Today’s blog is a little different as I’m going to be focusing on local businesses!! With that in mind are you a small business owner in the North East? Or perhaps you work in HR for a larger business or organisation? If this is you then please read on… Statistics show that over 150 million …

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Our First Press Release Went Out This Week A Sunderland PhD graduate has swapped her lab coat for her new business, aimed at promoting the North East. Donna Petch, 30, studied a BSc in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Science and completed a PhD in Medicinal Chemistry at Sunderland University before moving to Leeds, where she worked …

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  What Are your Addictions? We live in a world where everything is moving so fast that if you blink you would miss something. The people in it have totally lost the ability to be self aware, to understand that they are in charge of their own reality instead of coasting along not realising that …

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This months event will focus on data visualisation tools and techniques, and featuring the Processing programming language, as well as business intelligence tools and lessons learned.

This event has been curated by Justin Souter. The lineup is:

1. Justin to give a quick introduction – 5 minutes
2. Slot 1 – 40 mins
1. Joeli from Codeworks to recount how the CultureCode events went, what the thinking was behind it, and what future plans may be – 5 mins probably
2. Brigitta to address ‘Experimental Approaches to Data Visualisation’, and thus broaden the scope by talking through her data visualisation work – 12 mins
3. Adrian Park to outline his work with Processing and recent CultureCode attendance etc. – 12 mins
3. Q&A session involving these three presenters – 5-10 mins
4. Comfort break – 5 mins
5. Slot 2 – 25 mins
1. Local industry player to talk about business intelligence tools – 20 mins (tops) + 5 mins Q&A
2. Potential slot for sponsor to speak, at this point
3. I still need to finalise this, so any volunteers – please get in touch –@souterconsults :-)
6. Slot 3
1. Stuart Smith from Wood Holmes – 20-25 mins + 5 mins Q&A
1. Stuart to talk about more technical side of data analysis
2. This is what we used; not how we used it; challenges we faced in doing it
7. Wash-up and Q&A – 10 minutes

Justin has written more details about the event here:

http://souterconsulting.eu/2012/05/08/supermondays-data-visualisation-evening-may-28th/

The event will take place at the Culture Lab in Newcastle University on Monday 28th May starting from 6.00pm. You can find a map to the venue here:
http://culturelab.ncl.ac.uk/about/contact

Running a SuperMondays event costs money. In the past we paid for this out of Public Sector sponsorship, this has subsequently dried up. We are trying an innovative scheme this month by giving attendees the opportunity to make a small donation when booking your ticket.

Its been a while since I redesigned my blog and something I havent talked about is why I decided to...

The North East’s vibrant and collegial local music scene has found a new star – Natasha Haws – who this time last year didn’t even have any of her own songs, is now suddenly one of the most sought after tickets in town. The launch party for her debut E.P. on Saturday at the Sunderland …

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Welcome To Our 1st Promotional Blog Post On 3 North East Singers/Bands We love to support local music talent! **** Can’t afford Michael Buble – give Jason a call! Jason Isaacs is officially the UK’s favourite swing singer after winning ITV1s search for England’s answer to Michael Buble by a landslide vote. So if you can’t afford …

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The Premier League is set to award a multitude of honours celebrating 20 years of the greatest league in the world. One of the awards is set to go to the Premier League’s best player over the course of its existence, and so we thought it would be fun to carry out our very own …

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Evolution Emerging returns to the Ouseburn Valley on the 1st June and once again promises to be a fantastic day of live music, showcasing the very best in emerging north east talent. This year’s event will see 25 bands/solo artists play across the Ouseburn’s best drinking holes including The Cluny, The Cumberland Arms, The Tyne, …

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I was at a business networking meeting a couple of weeks ago when one girl turned to me for some advice at the end of the session. Her problem was, since changing the activities she did in her local gym she’d actually become fatter!! Yes, the tops of her legs and her ass had actually …

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Yes, I was one of those geeks who got up at 6am to order a Raspberry Pi. It has been a long wait since then but I now have my Pi to play with. This is a quick blog post to summarises what I have learnt from it in my day of playing.

Despite completing the RS form in the first minute and getting an order in on the Farnell site (in between it falling over) I was not quick enough in the first batch, but out of the blue I got an email from RS saying that I could now order one, and that I did, and it arrived yesterday. :-)

It is important to remember that the Raspberry Pi is at the moment just a development board that requires quite a few bits and bobs to get up and running. Fortunately I managed to scavenge…

• Power supply with a micro USB connector (Normally used for myy Mifi)
• A fast SD card (Spare card for my digital camera)
• HDMI to VGA converter (Purchased from http://amzn.to/Lp2MGG for £15)
• USB Keyboard and Mouse
• Network cable and access point set up as client

Yes, I don’t have a TV or monitor with an HDMI input but the converter works well, and using the wifi access point as a client means I don’t need to run a cable through the house.

I downloaded the recommended Debian “squeeze” image listed on the Raspberry Pi web site using BitTorrent on my Windows machine. Creating the SD card was easy although it took an age to work out what was an advert and what was the download link for Win32DiskImager. Writing the image was easy but the the image was for a 2GB card and I was using a 4GB one. It worked fine but I was wasting half the card. In the end I needed to use a Linux machine to resize the partition to use all the card.

The Pi running squeeze boots quickly enough. Officially you can not run YouTube on the Pi yet but you can install Google’s Chrome (just type “sudo apt-get install chromium-browser” in to the command line) and that will allow flash and HTML5 videos to [just about] play. It manages a frame rate of around half a frame a second at best. The Broadcom chip set is capable of playing accelerated video but there is a little work to be done yet.

I have not been able to get the sound working yet but this could be because the sound is being sent to the HDMI port instead of the 35mm jack socket. I will have to look further in to this.

So that is as far as I have got. To summarise the Raspberry Pi is a lovely little computer. I don’t feel it is in a position for people to start really learning on until the operating system matures. In fact it is currently more complex than the average home computer, but we should remember that this is currently a development board and not pretending to be ready for the classroom yet.

Following several comments online I also note is that there are plenty of other board around and the Pi is not built of bleeding edge technology any more, but that is not the point. It’s success will be built on it’s community, and the media hype and low cost can only help broaden this community and make the Pi a success. It is not really challenging the Arduino as it is not comparable, and it is not going to take much business from other boards as it is creating a new market and not competing in the same market.

There is one thing that does worry me though. One key advantages of the BBC B microcomputer, that the Pi is frequently being compared to, is that you could programme it out of the box following a few simple instructions. This is not the case with the Raspberry Pi yet. This is not to say that this will not come, but at the moment you need to go out of your way to programme something and it appears we are relying on the community to rectify this. Much of the community seem more keen to make it do cool things instead of make it easy to programme and we can’t blame anyone for that.

Finally, like many, I ordered from both RS and Farnell and have already paid Farnell for one. Because of demand we are only supposed to have one Pi and I am planning honour this by selling the second one locally at cost to someone deserving. If that could be you let me know, but I am not expecting in until the end of June.