Raspberry Pi – A whole computer for $25

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For a few months now I’ve been following a fascinating project that aimed to build a tiny, cheap computer. They wanted to design it for kids to use in schools as a way of learning how to program. Lets face it, the most computer education kids get in school is how to hit Control, Alt and Delete to restart Windows XP.

The project is known as Raspberry Pi, after a few years of planning and development, Raspberry Pi now have two single board, credit card sized computers fully developed. The first (Model ‘A’) is priced at $25 and features 128MB RAM. For an extra $10 you can get the ‘B’ model, which ships with 256mb RAM and on board ethernet.

Both models use a Broadcom BCM2835 chip. This is basically an ARM11 700mhz CPU but with a dedicated 1080p Dual Core ‘VideoCore’ co-processor built in. This basically means that this tiny little computer is able to playback video at full HD without any problems from its limited memory, due to the on-board video decoder.

So whats the point in it for the average user? Well, there’s a number of great things that can be done with it. Because its so cheap, you could buy 6 of these and it’d work out the same cost as 1 Sheevaplug. 6 Raspberry pie’s all hooked up together in a nice cluster would give you a great, low power linux system to work on. Myself, I’m planning on purchasing a couple of these as soon as they are released. Initially I just want to have a play with them, however I’m quite interested in hooking them up to the TV to use as a UPNP client to stream to the TV, and maybe even as a replacement for the AppleTV assuming I can get an AirPlay based server up and running.

Another great usage would be as a homeserver. The on-board SD card slot supports SDHC (unfortunately not SDXC) cards, so you can theoretically get a 32 or 64 GB card and use it to run a super fast LAMP system, all using just 5v of power via a microUSB plug!

Why not take a look at Raspberry Pi – for $25 its a fantastic project and worth checking out!

Welcome to 2012

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It’s been exactly 890 days, or 1.2 million seconds since my last post on RickyMills.com. After my last post on my top 10 mac web development apps, I moved in with some friends on my university course for a year, which was great fun. I then went on to launch my own web hosting business only to sell it this year to focus on other projects. I’m not going to mess about explaining what I’ve been up to. All I am going to say is, welcome to 2012 – I’m back.

I’ve been thinking about starting up the site again over the last moth or so, I even went as far as to upgrade WordPress and change the theme around a month ago, but never actually posted anything after that.

Like most people, on the 1st of Jan of every year, I subconsciously think “how can I make this year better than the last”. So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to start posting here again as of today. My personal goal is a minimum of 1 post per week. I think this is a fairly easy goal to achieve and hopefully go beyond. I’m looking at this as a fresh start. A new beginning. God knows I need it. My my own admission I’ve been pretty poorly motivated over the last few months to the point where at times I could barely be bothered to check my emails.

But, all that ends right now. I’m not going to try and list out a bunch of new years resolutions, as doing that just creates stupid amounts of pressure, and you end up pissed off with yourself when/if you dont meat your own expectations. All I am going to do is make myself more relaxed and productive. How I’m going to be doing that remains to be seen. I spent the christmas break mulling a few ideas over in my head and will likely try and modify my workspace and workflow in an attempt to get some sort of order and discipline into my work routine.

So, I’ll be back very soon with some interesting content – I’ve had 890 days to think of things I want to write so there’s no shortage of articles to put together ;)

Top 10 Mac Web Development Apps

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Following on from my post on the Top 10 Mac Productivity Apps, I’m now going to share what I feel, are the top 10 web development apps.

Now, obviously my choices will not suite many programmers. For this reason, please bear in mind that I’m a PHP developer, and my choices focus on PHP/HTML/CSS development. There are going to be a few repeated apps, simply because there’s a fine line between the two subjects.

Ok, lets get started! Continue reading →

Long time no see!

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First, let me apologise for the really, really, REALLY huge gap between posts! I’ve been a bit snowed under with the recent launch of VPSSpeed as well as ongoing work on the top secret project.

So, heres a little project update to let you know where I’m at.

VPSSpeed
VPSSpeed is expanding at a phenomenal rate. In the last week we’ve filled 2 Core 2 Quad (8GB RAM) servers and taken in a lot of new customers. Unfortunately with these new customers came the fraudsters….you know the ones, those guys who signup, send 50,000+ spam emails, then dump the account. Because of this, an entire IP range got put onto the Spamhaus blacklist!

It forced me to take extra steps to prevent fraud orders. From using MaxMind fraud verification, to no longer allowing free email addresses such as Yahoo and Hotmail. Since doing this, we’ve not had any fraud orders get through.

I’ve got a great range of new features that will be added to VPSSpeed soon. These include:

  • Updated website
  • Advanced reseller program
  • New OS Templates
  • A company blog
  • Twitter (Who’s not using it these days!?)
  • Dedicated Servers
  • DNS Hosting
  • + more

There are quite a few other little bits and bobs that I’ll keep under wraps for now! We’re also looking at offering VPS hosting in other locations. Whilst our Dallas provider does a great job, we’re looking at offering a few alternate locations such as Atlanta, Tampa, New York, etc.

If you’re interested in a VPS server, then do check out VPSSpeed.com you can also get 25% off your first month with the coupon RMCOM.

WSDReg
WSDReg has taken a bit of a back seat at the moment. This month it is 3 years old and is still going strong with a customer base in the thousands, and domains in the tens of thousands. I’ll be working more with WSDReg in a few months time.

Unnamed top-secret hidden project
This one’s got me rather frustrated. Its something I’ve been working on for close to a year now and is coming very close to ready for use by it’s first customer. I cant go into much detail about it but I’ve mentioned it on my blog before!

There’s not a huge amount to say about this one at this time but I’ll be posting more details once it goes live!

Well that’s about all for now! I’ve only got about 5 weeks left at university (if that) then I’m off for 4 1/2 months, so will post more updates soon!