Earlier, I wrote a post describing my lack of success in finding a music player suitable for a young toddler, and that would fit with the way he seems to use his music-playing toys.

In this post, I’ll document my actual requirements for the project. I’m sure they’ll evolve as I go - requirements always do - but this should provide a good starting point. In no particular order:

As I mentioned the other day, my Raspberry Pi arrived, though I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do with it.

Tonight my wife and I were talking about how our son would cycle through different songs on one of his toys until he reached the one he wanted. Unfortunately, each “song” is just a couple of measures long, so just as he gets into the groove the music ends.

This got us to wondering if there was a music player built for kids. Turns out there are a couple, but they’re overpriced and for the most part intended for someone a little older than our son (he’s 2.5). They’re basically oversized, limited-capacity MP3 players - not really what I want.

My Raspberry Pi arrived on Wednesday, after four or five months of waiting. I got it up and runnng – after cannibalizing my PS3 for its HDMI cord, my desktop for its keyboard and mouse, and my wife’s digital camera for its SD card. Now all I need is some time when I’m not working, familying, or coding for BB10.

My well of ideas seems to have run dry as well. Early on I made a list, but looking back over it - none of the items there are very interesting.

Anyone have thoughts for a good RPi project?

I see a lot of comments floating around to the effect of “I’m not going to bother voting, we’re screwed anyway.”

Our choices aren’t perfect, but the only message you actually send when you choose to abstain is that you don’t care about the future of the country you live in. The best thing you can do is vote for the candidate closest to what you want.

Consider also: this is not just an election for the presidency. Other seats are up as well, including your local government.

Go forth and vote. It’s the loudest voice you have if you want things to get better.

I’ve been wanting to start using this blog again for a while now. As I began dusting off the pieces (and running Wordpress
shamefully behind) I realized that WP offered a lot of bells, whistles, and complexity - and none of it was anything I actually needed.

So I started looking around for alternatives, and came across Octopress. Now this, I thought to myself, looks promising - I can actually set up a git-based flow for writing and publishing, without having to muck around with Wordpress’s controls. Being able to use markdown in vim is also a huge plus - web-based editors annoy me, and I’m far less likely to accidentally lose a post by mis-clicking somewhere on the screen.

It doesn’t hurt that I like the default theme - clean and simple. I may tweak it in the future, but I’m comfortable leaving it as is for now.

With some minor tweaks I should be able to deploy using rsync. I may explore using the Chef SCM resource and a custom LWRP to regenerate the site (build artifacts) on the server itself, but for now rsync will be fine.

* That’s a referrer link, BTW - if you follow it and sign up for Linode services, I get discounts. And if you’re looking for a reliable VPS host, Linode offers some of the best service and most reasonable prices out there.