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silveradept[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]
Here's where I lose just about all of my True Nerdery cred again: I've never used the GPIO pins on any of the Raspberry Pis in my house for anything more complicated than attaching included kit fans to the pins the directions indicated. And, truthfully, that's because I don't see them as hobbyist computers with a need for an interface to a physical project or other circuitry that is happening outside the computer itself (which is what they're intended for). Instead, I saw them as tiny, low power computers that had the potential to be inexpensive computers to experiment on for learning how computers worked at first, then as computers that could be used to do one very specific task very well. With the Raspberry Pi 4/400 family, I'm finally starting to feel a little more validated in the belief of a Pi being a second computer to experiment with, or a child's first computer to use so there's no danger to any machines that have to be kept pristine for work, or a computer that could be loaned out by a public library to people who don't have (spare) computing resources, possibly packaged with a hotspot with internet service so the computer can be used to its fullest and people who can't spare the wireless access cost or the broadband service cost can still do things online. That's a different story with different hurdles and complaints than the one that gets told with these two, the first Raspberry Pi pair that I obtained.
I bought the Model B for myself out of curiosity and because the price point on it was right for experimenting with. The Model B+ was a gift from my ex. At that point in the relationship, practically, it was a gift from myself to myself, through an intermediary who spent the money because I was still having second thoughts about it. In either case, I had initially thought of them as possible general purpose computers that I could use with the televisions that were in the household, possibly for the equivalent of smart TV operations, but the claim that they were the equivalent of a 300MHz Pentium II with much swankier graphics (or the power of the original XBox with swankier graphics) turned out to be all too true, and it was a good lesson in how clock speeds on processors don't tell the entire story about how powerful a machine actually is. Neither the Model B or B+ could do much in terms of swiftly rendering a single web page, much less any of the more complex things that browsing the Web requests of a computer, and that's even with a default browser that didn't do JavaScript or any of the really fancy Web 2.0 material that's expected of a modern browser. (It utterly choked on Chromium.) That didn't mean it was terrible with all of the aspects of the Web, but it did mean that the browser packaged with the Pis should have been a port of Netscape Navigator. Or Lynx. Anything that could have been done from the console would move much, much faster than anything that needed the graphical user interface.
One of the major complaints about these early model Pis are that only the official Raspberry Pi OS and its components are able to take advantage of any hardware acceleration provided by the GPU. The Pi's ability to play HD video with hardware acceleration is caveated by the bed to do it specifically through the software piece provided that knows how to get the acceleration to work. In the early days, there were two additional codecs that had to be bought separately from what was included, to play the Windows Media Player preferred format (the VC-1 codec) and the MPEG-2 codec, for things like DVDs. They were inexpensive to license, thankfully, but also, the performance of the Pi improved sufficiently from one generation to the next that it soon became possible to decode such things in software or to use other libraries and the charge for the codec license disappeared. The need to use the specific program persisted for some time afterward. I'm not sure that it exists at the moment, either, since some images come with VLC as their default media player now, so maybe on the newer models, it's easier for everything to access that hardware acceleration.
Since they aren't desktop replacements or smart TV substitutes yet, it became immediately clear that these tiny computers needed to find their niche and stick to it. Having bought an old dock for a Motorola phone that provided keyboard and touchpad and perhaps most critically, some additional USB ports, I hooked up both B and B+ to it at some point awhile I was trying to figure out what to do with them. I might have even successfuly connected to IRC from the B+ with this dock connector, but because of a neat trick in the Model B where enough power to run the system could be fed in through a USB port, I was able to create a lapdock Pi that could provide both power and the keyboard and trackpad support to the computer. Which I used to play video games, naturally. And perhaps most spectacularly, I played Streets of Rage 2 and 3 at many thousands of feet in the air while flying back to be a participant in the wedding of my youngest sibling. Both B and B+ had duties as the RetroPie machine playing classic games, as I tried to figure out how to use them both to maximum potential, and the lapdock would continue on in service as a screen for the RetroPie machine long after its keyboard and trackpad both broke sufficiently as to be useless, because I had thrown in a Bluetooth USB dongle to the lapdock and installed appropriate libraries to let RetroPie talk to my now unused DualShock 3 controllers. Since RetroPie is set up to be navigated with game controllers, it meant I could still use the system perfectly fine. Because the B and B+ couldn't handle any games at the PlayStation / Nintendo 64 line or later, it pretty well limited the type of games that could be played and would make sure that there were never any games that had more buttons than the controller could provide. Eventually, the B settled in as the RetroPie machine until the lapdock itself blew something out this year and refused to boot.
Which actually left me in the position of trying to find homes for both of these old-model Pis. The B+ had settled in nicely to being a Kodi box, able to stream things over the network, so long as they were H.264 and no larger than 720p in resolution, because even 802.11n isn't really good enough to sling enough bits for buffer in 1080 anything, and useful for tuning into various internet channels as available through the official (and sometimes unofficial) add-ons for Kodi. Most of the duty of streaming was taking place either for the television in the bedroom or for the television in the bar, neither of which was particularly close to the router. The problem was, as the Kodi version numbers advanced, the support for the original model Pis was getting less and less possible, until OpenELEC stopped at Kodi 14.2, which was making for difficulties in successfully streaming from a PC that was on Kodi 16. LibreELEC lasted a little bit longer, taking the B+ all the way through Kodi 16.9, but officially announced that they wouldn't be supporting the old Pi models starting with Kodi 17. At that roadblock, the old models graciously gave way to the new models that are currently hooked up to various screens and being very smart with the functions they are assigned to do. Two Pis that still need to have a purpose in life that will support their old, slow selves.
The first idea I had for them was to make them both useful again for the bar downstairs, which would probably return the B+ to being a retro gaming device. Except by this point, my ex was well into the rearview mirror and there was spare computing lying around, so the bar has obtained a proper PC to handle most of its needs, be they streaming video content or engaging in retro gaming through emulation. Eventually, with my super information professional powers, I read some lists of what to do with your old Raspberry Pis and one of the suggestions was to turn an old Pi into an Internet radio through the use of mopidy on the backend, which provided a server interface that a frontend could plug into, making it possible for the Pi to drive a pair of speakers and provide sound anywhere there was a plug for the Pi (and the speakers) and a strong enough network connection to get and serve the steam. Mopidy could also serve local network content as well, so the Model B became the radio for the bar so that the TV wouldn't have to be on to listen to music or similar while changing laundry or scooping out litterboxes or anything else that a person might be doing while within range of the speakers. It's a little hard to find Internet Radio playlist files these days, but there's also a plug-in that lets you input YouTube URIs to play those audio streams as well, or a different plug-in intended to let you authenticate to services like Spotify and pull playlists from there to stream, or other extensible bits to add for other services that make it possible for mopidy to understand them and play their content. The Model B is perfectly content to serve as the Internet and network radio, and the chosen frontend is lightweight enough that the Pi doesn't bog down when it's asked to do anything. Right now it's only got a set of so-so tweeters because I swapped in my 2.1 system that was hooked up to the model B to a housemate's computer so they can hear what's coming out of the computer while they're watching things in bed. If'n ever such a system again came down to the bar, there would be plenty of music pumping out for the bar, at whichever point in our lives that socializing isn't a matter of carefully comparing risk habits and deciding that the other(s) are an acceptable risk for limited interactions.
Which left the B+ to find a home. I'd been looking at some projects around, and someone demonstrated a really neat use of a display sequence for fanart while certain movies were playing, or animating through them when otherwise idle, but they really wanted a much more powerful Pi than this one to do the work. In looking about from that project, though, I came across an item called Screenly that's actually meant as a display coordinator, for things like hotels, conferences, or other places where there are informative display screens running all the time and that need frequent updating. Lots of low power machines connected to a central server, where someone can administer them from a single console, that kind of thing. They also released a standalone version that anyone can use if they want to manually connect and update all the screens they plan on having, one at a time, or if they're me, who is going to only be using it for one screen, rather than for multiples. And the thing claimed to be able to run on an original model Pi, so I thought maybe the B+ would work cycling through some fanart for the bar downstairs. And it did work for that purpose. The problem really was that after so much time spent displaying, there was an out of cheese error and the chromium kiosk driving the whole thing needed to reboot itself. Which it often did, and it seemed to be a coin flip as to whether the machine would fully recover back to displaying things or whether it would instead crash to a point where it would need to be fully rebooted before displaying the sideshow again. So itcould be run on the B+, but it wasn't exactly working the way we had hoped.
So finally, this year I got extremely tired of how all of my portable devices, like the phones and tablets, often didn't have the protections in their browser extensions that desktop and laptop browser extensions did from ads, and that so many applications that were free (or even ones that were paid) came with a bevy of advertising to try and convince us to get other such things, or to watch whatever had paid enough to be in the advertising rotation, or to try and overwhelm the actual viewing experience with as many ads as they can try to fit on the screen (or to pop up, or to try and hijack the browser to some shady site), which gets extra aggravating when the ads are videos that want to play loudly, even when you've already specifically said that there should be no volume at all available anywhere in the system. And it turns out there's a way that even an old Pi can be put to use helping filter out advertising by blocking DNS requests to specific domains on a forbidden list. Which has certain consequences with regard to games that offer extra lives, hints, or resources for watching the ads, but also generally means that I'm going to have a better time of not being hammered with ads when I don't specifically want them to be there. The problem being that some entities pull their address from the same server as their content, and that makes it less possible for the Pi-Hole to block them. Still one advantage for the browser plug-ins, but I kind of hope that it's cut down on the amount of idle ad-fetching over the network all the same from all the devices that might be trying to communicate with ad servers. Most importantly, though, the B+ has found a home doing something it is extremely able to do, even at its limited processing abilities. I'm happy again, because I don't have any computers in the house that are idle. (Well, except the last one obtained, but that one I'm afraid of turning on, least it trip a circuit breaker all by itself.)
- CPU: Single core ARM1176JZFS (ARM11 using an ARMv6-architecture core) @ 700Mhz on a Broadcom BCM2835 System on a Chip
- Memory: 256 (B)/ 512 MB RAM (B+)
- Graphics: Videocore IV GPU @ 250 MHz, max resolution 1920x1080
- Sound: Stereo output sound through HDMI or 3.5" jack
- Inputs/Peripherals: 2 (B) or 4 (B+) USB 2.0 ports IEEE 802.11 b/g/n via USB Wi-Fi dongle, Bluetooth 4.1 via USB dongle, 100 MBit Ethernet jack
- Storage: No internal storage, operating system and data all provided by SD (SDHC, SDXC) (B) or microSD (micoSDHC, microSDXC) (B+) card inserted, usually 4/8 GB, 40-pin General Purpose Input/Output interface
- OS: Raspbian → Arch Linux ARM → RetroPie → Raspberry Pi OS Lite (mopidy music server and Internet radio) (B), Raspbian → RetroPie → OpenELEC → LibreELEC 9.3.2 → Screenly → Raspberry Pi OS Lite (Pi-Hole) (B+)
Here's where I lose just about all of my True Nerdery cred again: I've never used the GPIO pins on any of the Raspberry Pis in my house for anything more complicated than attaching included kit fans to the pins the directions indicated. And, truthfully, that's because I don't see them as hobbyist computers with a need for an interface to a physical project or other circuitry that is happening outside the computer itself (which is what they're intended for). Instead, I saw them as tiny, low power computers that had the potential to be inexpensive computers to experiment on for learning how computers worked at first, then as computers that could be used to do one very specific task very well. With the Raspberry Pi 4/400 family, I'm finally starting to feel a little more validated in the belief of a Pi being a second computer to experiment with, or a child's first computer to use so there's no danger to any machines that have to be kept pristine for work, or a computer that could be loaned out by a public library to people who don't have (spare) computing resources, possibly packaged with a hotspot with internet service so the computer can be used to its fullest and people who can't spare the wireless access cost or the broadband service cost can still do things online. That's a different story with different hurdles and complaints than the one that gets told with these two, the first Raspberry Pi pair that I obtained.
I bought the Model B for myself out of curiosity and because the price point on it was right for experimenting with. The Model B+ was a gift from my ex. At that point in the relationship, practically, it was a gift from myself to myself, through an intermediary who spent the money because I was still having second thoughts about it. In either case, I had initially thought of them as possible general purpose computers that I could use with the televisions that were in the household, possibly for the equivalent of smart TV operations, but the claim that they were the equivalent of a 300MHz Pentium II with much swankier graphics (or the power of the original XBox with swankier graphics) turned out to be all too true, and it was a good lesson in how clock speeds on processors don't tell the entire story about how powerful a machine actually is. Neither the Model B or B+ could do much in terms of swiftly rendering a single web page, much less any of the more complex things that browsing the Web requests of a computer, and that's even with a default browser that didn't do JavaScript or any of the really fancy Web 2.0 material that's expected of a modern browser. (It utterly choked on Chromium.) That didn't mean it was terrible with all of the aspects of the Web, but it did mean that the browser packaged with the Pis should have been a port of Netscape Navigator. Or Lynx. Anything that could have been done from the console would move much, much faster than anything that needed the graphical user interface.
One of the major complaints about these early model Pis are that only the official Raspberry Pi OS and its components are able to take advantage of any hardware acceleration provided by the GPU. The Pi's ability to play HD video with hardware acceleration is caveated by the bed to do it specifically through the software piece provided that knows how to get the acceleration to work. In the early days, there were two additional codecs that had to be bought separately from what was included, to play the Windows Media Player preferred format (the VC-1 codec) and the MPEG-2 codec, for things like DVDs. They were inexpensive to license, thankfully, but also, the performance of the Pi improved sufficiently from one generation to the next that it soon became possible to decode such things in software or to use other libraries and the charge for the codec license disappeared. The need to use the specific program persisted for some time afterward. I'm not sure that it exists at the moment, either, since some images come with VLC as their default media player now, so maybe on the newer models, it's easier for everything to access that hardware acceleration.
Since they aren't desktop replacements or smart TV substitutes yet, it became immediately clear that these tiny computers needed to find their niche and stick to it. Having bought an old dock for a Motorola phone that provided keyboard and touchpad and perhaps most critically, some additional USB ports, I hooked up both B and B+ to it at some point awhile I was trying to figure out what to do with them. I might have even successfuly connected to IRC from the B+ with this dock connector, but because of a neat trick in the Model B where enough power to run the system could be fed in through a USB port, I was able to create a lapdock Pi that could provide both power and the keyboard and trackpad support to the computer. Which I used to play video games, naturally. And perhaps most spectacularly, I played Streets of Rage 2 and 3 at many thousands of feet in the air while flying back to be a participant in the wedding of my youngest sibling. Both B and B+ had duties as the RetroPie machine playing classic games, as I tried to figure out how to use them both to maximum potential, and the lapdock would continue on in service as a screen for the RetroPie machine long after its keyboard and trackpad both broke sufficiently as to be useless, because I had thrown in a Bluetooth USB dongle to the lapdock and installed appropriate libraries to let RetroPie talk to my now unused DualShock 3 controllers. Since RetroPie is set up to be navigated with game controllers, it meant I could still use the system perfectly fine. Because the B and B+ couldn't handle any games at the PlayStation / Nintendo 64 line or later, it pretty well limited the type of games that could be played and would make sure that there were never any games that had more buttons than the controller could provide. Eventually, the B settled in as the RetroPie machine until the lapdock itself blew something out this year and refused to boot.
Which actually left me in the position of trying to find homes for both of these old-model Pis. The B+ had settled in nicely to being a Kodi box, able to stream things over the network, so long as they were H.264 and no larger than 720p in resolution, because even 802.11n isn't really good enough to sling enough bits for buffer in 1080 anything, and useful for tuning into various internet channels as available through the official (and sometimes unofficial) add-ons for Kodi. Most of the duty of streaming was taking place either for the television in the bedroom or for the television in the bar, neither of which was particularly close to the router. The problem was, as the Kodi version numbers advanced, the support for the original model Pis was getting less and less possible, until OpenELEC stopped at Kodi 14.2, which was making for difficulties in successfully streaming from a PC that was on Kodi 16. LibreELEC lasted a little bit longer, taking the B+ all the way through Kodi 16.9, but officially announced that they wouldn't be supporting the old Pi models starting with Kodi 17. At that roadblock, the old models graciously gave way to the new models that are currently hooked up to various screens and being very smart with the functions they are assigned to do. Two Pis that still need to have a purpose in life that will support their old, slow selves.
The first idea I had for them was to make them both useful again for the bar downstairs, which would probably return the B+ to being a retro gaming device. Except by this point, my ex was well into the rearview mirror and there was spare computing lying around, so the bar has obtained a proper PC to handle most of its needs, be they streaming video content or engaging in retro gaming through emulation. Eventually, with my super information professional powers, I read some lists of what to do with your old Raspberry Pis and one of the suggestions was to turn an old Pi into an Internet radio through the use of mopidy on the backend, which provided a server interface that a frontend could plug into, making it possible for the Pi to drive a pair of speakers and provide sound anywhere there was a plug for the Pi (and the speakers) and a strong enough network connection to get and serve the steam. Mopidy could also serve local network content as well, so the Model B became the radio for the bar so that the TV wouldn't have to be on to listen to music or similar while changing laundry or scooping out litterboxes or anything else that a person might be doing while within range of the speakers. It's a little hard to find Internet Radio playlist files these days, but there's also a plug-in that lets you input YouTube URIs to play those audio streams as well, or a different plug-in intended to let you authenticate to services like Spotify and pull playlists from there to stream, or other extensible bits to add for other services that make it possible for mopidy to understand them and play their content. The Model B is perfectly content to serve as the Internet and network radio, and the chosen frontend is lightweight enough that the Pi doesn't bog down when it's asked to do anything. Right now it's only got a set of so-so tweeters because I swapped in my 2.1 system that was hooked up to the model B to a housemate's computer so they can hear what's coming out of the computer while they're watching things in bed. If'n ever such a system again came down to the bar, there would be plenty of music pumping out for the bar, at whichever point in our lives that socializing isn't a matter of carefully comparing risk habits and deciding that the other(s) are an acceptable risk for limited interactions.
Which left the B+ to find a home. I'd been looking at some projects around, and someone demonstrated a really neat use of a display sequence for fanart while certain movies were playing, or animating through them when otherwise idle, but they really wanted a much more powerful Pi than this one to do the work. In looking about from that project, though, I came across an item called Screenly that's actually meant as a display coordinator, for things like hotels, conferences, or other places where there are informative display screens running all the time and that need frequent updating. Lots of low power machines connected to a central server, where someone can administer them from a single console, that kind of thing. They also released a standalone version that anyone can use if they want to manually connect and update all the screens they plan on having, one at a time, or if they're me, who is going to only be using it for one screen, rather than for multiples. And the thing claimed to be able to run on an original model Pi, so I thought maybe the B+ would work cycling through some fanart for the bar downstairs. And it did work for that purpose. The problem really was that after so much time spent displaying, there was an out of cheese error and the chromium kiosk driving the whole thing needed to reboot itself. Which it often did, and it seemed to be a coin flip as to whether the machine would fully recover back to displaying things or whether it would instead crash to a point where it would need to be fully rebooted before displaying the sideshow again. So itcould be run on the B+, but it wasn't exactly working the way we had hoped.
So finally, this year I got extremely tired of how all of my portable devices, like the phones and tablets, often didn't have the protections in their browser extensions that desktop and laptop browser extensions did from ads, and that so many applications that were free (or even ones that were paid) came with a bevy of advertising to try and convince us to get other such things, or to watch whatever had paid enough to be in the advertising rotation, or to try and overwhelm the actual viewing experience with as many ads as they can try to fit on the screen (or to pop up, or to try and hijack the browser to some shady site), which gets extra aggravating when the ads are videos that want to play loudly, even when you've already specifically said that there should be no volume at all available anywhere in the system. And it turns out there's a way that even an old Pi can be put to use helping filter out advertising by blocking DNS requests to specific domains on a forbidden list. Which has certain consequences with regard to games that offer extra lives, hints, or resources for watching the ads, but also generally means that I'm going to have a better time of not being hammered with ads when I don't specifically want them to be there. The problem being that some entities pull their address from the same server as their content, and that makes it less possible for the Pi-Hole to block them. Still one advantage for the browser plug-ins, but I kind of hope that it's cut down on the amount of idle ad-fetching over the network all the same from all the devices that might be trying to communicate with ad servers. Most importantly, though, the B+ has found a home doing something it is extremely able to do, even at its limited processing abilities. I'm happy again, because I don't have any computers in the house that are idle. (Well, except the last one obtained, but that one I'm afraid of turning on, least it trip a circuit breaker all by itself.)
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Date: 2022-02-24 10:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-24 03:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-27 04:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-27 04:41 pm (UTC)If you're not familiar at all with Linux, a Raspberry Pi or similar computer is excellent to learn it on, since the cost of accidentally destroying the operating system environment is reimaging the card that contains it with something fresh and going at it again.
Running backups? What did you have in mind for it?