Pi Ramble

Oh hey, in gaming news, I actually played a couple hours of PlanetSide 2 (and got one kill!), and a little bit of XCOM and Jet Set Radio. I must say that the newest video drivers for my Radeon are quite an improvement -- no more weird slowdowns in the middle of animation so far).
I really hope I get some board gaming soon...


So yeah, I have this Raspberry Pi.
I have managed to shut down my main linux server (which used to also be an occasional media front end) and replace 90% of its functionality with this tiny little box.
It's pretty awesome.
I've had to do some compiling to get a few packages on there, but it's exceeding my expectations. I can see it acting a bit slow on some tasks, but the point is not super power.

It's currently got berryboot, dual-booting raspbian and (about 1% of the time) the XBMC-optimized distribution OpenELEC, both fully on a 16GB sdcard.  I have plans on expanding the space onto a USB hard drive, but haven't gotten around to that yet.
My mongodb instance, which is mainly used for my silly VTES IRC bot "Gramle", has its data in a ram drive which is slightly faster than the sdcard.
(Some mongo data from my old machine wasn't yet imported; mainly the stuff in my never-quite-begun BSG PBF Moderator tool which is on hold until Daybreak).

If you have any questions at all about my experiences with the Pi, feel free to ask.

And now, silly old me is worried about the hostname. :)
Right now, the machine is named "raziya", named -- purely as a pun -- after Raziya Samater, a classic combat weenie VTES vampire.
But at some point, I was attempting a Battlestar Galactica theme of machine names:
I've got baltar (the Linux server that is going into semi-retirement but isn't dead yet), who (cleverly) has a (rarely-used) Windows XP virtual machine inside him named six.
And I've got my "gaming laptop" named boomer , who (again, so cleverly) is named athena when booted into the rarely-used Linux partition.
I also used to have machines called cally and tyrol, but both have been long since retired.
My ipad was onced called leoben, and then husker, until I felt an obligation to have one machine named ossian (also not a BSG reference, but my dear readers should understand it), so that's that.

My main domain names have nothing to do with BSG, but that has never stopped me from arbitrary themes before...  and no other "named" machines have names having to do with BSG at all. My wife's laptops have had names chosen by her for her own reasons, and the machines that don't really have incoming connections (phone, ps3, etc) don't get special names.

(You can see why this is on my blog and not posted to social media, as frivolous as the concern is ;) )

So now I'm thinking, perhaps I should name the machine scar . Coincidentally, my son has been watching Lion King lately, so that's also remotely related..

What do you think?
Any other suggestions?
Do you want to call me insane for blogging about this? :)

I really want to play some games...

We are still in a "moving-in" state in our house... so I haven't had much chance to play any games.
I actually got to a Pathfinder session this week (!)
But I'd like to get into PlayGamesWithJosh again.. or at least PlayGamesWithChris.
And video games.. oh video games. My laptop is already getting "old" :) and I think I'm still in the middle of an Xcom game from 4 months ago.
I need to catch up on Steam, PS3, and maybe even pop some emulators onto my new Raspberry Pi.

Speaking of the Pi:  Yes, I've got one.
There's not a whole lot to write about it but it far exceeds my expectations for under $50.  It's running my whole Linux Server subsystem right now (everything that doesn't require a hard drive or video processing) and I couldn't be happier.

Thinking about getting a second one...