Disclosure: Some links on this page are monetized by the Skimlinks, Amazon, Rakuten Advertising, and eBay, affiliate programs. All prices are subject to change, and this article only reflects the prices available at time of publication.
Say you’ve got a 12 hour flight ahead of you, and you’re not a fan of the recent release movies that tend to be offered on your in-plane entertainment system. You could bring a tablet or laptop loaded up with your favorite videos or games… or you could make a project of it and bring a Raspberry Pi computer, a power pack, USB hub, gamepad, portable hard drive, travel router… and create a kind of ridiculous system that taps into the 12 inch monitor in the seatback in front of you.
Here’s a roundup of tech news from around the web.
You can keep up on the latest news by following Liliputing on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.
- Retroplane: using a Raspberry Pi to power an in-plane entertainment system at your seat
Surprisingly, nobody asked this reddit user whether the system was actually a bomb. [/r/Android/ - Android M developer preview includes initial support for themes
Sony’s RRO framework for a theme engine has been incorporated into Android’s source code. It’s not a feature users can actually take advantage of yet, but the underlying code is included in Android M and if you root a device running the Android M developer preview, use a custom kernel and take a few other steps, you can try it out. [xda-developers] - Sony SmartBand 2 fitness tracker leaked
Sony hasn’t officially announced its next-gen activity tracker. But the company did publish an app to the Google Play Store which spilled many details prematurely. The app has since been removed. [Xperia Blog] - Yahoo Pipes, Maps, Mail for older Apple devices shutting down
Before there was IFTTT. It wasn’t quite as simple to use, but it was a powerful tool for cooking up recipes without learning to code your own apps. Now it’s being sunset. [Yahoo] - MSI refines the design of its external graphics card adapter/gaming dock for laptops
Some gaming laptops come with discrete graphics cards… but what if you want desktop-class graphics, or the option to choose your own graphics card and upgrade it when a new model is available? MSI introduced an external graphics card solution for laptops last year. This year the company’s working on options to make it look less clunky. [Tom’s Hardware] - Asus Selfie Swing is a smartphone bumper and selfie stick rolled into one
You could also use it as a stand… which probably looks slightly less ridiculous than using it as a selfie stick. [The Verge] - Microsoft Nokia 105 budget phone coming to select markets this month… for just $20
When Microsoft acquired Nokia’s phone business, the company didn’t just get the smartphone division. Cheap phones with long battery life and limited features are still part of the lineup. [Microsoft] - Amazon Echo can now read Audible audiobooks out loud to you
Amazon’s speaker/digital assistant can now you read you stories. [Amazon] - Using Android phones to photograph the earth from 80,000 feet
Take a smartphone, modify it to use batteries that can work in cold environments, create custom apps, put them in a box, send them up in weather balloons, and track them with GPS and cellular data. Easy. Well, maybe not easy. But pretty cool. [Google Developers]
I’d love to see this being explained to security in the light of recent allegations of in-flight entertainment hacker vulnerability.
Thanks for posting this example showing how utterly ridiculous the Raspberry Pi is for anything except classroom experiments. It is almost as good as the “portable” ones where you have cords running up and down your back, sleeves, and pantlegs connecting all the bits and pieces in each hand, mounted on your shoes, hanging on your belt, and the backpack battery pack. Love it!
I think you meant “wearable” not “portable”. The RPi 2 is quite useful for all sorts of tinkering – and it makes a usable desktop PC. While I don’t think I’ll rush to make my own inflight system with it (hard to imagine the flight crew being very happy about it, somehow), I wouldn’t say this is proof that the Pi is ridiculous. People once thought the Apple II was a powerhouse, and the RPi has enormously more power, at a tiny fraction of the price.