I have several of the original Model B and B+. I also have one 2.0. I would like to use the same cards on all of my Pis, because who wants to keep track of which card is for which unit? Not me.

First, I read this article and mine was already up-to-date with everything mentioned.

When I first put a card from a Model B+ into the 2.0, it didn't finish booting. It got part way through and then got stuck and eventually tried rebooting. Once, it got booted, but the opening video that plays at startup had artifacts on it and never got to the desktop. I figured it might be an issue with speed/timing. So back in the Model B+, I set overclocking to none (sudo raspi-config). After that, it worked in the 2.0.

However, no overclocking is kind of lame, especially in the old models. So the question is, what overclock settings work in all of my units? I've tried this in all of my chips and it works in both of my Pi units that I have at hand (B+ and 2.0). This is the Pi2 overclock setting, but with 6v overvolt instead of 2v overvolt. Since this option isn't in the raspi-config, edit the over_voltage line in /boot/config.txt (can do it in Windows or on the Pi).

arm_freq=1000
core_freq=500
sdram_freq=500
over_voltage=6

 

Selecting PHP command line version on HostGator shared host

This took me a while to find, so I'm saving it somewhere I can find it again.

The easy way to select the PHP version used for web applications is to use the CPanel configuration tool. However, that doesn't work if you're using SSH and need PHP on the command line. Also, on HostGator, you can't create a symlink outside of your directory (such as to the global php).

You can find out what version you have with

$ php --version

If that's not the version you want, try a specific version like this (php55 is 5.5, etc):

Book Scanning Process

 

Just to document this for next time. For reference, my books are 8 x 10.75 inches and other dimension below work for this. For approximately 100 pages, It takes me about 45 minutes to scan, an hour to crop and rotate, and 30 minutes to organize and generate the PDF.

Fixing features for hotfolder

Here is some documentation about the process I used to solve some issues with hotfolder and the features module. I was doing this partly through the web interface and partly through a console, so this is a reconstruction of what I remember and the console log. 

 

I was getting the following error message when I tried to check hotfolder watches (see https://www.drupal.org/node/2453659):

Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$field_watch_config_scheme

 

GIMP for Kids

 

My daughter likes to draw on the computer. I don't remember exactly how it started, but she draws in GIMP using my Genius pen tablet, on my secondary monitor. I used to have Linux running in a VirtualBox with GIMP running on my second monitor for her, but VB doesn't completely work in Windows 10 yet. A while back I tried running GIMP on one of my Raspberry Pi's but it was just too sluggish to be useful, frustratingly slow for a (then) 3-year-old. It runs much better on a Raspberry Pi 2. It still lags if she goes crazy with a big brush, but it works.

Die Fly: Designing a better fly swatter

I was looking through some of my old stuff for something and ran across this gem. If you need to put together a quick flyswatter, try this one I designed for a class in college (the famous Rube Goldberg project).

Here are a few excerpts from the attached PDF. If this doesn't convince you to build one (perhaps with several improvements as noted in the document), I don't know what will.