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Shrinking a Raspberry Pi Image

There are a whole bunch of posts out there on why you may want to shrink the size of the backup images you make of your Raspberry Pi SD card based installations. I list a couple at the end of this post - but while most of what is in these posts is good and applicable, I felt I found a simpler combination of steps for my purposes. The difference in my case is the use of Virtualbox and the GParted Live CD. You see - a big advantage to having the entire Rpi system on an SD card, is that I can now put it in a USB card reader and make it available to GParted - running in Live CD mode in VirtualBox. Essentially you can do the following: Get the latest GParted 32-bit ISO (for greatest compatibility from here . While you're at it - be sure to show some appreciation for their great work if you can Create a Linux virtual machine in VirtualBox with no HDD and a CD ROM - setting it to the ISO you just downloaded Enable USB 2.0 at least so you can load the card reader into your VM Run ...
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POWER SALES

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"It's not safe for our son!", says my wife, effectively quashing all my arguments in favour of riding our bikes and her e-bike, without helmets on. Surrounded by a thousand electric scooters in the e-bike section of the Auchan retail store in Suzhou, China I stand nonplussed, as my wife expounds at length on her stand that helmets are a necessity. In China as in many developed countries in Europe, there are dedicated bike lanes on roads as part of a very successful government drive to get people to ride bicycles or electric scooters - e-bikes in the local parlance. Very unlike their European counterparts on the other hand, Chinese bikers are a stoical bunch, who use helmets only as winter-wear and think nothing of sharing their lanes with cars looking for parking spots, other bikers zooming in opposite directions and pedestrians. Such skills are rarely in-born though and my wife had had close shaves enough, in the first two days of her e-biking adventure, to feel the...
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GreenDay

Sometime back a Newsweek article sought to bring to light a determined effort by many influential persons and organizations to convince the world that global warming was a hoax. I find this amazing. Not because I'm totally convinced that global warming is what it is stated to be - a man-made phenomenon. But because there is no doubt that we are making the world an uglier place. Whether CO2 emissions are increasing and whether that is leading to accelerated warming of the planet is an interesting point but is subject to too many variables to be conclusively pinned down and dealt with. However, it is hard to deny the visual and environmental impact of industrialization and economic growth. Where reason fails sometimes aesthetics can win the day - we do not need to wait for the planet to burn up and drown in melting ice to see the damage we are wreaking on it. Some of us choose to risk the welfare of their own and the children of all others on the possibility that the pro-greens are ...
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Blog Post Dates

My sharp eyed better half just had an interesting observation - the blog post date on my first and only online entry was off by about 2 years!! Still trying to figure this out...
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All things have a start...

And so I kicked off writing for myself and for those who would read what I write...
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