My birthday picnic at the Jamestown steam train

April 14, 2013, 8:45 pm

Old No. 3

This was fun. For my birthday celebration we went to Railtown 1897 in Jamestown. We had a picnic lunch and then rode the steam train. Afterwards we drove through the Red Hills looking for wild flowers. We found a few and stopped to take some family portraits.

Chase

Audree

Cortnie

Mark and Annmarie

Phil and Karen

Link
—Birthday 2013 photo gallery

April 14th, 2013 | Category: Family | Leave a comment

First day with a new Raspberry Pi

April 2, 2013, 8:55 pm

Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi

My Raspberry Pi arrived today. I have some vague ideas of what to do with this tiny computer, but the list of things I have to learn (or relearn) is very long. Nevertheless, I successfully booted it and have briefly played with it through a command terminal session and through a GUI.

The standard “getting started” instructions say to hook up a HDMI monitor, USB keyboard, and USB mouse. That wasn’t very appealing to me—too much work trying to free up a monitor (or trying to work on the Raspberry Pi in front of the 46″ TV screen). So I downloaded Adafruit’s Occidentalis 0.2 Linux distro that is preconfigured with sshd and avahi (Bonjour client identifying as raspberry.local) on boot. Followed directions on how to load this image onto a 4GB SD card using Mac OSX, installed the card into the Rasberry Pi, hooked up an ethernet cable, and plugged in the power supply. The on-board LEDs flickered like it was booting.

I started a terminal session on my Mac:

RivendellPrime:/ phil$ ssh -l pi raspberrypi.local
pi@raspberrypi.local's password: 
Linux raspberrypi 3.1.9adafruit+ #10 PREEMPT Thu Aug 30 20:07:05 EDT 2012 armv6l

This logged me in as user pi. After playing around for a bit, I decided to try to get a graphical user interface running.

To get that going I needed a VNC server, so entering sudo apt-get install tightvncserver downloaded and installed ‘tightvncserver’ on the RPi. Firing that app up on the RPi, I then ran the ‘Chicken’ VNC client on the Mac giving the raspberry.local name and its password, and up popped the GUI window for the RPi on my Mac. Sweet!

April 2nd, 2013 | Tags: | Category: Computing | Leave a comment

Hiking and geocaching in the Phoenix area

February 9, 2013, 8:06 pm

McDowell Mountain Sugauro

For our first day of hiking in the Phoenix we went to McDowell Mountain Regional Park near Fountain Hills. On the way I realized the location of our motel was not the best—it took nearly an hour to drive to this park. This was a nice hike, densely packed with geocaches and lots of cactus. After hiking we got a coffee at Fountain Park and watched the huge fountain for a bit, then grabbed a few more nearby drive-up caches.

View of the fountain from in front of Sofrita’s restaurant

At sundown we ate on the patio at Sofrita’s. It was quite good. I think the namesake fountain in the park is the highest I’ve ever seen. On our drive back to our motel we stopped at a Costco for gas and got a frozen yogurt (our high class dessert).

Chollas and the Superstition Mountains

The next day we hiked at the Lost Dutchman State Park east of Phoenix. Actually, we parked in the state park, but did most of our hiking in the Superstition Mountains wilderness area. There are a couple of very rugged peaks here, but we only hiked near the base. If we ever get back to the area I would love to do some scrambling up towards the top.

Links
—Phoenix 2013 photo gallery

February 9th, 2013 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment
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