Eye on the Pi

I have my eye on the Raspberry Pi. This little machine has a vibrant community and help is available all around the web.

This morning, I found The Errant Scientist blog; Matthew takes a walk through the set up process and installation of software via the LXTerminal.

ADB Inc. Calls in Some Friends

Amarillo Design Bureau has called in some friends. Facebook is now hosting several new fan pages for the great products by ADB, Inc.

Their main page is here.
The page for Star Fleet Battles is here.
Federation Commander has a page, as does A Call to Arms.
Task Force Games has an active fan base on Facebook, too.

Go ahead and friend them on the main page and look for new updates by Steven, Jean and all the good people at ADB.

Incompetech.com’s Graphpaper

One of my favorite websites is Incompetech. Not only do they have a great name, they have free graph paper. Perfect for a variety of gaming purposes.

For future reference – US Census Microdata

The other day, took the kids to the Niagara Aquarium.

On our way home, desperate for bathroom, we stopped at the Tuscarora Reservation. Inside, there is a tiny museum with awesome maps. 

Snapping pictures of them does no justice. They are gorgeous prints. I found out that they are from the 1892 Census.

Looking around online, I found this website with the actual images. The Integrated Public Use Microdata Series website is not just information on the US Census, it is data on individuals. What an excellent historical document.

I am pretty sure they didn’t think of someone pulling maps from the public documents, but what a wonderful resource for history and art.

Next → Stupid Saucy and XFCE Minecraft Trick

Installing Minecraft on a Chromebook is simple. Get Crouton, install Saucy and XFCE then get stuck. Why stuck?

You need to change the permissions of the Minecraft.jar to be an executable.

On many versions of Ubuntu, it is a simple matter of right clicking and checking the “make executable” check box. Using the standard Thunar XFCE file manager, that isn’t an option.

You have a couple of choices here. Installing a new file manager is a possibility, but if you are running XFCE or other light version of Linux, maybe you simply don’t want to do that.

This is a great chance to use the terminal to do what you want. The command needed is “sudo chmod +x”.


As you can see from the screenshot, I am using XFCE on a Chromebook, so my directory line is a little different.