If I get bored at work I’m sitting at a desk in front of a computer so either do some idle surfing or play a game. But when a dentist gets bored, he has an X-ray machine to play with. In the case of dentist Steve Purchase, he decided to put it to good use to zap some images of a Raspberry Pi.

Steve initially used a 30 x 15cm “large extra-oral film” in his X-ray machine to capture a small image of the Raspberry Pi board. He sent that off to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which understandably wanted to see more and bigger X-rays of their tiny PC. Steve was more than happy to oblige.

The images you see included here are from that second round of X-rays. This time Steve used a much higher resolution film, but had to stitch 16 images together because the film was only 3 x 4cm in size. The X-ray machine used is a Trophy CCX 70kV for those who are interested in such details.

Stitching X-ray images together sounds like an error-prone task, but it was made easier by the fact Steve’s machine uses re-usable phosphor plates that are then scanned using a DenOptix QST scanner. So the process was done on a PC which has those ever so useful snap-to-grid and undo features.

The image above is the original monochrome X-ray capture, but Steve also took the time to artificially colorize the board, which can be seen in the images below.

Reade more >>

With Google Reader shutting down this July

With Google Reader shutting down this July, you might be looking for another way to stay on top of your feed subscriptions. Why not set up a Raspberry Pi to do the not-so-heavy lifting instead of importing your feeds into yet another web-based service? After all, you never know when anyone (or everyone) is going to pull the pin on their aggregators — especially since RSS is supposed to be dead already anyway.

Just follow Conor O’Neill’s lead and install Tiny Tiny RSS on your Raspberry Pi. It’s an open-source app that has been around for ages, and its developers provide a tarball that makes setup on the Pi (or any Linux-powered system) a simple task. You’ll need a basic LAMP stack running, too, because Tiny Tiny RSS isn’t a desktop app, it’s a web app that you can self-host.

That makes it a pretty ideal Google Reader replacement if you’ve got a decent internet connection and are comfortable setting up port forwarding on your router. Once everything’s configured, you’ll be able to access your feeds anywhere you have a browser available — just like you can with Reader. And since you’re in control, you don’t have to worry about a startup going under or someone going on a spring cleaning purgefest. As long as your ISP bill is up-to-date, you’ll always be able to read your feeds in the comfort of Tiny Tiny RSS.

Don’t have a Raspberry Pi? Loads of other devices will do the trick. SheevaPlug devices should work nicely, too, and so will those nifty little HDMI stick PCs — as long as you own one that can handle an ARM-friendly Linux distro.

Reade more >>