using Linux: the WiFi dongle got its power from a powered USB hub).

Start it up and turn on networking and all is fun and memorable. The only snags are that it doesn’t seem to support full widescreen display on my Philips HDMI monitor and if I have my Dell USB mouse plugged into my keyboard and then into the Raspberry Pi, then mouse clicks wouldn’t register and the keyboard was repeating: plugging in the mouse and keyboard separately into the Pi and everything worked well.

Now to download some fun free games and browse APDL’s full catalogue.

Techy: rSync and scp over different ports

December 21, 2012
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If you want to copy a file over scp using a different port number than usual, the syntax is:

Assume 1234 is the port number
scp -P 1234 user@remotehost:/folder/file.txt .

And if you want to do the same in rsync over SSH, then the syntax is:
rsync -av --progress -e "ssh -p 1234" user@remotehost:/folder/file.txt .

Note the different capitalisation of the port specifier (“p” is rsync’s ssh connection and “P” in scp).

Techy: Linux Mint: Where now?

December 20, 2012
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For just over the past year, I have been running Linux Mint 12 (“Lisa”) 64bit on my HP Pavilion dv7-6103ea laptop. The only problems I’ve had are the graphics drivers (installing and upgrading the drivers for the AMD Radeon 6545G2 card gives me a black screen and I have to somehow boot Linx, remove the Catalyst drivers, reboot, try and install them and hope), the AVerMedia USB TV card not working at first (it’s working now and I don’t think I changed anything: although the remote doesn’t seem to work) and the fingerprint scanner not working.

Anyway – it’s time for me to upgrade my Operating System, but what to? The choices for the OS I have are:
* Stay on Linux Mint 12 and slowly get out of date and be disappointed that Steam (for Linux) and World of Warcraft (under Wine) won’t work. It’ll become obsolete in April 2013.
* Upgrade to the latest version of Linux Mint : 14 “Nadia” which only be supported until April 2014, but was only released in November 2012. Will require entire reinstall, but a new upgrade will be available in around April.
* Upgrade to the latest “long term support” version of Linux Mint: 13 “Maya” which will be supported until April 2017, but was released in July 2012. Will require entire reinstall, but a new upgrade will be available sometime before 2017.
* Switch to Linux Mint Debian edition which has “rolling updates” (so no need to reinstall on updates), however might not be so stable as the “Ubuntu based Mint”. Meant to be more responsive/faster, but less desktop ready. Will require entire reinstall, but just once.

But then I’ve also got the choice:
* Reinstall over the existing Linux Mint install – giving me “no way back”
* Make a new partition on either my “Linux hard drive” or “Windows hard drive” and put the new OS there
* Replace an existing hard drive with an SSD card (I’m currently using 83G of space on my Linux drive). A 128Gb card will cost £70+vat, 256Gb, £125+vat and 512Gb £253+vat.
* Get a new internal hard drive. For a straight-replacement of the 750Gb HD, it’ll be £65+vat

Any suggestions?

Full machine specification for the record

Continue ReadingTechy: Linux Mint: Where now?

Magento: Get customers ordered by order value

December 17, 2012
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Want to know which of your Magento e-commerce shopping cart customers have ordered the most this year? Well, I’ve written the following SQL query to help:

SELECT SUM(sales_flat_order.base_total_invoiced) AS totalvalue,sales_flat_order.customer_firstname,sales_flat_order.customer_lastname,sales_flat_order.customer_email,sales_flat_order_address.street,sales_flat_order_address.city,sales_flat_order_address.region,sales_flat_order_address.postcode FROM sales_flat_order,sales_flat_order_address WHERE sales_flat_order.state='complete' AND sales_flat_order.created_at>'2012-01-01' AND sales_flat_order_address.entity_id=sales_flat_order.billing_address_id GROUP BY sales_flat_order.customer_email ORDER BY totalvalue DESC

Cold call from AON

November 7, 2012
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Just had a cold selling call from a company called AON asking for me by name (using my old name) and asking when our Professional Indemnity Insurance was due for renewal. The woman I spoke to was nice and polite and did say she would remove us from their calling list when I requested.

Caller ID showed 0800 635 00666, but looking on the internet doesn’t show them up – but I assume by the spelling of the name and the services that they are http://www.rewritinginsurance.aon.co.uk/.

We are more than happy with our current professional indemnity insurance from Policy Bee – who have only called us when we contacted them (just to confirm legal details) and came with good recommendations.

My view is that in this day and age, if you need to cold-call then you aren’t a very good company as people should be recommending you and you should have good ranking well designed website (I’m not saying AON are a “bad company”, but that’s my viewpoint: I’ve never purchased anything from cold-callers and won’t in the future: however, I may well waste your time)