Unit 14: My Raspberry Pi Future Projects

For this semester we dabbled with creating a LAMP server on both a virtual machine on the computer and a Raspberry PI (optional). Now that class is weeks from completion I thought it might be interesting to think about the things I can do with my Raspberry Pi.

Game Console

Of course I could make a game console out of my Raspberry Pi. On Life Hacker website it gives perfect step by step instructions for installing software called RetroPie. By simple erasing the current information on my Micro SD chip and imaging RetoPie on instead I can turn the Raspberry Pi into an old school video game machine. I've already purchased some SNES UBS Controller to give it a try in a couple weeks.

Home Media Center

I can turn my Raspberry Pi into a media center. Since I already have a Apple TV I’m not sure this is really what I want to use it for, but it’s an option. With the OpenELEC software I can run Xbox Media Center from my Pi and from what I’ve read and watched on YouTube, it runs cable TV and videos in the home network fast and in High Definition. As I said before, I do already have a way to stream HD video on my Television, but this would be great for the job down the road if I need it.

Creating a Drone

I've been wanting a drone for recording film in the air for over a year now. This is a perfectly logical project if I want to learn a bit more code and create a drone with the Raspberry PI. I know for a fact that there are multiple sites on the web that give step by step instruction for the build (Example). I think the big thing that’s important to me is that the Drone can lift a camera with it. So even if the Raspberry Pi is smart enough to fly, I still need a HD camera connected.

There are tons of other idea for things to do with your Raspberry pi. I personally like these links:

Ping Bin

Gear Burn

I have tons of projects just waiting for my graduation in December. I thought my list was filled with things to do, but with the Raspberry PI I have gained more projects to play with during all that time I used to spend studying and working on assignments.

Unit 13: Hello, World

Earlier in the year I read the book called Homeland by Cory Doctorow.  It’s the sequel to his more popular book Little Brother. In Homeland the main character has to deal with a huge torrent full of government documents that the government doesn't want the world to see. It’s a Techie kind of thriller and I would say that these books are directed at nerdy people and teens. It’s about question authority and about why we let other people make rules for the way we live. They are very interesting reads and I totally suggest them to all of my library teens.

In Homeland there is an awesome moment where the main character is building and programming a website for a politician. The book then goes on to talk about the awesomeness of writing code. The idea of creating something from nothing and then executing it and seeing what you've created in action. The “HelloWorld” code that most computer language lesson books teach is a perfect example of this. ‘Hello World’ is instant gratification that you've created something worth seeing (even if it’s a little text on a web browser written in JavaScript).

I personally love creating things and I defiantly would love to learn more about C++ and graphical based game design. Currently at my job I am working on learning how to get an App published in the Apple store using software that lets you design and upload it to the Apple store (GameSalad). This is great if you want to rely on a 3rd party, but I want to learn how to do it from scratch too.

I think it’s great that we live in a world with such a mass of openly available information on learning to do just about anything. The only time where really need to pay for any of that education is if we want to get that information in binded form. I’m graduating after this semester and I can’t wait to start playing with learning game design as a hobby. This class was really great to get my juices going in that direction.

Unit 11: Can't Wait to Use it!

One thing that I have really liked about this semester and this class specifically is the real world use of what we've been doing this for the past 11 weeks. Instead of so many classes that I've had where we learned a lot of philosophy on the LIS profession, this class has given as a hands-on technical look at how library databases from work. Don't get me wrong. I think a lot of the theory that I have learned in the past two years will be very helpful for communicating with other people in the LIS profession, but there is something special about learning something that you can take with you to work and actually do something with if given the computer access.

         

When I learned that we were going to be making our own LAMP server, I was very excited and couldn't wait to order the Raspberry Pi to set up. Being a somewhat technical person, with some background in coding but not a lot of background in hardware this has been a nice refreshing way of learning how to use and set up a library system.

Six years ago I helped open my first library. But when it came to opening the library on the library computer system end, I really didn't have anything to do with it. Everything that had to do with setting up the library OPAC server went to the library technician, and I'm sure that he probably knows most of the things that were learning in this class. I'm proud to say that now I'm excited about the idea of setting up a system that I know the ins and outs of the back end.

I realize that we have one third of our class left and I can't wait to see where this goes and the great hands on experiences we have left. I also have to admit I’m excited to figure out what I’m going to do with my Raspberry Pi. I’m figuring I will make a video game system with it, but who knows, there are a ton of different possibilities.

Unit 10: Getting My Hands Dirty

Since last week was mostly conceptual, I was really excited to finally get into actually doing some coding. I love getting my hands dirty, figuratively of course. I have to admit that I really didn't have a hard time with any of this weeks work. Instead a lot of it was a great way of reflecting on the things that we've learned throughout the semester. 

It was really neat to rehash learning about creating users and security levels just like we did about Linux, but this time in MySQL. I really did enjoy the coursework video and Joshua’s choice usernames for his sample accounts. There's something about having both a teachers pet and that best friend that will mess everything up as a great example for showing everyone how everything can get screwed up by letting someone you don't trust into your system.

Next I got to rehash all of what we learned about installing Webmin. When I first used Webmin, I was very unimpressed with it weeks ago. But it was really cool to be able to create tables and databases very fast and with ease. If I wanted to add a ton data really fast, I think I would use Webmin to do it, because for me it’s the quickest way of doing.  Of course everyone has their own personal choice for how they like to enter data and I'm sure many people would disagree with my favorite being Webmin.

Next installing, installing and installing was the name of the game, and it brought me back to when we first created our LAMP server. This time we installed phpMyAdmin. This software is definitely my choice for testing MySQL Queries. I think the fact that you can simply copy and paste from one window to another and then apply and see what happens it a lot easier than creating a query on the command line and continually getting errors until you get a working product. I'm assuming that's why I was told that this is probably the preferable program for using MySQL and creating a databases.

Last but definitely not least we made a text file and turned it into a table. It's really nice to know that there are so many different ways to do the same thing. I think that was the point of this week. This week we learned the versatility of being able to create databases and tables for MySQL in so many different manners.

To end my exciting week it was very cool to create my very own queries made of all kinds of different verbiage and testing them out.  Sometimes my code worked and sometimes it took forever to figure out what I was doing wrong. All in all this was a very exciting week, and I love learning and creating something and then being able to look back and see the architecture.

Unit 9: Something to Figure Out

I have to admit, that I had a really hard time with this project. I always thought of myself as a very adaptive person. If you put a piece of software in front of me I can learn it if I have enough instruction. When it came to creating an Entity Relationship Diagram I felt like I hit a wall of logic what wasn’t kicking in. Maybe it has to do with my hands on approach, but I just had a really hard time rapping my head around relationships. It was almost impossible to figure it out myself so I searched the internet to find an example close to my database idea and work from there.

So my idea is to make an image database that is based on different types of humor. In reality I really just need a digital asset database example and I found one after searching for an hour or so at Database Answers. There I finally found what I was looking for.

Here an asset has a relationship with its creators, events and format types. I’m not sure what the events are for, but the other two made sense. The format type is connected to two additional tables (recording devices and publishing devise), which is a bit too complicated for my database. 

I was able to take this Entity Relationship Diagram and make my own. It’s not perfect by any means, but I’m proud of it because it was hard to wrap my mind around how it would be written.

Other than that, this week’s concepts weren't that bad. I can see how many would have an issue with Normalization, but after watching MySQL Database Normalization on YouTube the concept finally clicked for me.

Unit 8: Is it still true today, yep?

I loved reading ‘Life is what happens to you when you'remaking other plans’, written by Michael Schuyler in 2000. It was a blast from the past to know even back in 2000 people who were making decisions on technology knew little to anything about the technology itself. I will admit that understanding technology has become easier and easier, but I was still surprised that my now fiancé, then girlfriend knew little to nothing about computers. She wanted them just work to and to do what she wanted. She had no interested on how they worked, “That’s what the Best Buy people are for (Geek Squad).”

Again this article was written back in 2000, and I would cringe if a big city library system didn’t have some IT professionals in the room when talking about the future technology plan for a city-wide system, but what about smaller systems or  a one library town.  Some libraries can’t even afford to have an IT person on staff and then need to talk about their future in technology needs. I’d love to dismiss this article and say, it’s a great satire of the past, but in fact it’s probably something that still happens today in the building next door, when we’re not paying attention.

Sure there are words everyone knows now, like, internet and website. Small businesses go out of business because of their lack of web presence. Library need to always staff in front of the crowd and therefore need to keep a loud technology presence in the room at all staff meetings.

I am currently working on a LSTA grant for a program I call ‘The Videogame Blogging Station’. Without going into a lot of specifics I want to get a powerful computer with numerous recording abilities for tweens and teens to play games while recording themselves and for them to make games reviews and video blogs. This will help them build communication skills, video editing skills and self-esteem, plus they get to play video games, everyone wins.  In the grant I will need to talk about in many pages my technology needs, but mostly I will need to talk about outcomes. What’s interesting is the outcome has nothing to do with the actual technology needs.

I brought that all up because technology forecasting can easily get clouded by non-technology based information. We want to maintain a high-speed internet. We want to set up places for staff to save all of their work so they can use it anywhere in the city, etc. These things are great, but you’ll need a tech guy in the room to help you figure out how this is going to happen and the cost. Cost especially is important in future casting.

I really loved Schuyler article, partially for its humor, but even more because these issues still exist at some level all over the place today.

Unit 7: XML is so fancy!

I have to admit to learning a little XML about fifteen years ago. Back when I just graduated with my undergrad, my dad wanted to take a JavaScript course at the community college and asked if I wanted to take it with him. During the class my dad created a slide show webpage with JavaScript that let the user flip through pictures, using html buttons links to the script. The JavaScript used an XML page for the picture information. Back then I was working on getting rid of a bunch of my stuff to move out of living with my parents so I transferred his idea to a website I called Bargain Monkey’s Garage. This was a time period where eBay wasn't that big yet, so just think if I had made the site learn to take money from people and actually took time to finish it I might be a millionaire.

So this week I instantly went to the w3schools website to refresh my memory on XML. I watched part of Professors Fulton’s YouTube video and realized it was a great class for XML information made as a PowerPoint presentation (Beyond MARC: Metadata Standards for Digital Resources). I also watched the suggested video called, “Just Enough XML to Survive”, it was a very brief overview of XML, but the video quality was lacking. I could hard read the screen and when I made it larger I felt like I was just looking at fuzz.

I then moved to making my XML file and we were instructed to make a XML files with a root element with three data elements with sub-elements within. It was supposed to be about images so I figured I would make one for real. I used free picture from Deviant Art with random searches. 

I picked a picture of a turtle, a banana and a double rainbow and saved off the files for potential use in the future. I also got their creation date and artist data and added it to the sub-elements. I really enjoyed making the XML file and hope we use it in the upcoming weeks in class.