Today's boot sale bargains

[ffutures]

A lot of cheap photographic stuff:

Five polarising filters in various sizes, a uv filter, a lens cap, and three Cokin effects filters for a fiver.
Five Nikon focusing screens for £2
A wide angle converter of the type I wanted to try for a fiver - first opinion, much more circular image but not incredibly sharp, but I need to try it in good lighting, not twilight.
A Minolta-fit Centon 50mm 1.8 and Jessop 2x converter, with all caps and cases, for a tenner.

An iPod charger (real, so far as I can tell) and two plugs for £1.50

And an early Raspberry Pi for £2 - which unfortunately doesn't work, unless I'm missing something, but since the same vendor sold me most of the filters I'm not going to worry much. I'm getting a red light when I power it up, is that normal? Will it work without a memory card plugged in?

Later - thanks to history_monk the Pi is in business!

Comments

[history-monk.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure a Pi won't work without a memory card. It boots OSes off memory cards; it doesn't have a lot of ROM.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

OK, thanks - I was thinking there'd be an error message or something.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

YES! We have a raspberry!

MANY thanks!

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I managed a minimum install on a 2GB card from my Nikon, but it looks like you need at least 8GB to do anything useful.

Now I need to decide what to do with it. REALLY don't need yet another project... I can put together a basic kit (mini keyboard, mouse, cables and a charger) from my spares box, the only thing I'd need to buy is the card and possibly a casing. Since it has composite video output I might look at turning it into a media centre for my bedroom TV, which does not have HDMI or VGA.

[murphys-lawyer.livejournal.com]

There are lots of HowTos on making a Pi into a media server online. You can also fint templates on making a Pi box from paper or card. There's a great community out there!

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks - to be honest, I'm leaning more toward selling it on at present, while the bedroom media centre idea sounds good I think I watched TV in bed for a total of about one hour in the last year, and if I really needed to watch some sort of media thing it'd probably be easier to take my iPad or laptop upstairs.

I'm sort of wondering about building one into a defunct iMac G4, but converting the video output to Apple's non-standard screen is probably beyond my limited talents.