How to play sounds (or run anything) on startup and shutdown with Raspbian

The Raspberry Pi is very handy for fun projects, and sometimes these projects require running specific events (like playing a sound) on startup or shutdown, or even in both instances – for an interactive machine that reacts to user input and presence, for example.

Sounds on startup and shutdown can also be used as a means of confirming those specific actions taking place – startup is complete and shutdown is taking place (and will complete in a very short while).

How to pre-configure Raspberry PI for remote SSH and Wifi

Many Raspberry PI projects are used headless (with no display device attached or if a display device exists, it’s not connected to the default HDMI or analog outputs).
In these instances it’s time consuming to connect the PI to a monitor and keyboard just to configure remote SSH access and wireless connection details (and in rare occasions it may even not be possible).

Luckily, the good folk developing Raspbian implemented shortcuts and workarounds that allow things to be pre-configured even before booting the PI.

DVB-C TV on Raspberry PI with LibreELEC/Kodi

There are plenty of TVs to chose from and nowadays they all know DVB-C so why go through all the trouble of building a TV player with a Raspberry PI?

Well… because it’s fun and because of the freedom of being able to watch your favourite TV channel on any of your devices – even when away.

Service management on the PI – chkconfig equivalent for Debian

Using the Debian based Rasbian (on my Raspberry PI), I recently need to turn some services off and then others on for startup. I knew how to do this on Redhat based distributions, but Debian does things differently.

Instead of chkconfig, Debian provides the update-rc.d utility to turn services on/off at specific runlevels…

Raspberry PI as NAS

A friend of mine was wondering about using a Raspberry PI as a NAS, the question being: how fast is the PI at file transfers from/to an external hard disk connected via a USB rack.

So I booted up my PI, mounted some random 3.5 inch Samsung 160GB SATA hard drive inside another random Spire USB-SATA external (powered) rack and gave it a go at some testing.

RaspberryPI – first impression

I couldn’t resist not trying out my RaspberryPI which I received yesterday 🙂

I quickly recycled one of my SD cards, installed the recommended SD image and booted it up.

After the initial boot setup screen (and partition resize), you can see it running connected to a monitor via HDMI, with a keyboard, mouse and wireless adapter (Asus WL-167g) all plugged in a 4-port USB hub…