Shell calendar generator

Some people still use paper calendars. Stuff where you have a picture of the month and all days in the month listed. I have some relatives that do use those. On loosely related topic, I like to travel and I like to take some pictures in foreign lands. So combining both is an obvious idea – to create a calendar where pictures of the month are taken by me. I searched for some ready to use solution but haven’t found anything. So I decided to create my own simple tool. And this post is about creating that tool.

Getting to your PiDrive

ocipv6I wrote few times about my PiDrive already, this is continuation of the work in progress and I would like to share what I did since the last time.

Getting accessible

We need to address two problems regarding the accessibility of PiDrive. First one is actually not that you need to access your PiDrive from Internet, but something much simpler. Once you connect your PiDrive to your local network, you need to find out it’s local address first so you can set it up. There are various options, for example including avahi or netbios and configuring them to publish some recognizable name. I’m sure everybody has those in mind and I do as well. But I wanted to start first with something that might have escaped the others and what I consider quite simple but at the same time quite effective approach. On boot, I display ownCloud logo on HDMI attached display if there is one and bellow it address of the device. My PiDrive came with 90 degrees angle HDMI converter so it looked like it is expected that you will connect display to it. And reading what is written on HDMI is much simpler and reliable than anything you do on computer.

My way of booting PiDrive (Raspberry Pi2)

PiDrive bootingSome time ago I started playing with PiDrive project. I implemented an application that I think will be useful to people using it in the end – some simple IPv6 enabler/browser and DynDNS client. But I kinda cheated and implemented it on the ARM board I already had at home. Over the last week I didn’t had much free time, but I still continued on the project and I got my Pi booting my custom image. How will PiDrive boot was subject to lengthy discussions on mailing list, so I wanted to provide a proof of concept of how do I think it can be done. As it is long post, TLDR version at the end 😉

Getting IPv6 for your ownCloud

As you could have read, I joined the ownClouds PiDrive effort. I like the idea and we were brainstorming on the mailing list regarding what can we do. One notion really popped out. If you have ownCloud at home, you might be interested in reaching your home cloud from anywhere you go. And if you don’t have public IPv4 or you don’t want to forward public ports from the router, you might be interested in getting IPv6 for you home cloud. It can be pretty easy. Both on your home cloud and your notebook. I would like to talk about few options I considered and how and which I decided to integrate them (also into ownCloud app that you can use anywhere).

PiDrive unboxing

Not so long ago ownCloud announced their cooperation with Western Digital. Outcome is PiDrive – basically home NAS solution. ARM board (RaspberryPi2) connected with HDD. And with the announcement of the cooperation came a challenge. Community was asked to come up with ideas regarding what would they do with it. Who was interested in working on the image that will be shipped as part of the final solution was offered a prototype of the device. I was one of the guys brainstorming about what to do with it. I had some ideas and already started working on some of them. More about them and the progress later. Currently I want to share some pictures of the PiDrive (as I already received the prototype) – obligatory unboxing and few thoughts on hardware.

openSUSE Summit Asia 2015

Me & BudhaLast year first ever openSUSE Summit Asia took place in Beijing. From all the reports it sounded really awesome and I regretted that I couldn’t go. This year, I was lucky enough to manage to go. I was selected to do a board keynote and I got some of my travel expenses sponsored by Travel Support Programme (big thanks!). So how was this years openSUSE Summit Asia from my point of view? In short, amazing 🙂 In long, read on…

Introducing OCTV – ownCloud + ARM + old TV

CRT TVDo you remember my post about how Raspberry Pi revived my old TV? This is partially continuation of that post but also something new. Lets start with recap of what I did almost a year ago. I connected my Raspberry Pi to old CRT TV, installed video player and hacked together few CGI scripts to manage it. I got my old useless TV to do something useful again. Over the time, I made few modifications, introduced caching and added support for mpv to support not only Raspberry, but also better computers, like CubieBoard.