Paul Verrall's Blog

Short story, I made a program. Instructions and download here:  https://github.com/mrverrall/go-row Despite there being an appetite for rowing in Zwift the fact is a rowing machine is not a bicycle and a Concept2 rower won't connect directly to Zwift. The Zwift gods tease a rowing release every now and again, but it's been coming 'soon' for years now. Don't hold your breath. But people do row in Zwift, so how do they do it? To get the data from the rowers computer, the PM5, into something Zwift recognises as a bicycle you need a device that translates between the rower and the device running Zwift. There are solutions already available to do this. Some are expensive like the  NPE CABLE (about £90 in the UK) and some are 'free' like the  RowedBiker  app. The downside with RowedBiker is that it needs to run on a extra device separate from the one running Zwift. If you have a compatible device lying around, great, otherwise you'll need to buy one. Meanwh...

I've occasionally wondered if it was at all practical to run a small functional Moodle site using just a Raspberry Pi and whenever I've been half tempted to try I've came to the swift conclusion that the answer was most likely 'No'; and I think this is still probably the case today. We are now however in the brave new era of the Raspberry Pi 2 where we have more cpus and RAM to play with, and after my friend Moodle Fairy asked if it was at all possible or indeed worthwhile to do such a thing I decided it was time to give it a real shot and put to task my experience in optimising Moodle at work hosting a Moodle site on the decidedly lightweight Pi 2. So what is the answer? Can you run a useful Moodle on a raspberry Pi 2? Well, yes you can! And not only that I have been rather impressed with the sites overall performance which has exceed all reasonable expectations. Your average page load time is well under a second. Rather than go into more details her...

I wanted to use a Raspberry Pi to act as a Bluetooth audio receiver or my Hi-Fi so that I could connect a phone/tablet easily to some proper speakers wirelessly. Rather than reinventing the wheel 'kmonkey' has already achieved most of what I set out to do over here ; check this out first. The only issue now is the manual intervention needed to connect up a new Bluetooth source to the output sink. I initially created a simple bash script to poll pulseaudio (every 5 seconds) and run the necessary commands as and when a new device is connected. You can see the script here and all the pertinent commands are explained over in kmonkey's blog. This is all good, but will need to be run manually using something like, # nohup ./bt_audio_attach & This is a bit rubbish and you'll be pleased to know there is a better way to get this done, UDEV! Over at the Raspbery Pi forums   there's some discussion on using UDEV scripts to auto...