Reading time is over

As anticipated, I finished reading the Getting Started with Raspberry Pi on the plane. When I get back home, it will be time to actually get on the Raspberry Pi and see what I can do with it.

There are a few things that I learned that I think will be very useful.

• Running Headless: This just means running the Raspberry Pi without a keyboard, mouse, or monitor connected to it. This can be accomplished by either setting it up as an SSH server or a VNC server. (Page 29)
• Interacting with GPIO from the Shell: Both books discussed using Python to use the GPIO pins, but this book explained how to do it from the Linux shell. This gives access to writing shell scripts to do stuff (for example, with cron -- which is also something that I just learned about).
• Connecting a Webcam: I don't know how this is useful, but I'm pretty sure it will be if I start to build projects. I can see some time lapse stuff being a possibility.
• Connecting through the Internet: This may seem like nothing, but this book gives a simple example of a device that allows you to turn a lamp on and off through the internet. I think knowing how to do stuff like that might be pretty handy.

So... I guess I'm ready to start tinkering. When I get back, I'll take a quick inventory of the pieces in the kit that I bought and start trying to do a couple of the sample projects, or at least a modification of one of those projects.