Ye Gods, it's been over a year gone past since my last post.

So much has changed and not necessarily for the better.  Let's quickly address my last post.  My weight has crept back up so whilst I am not a fan of "New Years Resolutions", I will need to try to implement some life-style changes.  I managed to get myself a little shed.  Saw one reduced to £199 and found that if I ordered it online, I could get a further 15% off so I managed to get it for about £160.

I looked at the cost of the timber, fixtures and fittings and found it was cheaper to get a kit.  Had fun growing my chillies last year so hopefully will get a decent crop this year too.  I started a little raspberry pi project


I found myself away from home, doing my photography and usually I would use our laptop to copy files from my camera card to hard-drive for safe-keeping and freeing up space on the card.  However, I did not have the laptop available and I asked myself, how I could do it otherwise.  This cast my memory back to the Raspberry Pi which I've found is now in it's third generation (not including the B and + models)  So, out of my pocket money I got the Raspberry Pi 3 and started playing with it.  It is effectively a computer with the processing power of about a 5 year old PC.  Let's face it, it's not a gaming powerhouse but it runs linux nicely.  I then added the cannibalised playstation eye from my PS3 to add video and sound recording and attached the Pi to the Amazon Alexa service. A £5 amplifier and speakers later and I had effectively made an extremely cheap Amazon Echo (albeit with limited capabilities)  I then marauded a USB connector and 3.5mm sound jack from the back of an old PC motherboard and added an £6 LCD screen to the top and I have a working Linux computer with USB ports on the back for adding keyboard and mouse and copying from flashdrives/card-readers.  I can also VNC into the desktop or SSH into the command line from phone or PC.