Archive for the ‘howto’ Category

I’ve written before about my OpenELEC build bot, and even detailed how to run one for yourself in the cloud. After the VPS I’d been using died the other day I had to rebuild my environment, and thought I’d take the opportunity to try some things out. The key change is using a loop device […]


Update (26 Jan 2013) This post is now a historical record of the hoops that I once had to jump through to get my Raspberry Pi working as a PVR. Everything has now been folded into the official OpenELEC build, which at the time of writing is at 3.0 RC2. You can download an SD […]


After getting MAME going on my Raspberry Pi so that I could play old arcade games. I wanted to hook up a proper joystick. Back in the 80’s I had the excellent and ubiquitous Competition Pro 5000. As mine (foolishly) got sold with my Amiga stuff I got one on eBay, and it came in […]


I grew up in the dawn of arcade games, and living at the coast meant that I had access to a couple of decent arcades where I could play all the classics as they came out – Space Invaders, Galaxian, Defender, Moon Cresta, Galaga, Phoenix, Star Wars, Tron and Tempest all stick in my mind, […]


I set $son0 a summer holiday challenge of building an alarm system that would send an email (and it seems that I’m not alone). I was pleased to see that the latest edition (#4) of Magpi has an alarm project so we set about building it together. The hardware came together pretty nicely, but the software […]


A few weeks back I wrote a howto that utilised the 90 day free trial on Azure to build OpenELEC for the Raspberry Pi. Days later my account was disabled as I’d exhausted the (rather low) limit for I/O within the trial. Since I’d only used 5-6p of extra stuff I went through the process […]


In part 1 I went through setting up an SSH tunnel, and waking up machines on the home network. In this part I’ll run through how to use various protocols and clients to connect to machines on the home network. SSH tunnels on PuTTY SSH lets you tunnel many other protocols through it (using a […]


In this post I’m going to cover setting up a network tunnel and waking up other computers on the home network. Why use a Raspberry Pi? A tunnel needs two ends, so at home this means leaving at least one machine switched on – keeping the electricity meter turning. One of the great things about […]


In the first part of this howto I went through signing up for a cloud service, provisioning a VM, installing the build tools and kicking off a build. All being well you should end up with something like this: Azure can also give you a pretty chart of how busy the VM was during the build […]


When I got my Raspberry Pi pretty much the first thing I did with it was to put on OpenELEC, and excellent shrink wrapped package for XBMC. Initially I started compiling it myself on a local virtual machine (VM), but impatience got the better of me and I downloaded an image provided by somebody else. […]