All Pis in action!

All three of my Pis are currently up and running.

Following some issues with our stupid BT broadband, I have had no internet for a few days. This coming less than a couple of weeks since the last outage. Fortunately, this was fairly quickly (for BT anyway) resolved. Apparently, they were working on line faults and one of the engineers cut out line when installing another one....

So back to the Pis.

The blue Pi - which was my first Model B Pi - is currently up and running a fairly standard Raspbian install. By "fairly", I mean that I have removed stuff I personally don't use which has no bearing on the functionality of the Pi - so the programming Scratch tools and the Wolfram stuff. I don't use it, so no point in it being there.
The blue Pi is my "test" box. I like to try things out on it, so from time to time, it gets the SD card re-written from a stock image or from a backup. It runs headless, but I use VNC to see the GUI if I so wish on my main PC. It actually works quite well - and, just for fun, I also installed the VNC viewer on my Android tablet and I can use that as a touch screen interface for the Pi! Yep, it really works!

The clear Pi (and the blue and clear Pi's are named after their cases in case you were wondering!) is also a B and runs completely headless and is used as a simple server. Until recently, I ran lighttpd on it but, when the BT problems all occured, the SD card somehow went south and I had to spend quite some time trying to get the card to work again. It refused to allow me to use the wifi - or ethernet - which meant corruptions each time I wanted to edit the card...
Eventually, I had to reformat and re-install the system. Again, it is Raspbian, but this one is far more cut down. All x11 related graphical desktop stuff has been removed and I use SSh to work with this PI. At the moment, all it is doing is running a small database of my family tree, which runs in a program called geneweb. Geneweb runs a small server of its own, so I don't need to install a server for that. It is actually a pretty impressive program - I must write something on Linux genealogy programs soon. There are some really good ones.

The third Pi is one of the latest Pi 2 models. Quad core, twice the RAM of the Model B...
Originally, I had Raspbian on that and used it mostly for doing time lapse video with the Pi camera module. I did the processing on my computer though!
Currently, I have installed Ubuntu Mate on this Pi and, the odd niggle aside, it works quite well. It certainly looks lovely - especially compared to the LXDE of the standard Raspbian install! It even comes with LibreOffice installed - which, to be fair, runs quite well on the Pi!
Not sure if I shall keep it on the Pi or not, but for now, it is staying.

Only snag now is that I need another Pi 2 to stick the camera back on so I can do more time lapse and some stop animation!

Tonight, we have forecasts of thunder and lightning, so I suspect all Pi's will be off tonight to keep them safe.

Genealogy and parish registers

One of my little hobbies is genealogy - tracing my ancestors.
A while back, the parish registers for many Cornish parishes became available online at the Familysearch website - which was brilliant, especially for those with ancestors down here. Then without warning, these registers were removed from the website. After waiting a while to see if this was just a technical glitch, I emailed the site to see what was happening and was surprised to be told that apparently an individual had complained about the registers being available on the site.

Now, as these were free of charge to view, I can only surmise that the complainant was someone with a vested (i.e commercial) interest in preventing us from seeing these registers.
I presume the Familysearch won't provide the details of the complainant, so if that person would like to contact me and explain their reasoning, I would be most interested. However I doubt they will - they are going to simply sit smugly and continue to presumably raise a small income from selling these registers on cd or whatever. Those of us in the genealogy community know who sells various products and one of those people is presumably the person responsible for this free service being removed.
Well, whoever it was, I did used to actually purchase cds as well as finding stuff for free (sometimes it is just easier to locate an ancestor via a searchable cd than struggling through the dreadful handwriting and faded pages of a register) - but I will no longer purchase a cd.
Not only that, but those registers I have already downloaded will be transcribed and placed online for free access - so you will not win.

Sorry for the rant - but this has really annoyed me.