Raspberry Pi

Yesterday afternoon as I set off for my walk I noticed that the Pi AI Kit was in my post box. I moved it to the locked compartment and then went for my walk. After the walk I took the time to set it up and it went well.

Easy Assembly

If you’ve got your own kit but haven’t assembled it first, the long screws are there so that you can fix the Raspberry Pi and AI kit within the default Pi case. I made the mistake of using the shorter screws and had to swap them. It delayed me only slightly.

Last night I started to install wordpress on the Pi5 and I got it to work. I then started to install ClassicPress via the ClassicPress switchtoclassicpress plugin and got blocked. I was blocked because in order for WordPress to update plugins, themes and wordpress it needs to have access to itself via FTP. That’s when I stopped for the night.

VSFTPD

This morning I installed vsftpd and the first part went well. Within a few minutes I had access to the Pi via FTP, and then changed from the default tutorial directory to the wordpress directory where apt install wordpress places WordPress. I was able to navigate the directories and see the files.

Rain was forecast today. If rain had not been forecast then I would have driven to Ins, near the Lake of Murten near Neuchatel to go around the lake at a slow up. I didn’t go, not because rain was forecast, but because rain was expected although not quantified. I like to drive and do things, sometimes, but if I drive so far, especially to do something in relative solitude I would prefer to do it when the weather is good, rather than rainy. By driving so far in the rain I am contributing to global warming for very little

This morning when I should have been working on the daily blog post I decided to install Ubuntu on an external hard drive to see if it still worked as I remembered it working. It does, sort of.

There are two approaches. You could install Linux straight onto the internal HD of a mac device but if you do, and you encounter problems then it could take hours to fix your mistake. With an exteranl disk in target drive mode you can experiment to your heart’s content with an SSD that you can wipe, and reformat, and start again, if something messes up badly.

There are several types of people. One of them is youtubers that try and fail until they succeed, and then there are people like me, who also try and fail until they succeed. In one case the individual probably gets millions of views, and earns enough to waste hundreds of dollars per video in microtransactions, to people like me who are experimenting with Pis because it’s cheaper, once you know what you’re doing than getting a synology box.

Over at least a week I have been blogging with the Pi 5 and an Apple keyboard. I am using the Apple keyboard just because it’s the one I have, rather than out of a preference for their keyboards over others. I have a full size keyboard but it lost a part so it’s unbalanced and the rapoo keyboard is too small to be comfortable for typing.

VS Code and Front Matter

I use Visual Code and Front matter. Visual Code is good for keeping files organised. Front Matter is good for generating the Front Matter required by Hugo for each blog post. I create a new post with the required title, add the tags, and mark the post as false for draft status.

Yesterday I watched a video about setting up a Mini Nextcloud Server on a Pi 5 so I experimented with using the Pi-Hosted script to install docker and then portainer. Pi Hoster uses two scripts. One installs Docker and the second one installs Portainer. Portainer is a web interface to install docker containers instead of doing the same thing via the command line. It allows you to install Pi-Hole, Ad Guard, PhotoPrism, Nextcloud and many other solutions on a single server with relative ease.

This morning when driving back from the shops I heard someone in a podcast say that his fourteen year old niece was disgusted at the thought of using a laptop rather than a mobile phone and it made me think of something. In the age of iOS and Android devices replacing computers it makes sense to setup Raspberry Pi as Nextcloud servers, photoprism servers, Pi Holes and more. It makes sense becaue if we move away from the laptop and the desktop then we come across a serious limitation. Storage.

Yesterday when I tried to migrate nextcloud between two locations I used one that I installed from scratch and when I got to another network I was unable to use it. In the evening when I got home I re-installed Nextcloud but this time I used the NextcloudPi package, rather than installing it myself. I tested sudo raspi-config and went to change the SSID. When I saw that I could do this I decided that it was safe for another experiment this morning.

I had a theory that if I wanted to I could transport a raspberry pi running ubuntu server from one place to another and connect by wifi, with a little tweak, or by ethernet if that didn’t work and today that thought was proved wrong. I spend at least an hour experimenting, before calling it a day, because of lunch time, rather than a loss of desire to find a solution.