Although it’s been over a week since I returned from both these events I thought I better put a little something up about them and the experiences I had there. Unfortunately Oggcamp and LinuxCon followed each other directly this year, so it meant a lot of heaving about over the course of about a week. Here’s part 1 where I will detail my time at OggCamp. The event I look forward to all year, took a little longer to arrive this year due to it being moved to October (Oggtober?

It’s been a while since I stayed up most of the night writing code, mainly down to having a young daughter but also down to the fact I haven’t found anything that needed a late night hack session to produce a result. This weekend changed all that, I’ve been playing around with home automation for a while but am now actually taking the plunge. I purchased a load of Arduino and electronics kit over the last few days to start prototyping the setup.

Recently I’ve been working on several new projects, all of which use either a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino. Site-To-Site VPN A friend of mine recently opened a new satellite office, and as part of his day to day work had a requirement to connect the two together so resources on either side could see each other. Site-to-site VPN I thought, and what better kit for the task than a couple of Raspberry Pi’s.

So, it’s been a while since I wrote anything on here, mainly because I couldn’t find the time to do so. Since I last wrote a lot has changed in my life, found out my wife was expecting our second child, visited Bletchley Park and the National museum of computing, got a new job and broke my toe just to name a few. Back in May, the LUG I’m Group Appointed BDFL for, RossLUG, took a daytrip to Bletchley park.

After one of my LUG colleagues mentioning about the BigV service from Bytemark I just had to try it. So today I prized open the wallet and set myself up an account. For £10+VAT per month you get a VM, it comes with 25gb HD space, 1GiB RAM, 1CPU (2.2ghz AMD it seems) and 200gb bandwidth per month. All seems pretty reasonable. Their software is a breeze to use, and being command line driven its my kind of thing.

I wouldn’t normally write about this kind of move, but I’m in a position where I feel I have to. A little over a year ago I made a decision to move from Fedora to Ubuntu, it wasn’t a decision that was easy after all I have been using Fedora since its first release, and Red Hat since around version 5. Needless to say I was (and still am at heart) a die hard Red Hat fan.

Let me start by saying, Saturday was a fantastic day out - even if I was there as crew not an attendee. The day started as most of these type of events do, runnning slightly late, I was a little worried at first as I thought I was the one running late (even though I was bang on time), but then I remembered who I was waiting for :). Eventually bumping into familiar faces everything started to fall into place.

This coming Saturday, 9th March, I’ll be helping out as crew member at what could be the most exciting Raspbery Pi event since its launch. CPC are sponsoring the jamboree, with talks from plenty of familiar, and some not so, faces at the exhibition centre in Manchester. Much looking forward to it. Full writeup will follow after the event, I am expecting an announcement or two though, not sure what though.

There are a number of events in my geek calendar I really look forward to throughout the year, most of them centre around a particular group of people too. This year an extra event has turned up early in the list, Linux Outlaws Live, or LOL as it seems to be more affectionately known. The live show, celebrating the 300th episode of Linux Outlaws, was held at Leaf on Bold st, Liverpool.