August 2017 – Tor's blog

In this tutorial, we will be exploring how to setup a Raspberry Pi AirPlay Receiver. This tutorial basically involves you connecting your Raspberry Pi to your speakers then installing software so that it becomes recognised as an AirPlay receiver on your internet network. To setup your AirPlay Receiver we will be making use of the open source software called Shairport Sync.

This software allows the Raspberry Pi to act as an AirPlay receiver by implementing Apples proprietary protocols so that it can receive music from those devices.

This will allow you to play music from any AirPlay enabled device to your Raspberry Pi meaning you can use almost any iPhone product and even some Android products with a compatible app installed. A Raspberry Pi AirPlay Receiver is very simple and cost-efficient way to setup wireless speakers without the huge cost of buying a set of wireless speakers. It can easily help you modernise your speakers and help cut the cord.

How to get a train ticket refund on smartcards

On calling the Southwest trains helpline they say that the quickest way to get a refund on a train ticket bought on a smart card is

– Take a picture of the back of the card

– Email it to smartcards@swtrains.co.uk

– Explain what you could not use the ticket etc.

I wonder if it works – as this is not on the website.

Interesting running shoe

This is interesting

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I would like to try it at some stage.

What it’s like to take the new sleeper bus from LA to SF

Love it !-–
Boing Boing What it’s like to take the new sleeper bus from LA to SF

A new bus line called Cabin is positioning itself as a “hotel on wheels.” For $115 you get a sleeping pod on a bus that goes between LA and San Francisco (the trip takes 8 hours). Each pod has a power outlet and the bus has WiFi. It also has an espresso bar and an attendant to assist you. Lexy Savvides of CNet took a ride on Cabin, and interviewed Gaetano Crupi, co-founder and president of Cabin.

There’s no shortage of cheap flights between San Francisco and Los Angeles. So why would you take Cabin that costs $115 one-way?

We didn’t design the cheapest way to get to Los Angeles from San Francisco. There’s a lot of options that are significantly cheaper. We also didn’t design the fastest way. We tried to design the most comfortable way where you don’t burn any of your day while being transported.

We are basically an Uber from a downtown location to the airport and we’re also a hotel night’s stay. So if you add those two endpoints of transportation, the night and the flight, we think $115 is actually a very reasonable price.

Why are you comparing Cabin to a hotel rather than a regular bus?

The reason why we don’t use [the term] bus is that people don’t want to sleep on a bus. And so everything that we’ve designed talking about a hotel, from the sheets that we use, the amenities, the pillows, the way our ground crew services the bathroom, the way we steam all of the sheets when we put them on the bed, all of that is really for someone to think of this not as a bus but as another form of transportation.

http://boingboing.net/2017/08/10/what-its-like-to-take-the-ne.html

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Airfoil and Google Home

Have a look at my Airfoil Speakers list :

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And halfway down you will see “Library” – with a different logo in front, compared to the others. It’s a Google Home speaker. So in other words Airfoil can now play Apple Music. Not too bad a solution while we’re waiting for the Apple HomePod.

Raspberry PI zero music distribution for the house

I have a new and small hobby project in music distribution for the house.

We have a “big” hifi in the library with 2 QUAD electrostatics and a REL sub – which we almost never fire up these days. But I still want to play music around the house. And in the living room we have 2 small JBL Control1’s (they are fairly unobtrusive and not too bad (you’d never know that I used to build recording studios for a living (-;)

So the current plan is to user Airfoil to distribute music to all our amplifiers/speakers/etc in the house. The master Airfoil will be on a server running iTunes/Apple Music, and the audio output will be through a combination of Apple Airports and AppleTV’s around the house.

But for the JBL Control1’s i wanted to experiment and do it differently. The idea was to take a Raspberry Pi ZeroW (the tiny £9 wireless (and bluetooth) version of the Raspberry Pi and add a JustBoom Zero Amp to it. The fantastic thing is that there is a Airfoil Satellite for Linux and the Raspberry PI!

And I got it all working now.

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This is a partial screenshot of the server in action – you can see the audio sources around the house on the left hand side of the screen, and behind everything iTune/Apple Music running, pumping out music to the tiny Raspberry Pi Zero, and using the JustBoom amp playing on the JBLs!

I’m very pleased that the test seems to work!!!