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Showing posts from December, 2015

Adding my usb 64gb drive to the pi

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I picked up a 64gb Nano usb for the pi this week. I used Amazon but, in the rather bizarre way I have of buying, I also use a service called purse.io  for a lot of my Amazon purchases. It actually allows you to use digital Bitcoins via Amazon wishlists to make purchases. The mechanics of it are a bit dull but you usually get a discount via purse  of 5% upwards. So I shave a few pence off each purchase. However after the device arrived my troubles began. It basically wasn't recognised. There is a reason for this and it goes back about 30 years. USB drives were designed as floppy disk replacements originally. Big floppy disks but definitely removeable. For this reason they use a variation of the FAT filesystem. FAT is 'File Allocation Table'. The original 8 bit FAT format was designed for floppy disks with a capacity of 180kb (single sided). The original floppy was 8 inches, which then became 5.25 and then became 3.5 inch. It was always 'floppy' but the extern

As easy as Pi

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A couple of years ago, I dont remember exactly when, I bought a Raspberry Pi . This is a very small computer the size of a cigarette pack. It was supplied basically as a circuit board where you plug in a power supply, keyboard, mouse and monitor. It has an HDMI output for a TV. The main thing about this is you switch on the power and it boots from an SD Card.  The problem with this for me was the messy nature of my desk. If the exposed circuit board touches metal and short circuits then you have a problem. That's what I did and a smell of burning hit my nose.  That was it. Well the PI developed and as a little Christmas treat I bought a replacement. This time with a case to stop me breaking it so easily. With the new smart case with a raspberry logo, more memory, a microsd and more USB ports it is a bit better than the original but still tiny. It's basically about as powerful as a small smartphone and is targetted at the hobbiests and also the kids who