Good Time to Leave Town...

Winter has returned. Especially if you look at the prediction for Saturday. It sounds like a good reason to be somewhere else. Almost anywhere else. Actually, this is probably the last really cold spell that we're going to have. Plus, this evening, we are heading for Chicago and Pennsylvania for a bit. I not delusional enough to believe that it's going to be warm but hoping that it'll be warmer than here.

On another note, this is one of the new Raspberry Pi 2 model B single board computers. It has a 900 mHz quad core Arm 7 processor, 1 gig of memory, 4xUSB ports, 10/100 ethernet port, HDMI, analog audio out, camera input plus a smattering of digital inputs. Not too shabby for $35 though I wish it came with a 10/100/1000 ethernet port that supported PoE (Power over Ethernet). Initially, I loaded OpenELEC on a micro-SD card and have it hooked up to an old plasma TV that was going to be sent to surplus. The video performance blows the older model out of the water.

I am setting up another one to run Raspbian, a Linux distro for the Pi, and compile the PerfSonar tools. This would be a cheap method of monitoring network performance around the campus. A colleague at the University of Hawaii has a large number of the older model B Pi's deployed on their campus and I was inspired by his presentation at the last Internet² meeting. The package also included a wireless network (802.11B/G/N) usb adapter, plastic case, SD cards, heatsinks, HDMI cable and 10 watt power supply. The total for each package ended up around  $65 on Amazon.

On Monday, I met with JedR another soon to be Ural rider and BMW airhead. He had just returned from Anchorage to get Mickey to sign off on some sort of card that indicates that he has been briefed and ridden a Ural. He brought back my speedometer from Mickey to replace the one that died when we first reached -28°F. Then it'll be a new bike restarting at 0 miles, right? His rig is being shipped up from the east coast fully assembled in what must be one huge crate.