Today’s Deal: Save 80% on Spelunky!*
Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!
*Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time
Website: LINK
Kategorie: PC
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Now Available on Steam – Crash Bandicoot™ N. Sane Trilogy
Reading Time: < 1 minuteCrash Bandicoot™ N. Sane Trilogy is Now Available on Steam!
Your favorite marsupial, Crash Bandicoot™, is back! He’s enhanced, entranced and ready-to-dance with the N. Sane Trilogy. Relive all your favorite moments in Crash Bandicoot™, Crash Bandicoot™ 2: Cortex Strikes Back and Crash Bandicoot™ 3: Warped, now in fully-remastered graphical glory!
Plus, play the first-ever NEW level built for the original trilogy’s gameplay in almost 20 years. Drawing inspiration from the cut “Waterfall Level” from the first Crash Bandicoot game, Future Tense features several puzzles from the original level set in the futuristic setting from Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped.
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Daily Deal – The Witness, 70% Off
Reading Time: < 1 minuteToday’s Deal: Save 70% on The Witness!*
Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!
*Offer ends Sunday at 10AM Pacific Time
Website: LINK -
Zelda casemod with levitating Triforce
Reading Time: 2 minutesI know: you’ve seen a bajillion RetroPie implementations before, and a bajillion casemods to go with them. But this one’s so hopelessly, magnificently splendid that we felt we had to share. Magnetic levitation. It’s not just for trains and frogs.
This Zelda casemod, covered with engraved pine from the forests of Hyrule and shiny brass mouldings hammered by…dwarves or something, would be gorgeous as-is. The levitating, mirrored Triforce twizzling away on top is the icing on the cake; and a very lovely cake it is too. Here’s some video (in Spanish, with English subtitles) from Tuberviejuner in Spain, walking you through the build.
Raspberry pi Zelda mod: MagicBerry WindWaker by Makomod & Tuberviejuner.
Raspberry pi Zelda mod: Magic Berry WindWaker The Legend of Zelda by Makomod & Tuberviejuner alucinad con el triforce levitador.
This magical piece of work is by MakoMod, a case modder who splits his time between Barcelona and Texas. There’s a Pi inside running RetroPie, and a separate electromagnetic device levitating the Triforce up top. If you’re interested in incorporating something like this into one of your own builds, there are two ways to go: make your own from scratch, as DrewPaul Designs has done here, or buy a pre-built kit.
If you get in there quickly, you’ve a chance to own this one-off case: MakoMod is auctioning it on eBay. You’ve got until July 14 2018 to bid – good luck!
Website: LINK
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Free Weekend – Rocket League®, 50% off!
Reading Time: < 1 minutePlay Rocket League® for FREE starting now through Monday at 10AM Pacific Time. You can also pickup Rocket League® at 50% off the regular price!*
If you already have Steam installed, click here to install or play Rocket League®. If you don’t have Steam, you can download it here.
*Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time
Website: LINK -
Weekend Deal – Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition, 75% Off
Reading Time: < 1 minuteSave 75% on Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition as part of this week’s Weekend Deal*!
Step into the boots of Grayson Hunt after a crash landing on an abandoned resort planet forces him to make a hard choice: survival or revenge. An exiled member of the elite assassin group Dead Echo, Grayson’s blind desire for vengeance finds his crew stranded on Stygia where he can finally confront the commander behind his betrayal—or get his team off the planet alive.
*Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time
Website: LINK -
Daily Deal – Papers, Please, 50% Off
Reading Time: < 1 minuteToday’s Deal: Save 50% on Papers, Please!*
Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!
*Offer ends Saturday at 10AM Pacific Time
Website: LINK -
Take a photo of yourself as an unreliable cartoon
Reading Time: 2 minutesTake a selfie, wait for the image to appear, and behold a cartoon version of yourself. Or, at least, behold a cartoon version of whatever the camera thought it saw. Welcome to Draw This by maker Dan Macnish.
Dan has made code, instructions, and wiring diagrams available to help you bring this beguiling weirdery into your own life.
Neural networks, object recognition, and cartoons
One of the fun things about this re-imagined polaroid is that you never get to see the original image. You point, and shoot – and out pops a cartoon; the camera’s best interpretation of what it saw. The result is always a surprise. A food selfie of a healthy salad might turn into an enormous hot dog, or a photo with friends might be photobombed by a goat.
OK. Let’s take this one step at a time.
Pi + camera + button + LED
Draw This uses a Raspberry Pi 3 and a Camera Module, with a button and a useful status LED connected to the GPIO pins via a breadboard. You press the button, and the camera captures a still image while the LED comes on and stays lit for a couple of seconds while the Pi processes the image. So far, so standard Pi camera build.
Interpreting and re-interpreting the camera image
Dan uses Python to process the captured photograph, employing a pre-trained machine learning model from Google to recognise multiple objects in the image. Now he brings the strangeness. The Pi matches the things it sees in the photo with doodles from Google’s huge open-source Quick, Draw! dataset, and generates a new image that represents the objects in the original image as doodles. Then a thermal printer connected to the Pi’s GPIO pins prints the results.
Kangaroos from the Quick, Draw! dataset (I got distracted)
Potential for peculiar
Reading about this build leaves me yearning to see its oddest interpretation of a scene, so if you make this and you find it really does turn you or your friend into a goat, please do share that with us.
And as you can see from my kangaroo digression above, there is a ton of potential for bizarro makes that use the Quick, Draw! dataset, object recognition models, or both; it’s not just the marsupials that are inexplicably compelling (I dare you to go and look and see how long it takes you to get back to whatever you were in the middle of). If you’re planning to make this, or something inspired by this, check out Dan’s cartoonify GitHub repo. And tell us all about it in the comments.
Website: LINK
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Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale Finale – Day 14
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale wraps up in 24 hours! Take advantage of huge savings throughout our store on over ten thousand games in the final day of the sale.
Thanks to all that played the 2018 Summer Salien Game!
The Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale will run until 10 AM Pacific, July 5th.
Website: LINK -
Pre-Purchase Now – Shenmue I & II
Reading Time: < 1 minuteShenmue I & II is Now Available for Pre-Purchase on Steam and is 10% off!*
*Offer ends when the game is released.
Website: LINK -
New software to get you started with high-altitude ballooning
Reading Time: 4 minutesRight now, we’re working on an online project pathway to support you with all your high-altitude balloon (HAB) flight activities, whether you run them with students or as a hobby. We’ll release the resources later in the year, but in the meantime we have some exciting new HAB software to share with you!
Skycademy and early HAB software
Over the past few years, I’ve been lucky enough to conduct several high-altitude balloon (HAB) flights and to help educators who wanted to do HAB projects with learners. In the Foundation’s Skycademy programme, supported by UKHAS members, in particular Dave Akerman, we’ve trained more than 50 teachers to successfully launch near-space missions with their students.
Whenever I advise people who are planning a HAB mission, I tell them that the separate elements actually aren’t that complicated. The difficulty lies in juggling them all at the same time to successfully launch, track, and recover your balloon.
Over the years, some excellent tools and software packages have been developed to help with HAB launches. Dave Akerman’s Pi In The Sky (PITS) software gave beginners the chance to control their first payloads: you enter your own specs into a configuration file, and the software, written in C, handles the rest. Dave’s Long Range (LoRa) gateway software then tracks the payload, receiving balloon data and plotting the flight’s trajectory on a real-time map.
Dave at a Skycademy event
These tools, while useful, present two challenges to the novice HAB enthusiast:
- Exposing and adapting the workings of the software is challenging for novice learners, given that it is written in C
- The existing tracking software and tools are fragmented: one application received LoRa signals; another received radioteletype (RTTY) data; photos were received and had to be manually opened elsewhere; and so on
Introducing Pytrack and SkyGate
Making ballooning as accessible as possible is something we’ve been keen to do since we first got involved in 2015. So I’m delighted to reveal that over the past year, we’ve worked with Dave to produce two new applications to support HAB activities!
Pytrack
Pytrack is a Python implementation of Dave’s original PITS software, and it offers several advantages:
- Learners can create their own tracker in a simpler programming language, rather than simply configuring the existing software
- The core mechanics of the tracker are exposed for the learner to understand, but complex details are abstracted away
- Learners can integrate the technology with standard Python libraries and existing projects
- Pytrack is modular, allowing learners to experiment with underlying radio components
SkyGate
After our last Skycademy event, I started to look for a way to make tracking a payload in flight easier. For Skycademy, we made a hacky tracking box using a Pi, a 7” screen, and a very rough GUI app that I
wrote in a hurrylovingly toiled over.Since then, we have gone on to develop SkyGate, a complete tracking application which runs on a Pi and fits nicely on a 7” screen. It brings together all the tracking functionalities into one intuitive application:
- Live tunable LoRa reception and decoding
- Live tunable RTTY reception and decoding (with compatible USB SDR)
- Image reception and previewing
- GPS tracking to report your location (when using compatible GPS USB dongle)
- Data, images, and GPS upload functionality to HabHub tracking site
- An Overview tab presenting a high-level summary and bearing to payload
- Full customisation via the Settings tab
You can get involved!
We would love HAB enthusiasts to test and experiment with both Pytrack and SkyGate, and to give us feedback. Your input will really help us to write the full guide that we’ll release later this year.
To get started, install both programmes using your command prompt/terminal.
For your payload, run:
sudo apt update sudo apt install python3-pytrack
And your receiver, run:
sudo apt update sudo apt install skygate
Follow this guide to start using Pytrack, and read this overview on SkyGate and what you’ll need for a tracking box. To give us your feedback, please raise issues on the respective GitHub repos: for Pytrack here, and for SkyGate here.
We’ve developed these software packages to make launching and tracking a HAB payload easier and more flexible, and we hope you’ll think we’ve succeeded.
Happy ballooning!
Disclaimer: each country has its own laws regarding HAB launches and radio transmissions in their airspace. Before you attempt to carry out your own HAB flight, you need to ensure you have permission and are complying with all local laws.
Website: LINK
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Ten awesome 3D-printable Raspberry Pi goodies
Reading Time: 4 minutes3D printing has become far more accessible for hobbyists, with printer prices now in the hundreds instead of thousands of pounds. Last year, we covered some of the best 3D-printable cases for the Pi, and since then, Raspberry Pi enthusiasts have shared even more cool designs on sites such as MyMiniFactory and Thingiverse!
Here are ten of our recent favourites:
World Cup Sputnik
“With the World Cup now underway, I wanted a Russia-themed football sculpture to hang over the desk,” explains creator Ajax Jones. “What better than a football-styled Sputnik!”
The World Cup Sputnik comes complete with a Raspberry Pi that transmits the original Sputnik ‘beeps’ on an FM frequency, allowing co-workers to tune in for some 1960s nostalgia.
Radios
We see an abundance of musical Raspberry Pi projects online, and love looking out for the ones housed in interesting, unique cases like these:
The MiniZ is a streaming radio based on the Zenith Cube, created by Thingiverse user thisoldgeek.
This is a case for a small, retro radio powered by Logitech Media Server. It uses a Raspberry Pi Zero W and displays a radio dial (tunes via a knob), a clock, and ‘Now Playing’ album art.
For something a little more simple to use, Lukas2040‘s NFC radio for children comes with illustrated, NFC-tagged cards to allow his two-year-old daughter to pick her own music to play.
Gaming
Whether it’s console replicas or tabletop arcade cabinets, the internet is awash with gaming-themed Raspberry Pi projects. Here are a few of our favourites!
The Okama Gamesphere is a fictional game console from South Park. Leodym has taken the rather stylish design and converted it into a Raspberry Pi 3 case.
Canino‘s Yet Another Mini Arcade is exactly that. We really like how it reminds us of old, imported gaming consoles from our childhoods.
“I really love the design and look of the HP OMEN Accelerator,” writes designer STIG_. “So I decided to draw up a case for the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B.”
We really love it too, STIG_. Well done.
Ironman, Ironman, does whatever an Ironman can…
atlredninja‘s Ironman Mark 7 torso housing for the Google AIY Projects Voice Kit is pretty sweet!
Iron man AIY case Neopixel Rings Adafruit
Iron man AIY case Neopixel Rings Adafruit 16 and 12 LEDS. 3d files and instructions for assembly here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2950452 This is just a test to make sure the LEDs are working and the A.I. is working correctly. This took me about 3 weeks to design, print, and assemble.
This model is atlredninja‘s second version of an Ironman-themed AIY project: the first fits within a replica helmet. We’re looking forward to a possible third edition with legs. And a fourth that flies.
We can dream, can’t we?
Speaking of Marvel
How often have you looked at Thor’s hammer and thought to yourself “If only it had a Raspberry Pi inside…”
This case from furnibird is one of several pop culture–themed Raspberry Pi cases that the designer has created. Be sure to check out the others, including a Deathstar and Pac-Man.
3D-printable bird box
chickey‘s 3D-printable Raspberry Pi Bird Box squeezes a Raspberry Pi Zero W and a camera into the lid, turning this simple nesting box into a live-streaming nature cam.
The Raspberry Pi uploads images directly to a webpage, allowing you to check in on the feathered occupants from any computer or mobile device. Nifty.
Print a Raspberry Pi!
Using a 3D-printed Raspberry Pi in place of the real deal while you’re prototyping in the workshop may save you from accidentally damaging your tiny computer.
AlwaysComputing designed this Raspberry Pi Voxel Model using MagicaVoxel, stating “I like to tinker and play with the program MagicaVoxel. I find it therapeutic!”
What else?
What Raspberry Pi–themed 3D prints have you seen lately? Share your favourites with us in the comments, or on Twitter and Facebook.
Website: LINK
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Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale Day 13
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale continues! For the next two days, take advantage of huge savings throughout our store on over ten thousand games. You can also help unlock free games by playing our Summer Saliens Game.
Today’s Featured Deals include:
RUST – 75% off
Slime Rancher – 40% off
Batman: The Enemy Within – 40% off
Total War Franchise – Up to 75% off
ARK: Survival Evolved – 67% off
Serious Sam Franchise – Up to 90% off
Hyper Light Drifter – 60% off
and many more!Along with the sale is the Summer Saliens Game. Team up with other Saliens to fight The Duldrumz on different planets and free the abducted games. Gain XP as you battle, level up, unlock new abilities, and win cosmetic items to deck out your Salien. Plus, get Summer Sale Trading Cards just for playing.
Choose to battle on a planet that piques your interest and you’ll automatically be entered for a chance to win one of its rewards when it’s conquered. The longer your Salien spends on a planet the higher your chances of winning! The groups with the most tiles when a planet is taken will get to plant their flag as conquerors, undoubtedly gaining Saliverse-wide fame in the process.
The Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale will run until 10 AM Pacific, July 5th. Complete information can be found HERE.
Website: LINK -
Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale Day 12
Reading Time: 1 minuteThe Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale continues! For the next three days, take advantage of huge savings throughout our store on over ten thousand games. You can also help unlock free games by playing our Summer Saliens Game.
Today’s Featured Deals include:
ARMA III – 66% off
House Flipper – 20% off
Black Desert Online – 50% off
Call of Duty Franchise – Up to 67% off
XCOM Franchise – Up to 80% off
Salt and Sanctuary – 50% off
Firewatch – 75% off
and many moreAlong with the sale is the Summer Saliens Game. Team up with other Saliens to fight The Duldrumz on different planets and free the abducted games. Gain XP as you battle, level up, unlock new abilities, and win cosmetic items to deck out your Salien. Plus, get Summer Sale Trading Cards just for playing.
Choose to battle on a planet that piques your interest and you’ll automatically be entered for a chance to win one of its rewards when it’s conquered. The longer your Salien spends on a planet the higher your chances of winning! The groups with the most tiles when a planet is taken will get to plant their flag as conquerors, undoubtedly gaining Saliverse-wide fame in the process.
The Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale will run until 10 AM Pacific, July 5th. Complete information can be found HERE.
Website: LINK -
Tired of queuing for the office toilet? Meet Occu-Pi
Reading Time: 2 minutesThis is the story of Occu-Pi, or how a magnet, a Raspberry Pi, and a barrel bolt saved an office team from queuing for the toilet.
The toil of toilet queuing
When Brian W. Wolter’s employer moved premises, the staff’s main concern as the dearth of toilets at the new office, and the increased queuing time this would lead to:
Our previous office had long been plagued by unreasonably long bathroom lines. At several high-demand periods throughout the day we’d be forced to wait three, four, five people deep while complaining bitterly to each other until our turn to use the facilities arrived. With even fewer bathrooms in our new office, concern about timely access was naturally high.
Faced with this problem, the in-house engineers decided to find a technological solution.
Occu-Pi
The main thing the engineers had to figure out was just how to determine the difference between a closed door and an occupied stall. Brian explains in his write-up:
There is one notable wrinkle: it’s not enough to know the door is closed, you need to know if the bathroom is actually in use — that is, locked from the inside. After considering and discarding a variety of ‘creative’ solutions (no thank you, motion sensors and facial recognition), we landed on a straightforward and reliable approach.
The team ended up using a magnet attached to the door’s barrel bolt to trigger a notification. Simply shutting the door doesn’t act as a trigger — the bolt needs to lock the door to set off a magnetic switch. That switch then triggers both LED notifications and updates to a dedicated Slack channel.
For the technically-minded, Occu-Pi is a pretty straightforward build. And those wanting to learn more about it can find a full write-up in Brian’s Medium post.
We’ve seen a few different toilet notification projects over the years, for example this project from DIY Tryin’ using a similar trigger plus a website. What’s nice about Occu-Pi, however, is the simplicity of its design and the subtle use of Slack — Pi Tower’s favoured platform for office shenanigans.
Website: LINK
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Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale Day 11
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale continues! For the next four days, take advantage of huge savings throughout our store on over ten thousand games. You can also help unlock free games by playing our Summer Saliens Game.
Today’s Featured Deals include:
Divinity Franchise – Up to 90% off
Football Manager 2018 – 66% off
Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen – 67% off
Wolfenstein Franchise – Up to 75% off
Cities Skylines – 75% off
Celeste – 20% off
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege – 50% off
Dirt Franchise – Up to 80% off
and many moreAlong with the sale is the Summer Saliens Game. Team up with other Saliens to fight The Duldrumz on different planets and free the abducted games. Gain XP as you battle, level up, unlock new abilities, and win cosmetic items to deck out your Salien. Plus, get Summer Sale Trading Cards just for playing.
Choose to battle on a planet that piques your interest and you’ll automatically be entered for a chance to win one of its rewards when it’s conquered. The longer your Salien spends on a planet the higher your chances of winning! The groups with the most tiles when a planet is taken will get to plant their flag as conquerors, undoubtedly gaining Saliverse-wide fame in the process.
The Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale will run until 10 AM Pacific, July 5th. Complete information can be found HERE.
Website: LINK -
Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale Day 10
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale continues! For the next five days, take advantage of huge savings throughout our store on over ten thousand games. You can also help unlock free games by playing our Summer Saliens Game.
Today’s Featured Deals include:
Hunt: Showdown – 20% off
Middle-earth: Shadow of War – 66% off
Europa Universalis IV – 75% off
Jackbox Franchise – Up to 60% off
The Walking Dead: The Telltale Series – Up to 70% off
Tales of Berseria – 70% off
Inside – 55% off
and many moreAlong with the sale is the Summer Saliens Game. Team up with other Saliens to fight The Duldrumz on different planets and free the abducted games. Gain XP as you battle, level up, unlock new abilities, and win cosmetic items to deck out your Salien. Plus, get Summer Sale Trading Cards just for playing.
Choose to battle on a planet that piques your interest and you’ll automatically be entered for a chance to win one of its rewards when it’s conquered. The longer your Salien spends on a planet the higher your chances of winning! The groups with the most tiles when a planet is taken will get to plant their flag as conquerors, undoubtedly gaining Saliverse-wide fame in the process.
The Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale will run until 10 AM Pacific, July 5th. Complete information can be found HERE.
Website: LINK -
Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale Day 9
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale continues! For the next six days, take advantage of huge savings throughout our store on over ten thousand games. You can also help unlock free games by playing our Summer Saliens Game.
Today’s Featured Deals include:
FINAL FANTASY Franchise – Up to 50% off
Tooth and Tail – 55% off
Dishonored 2 – 50% off
Borderlands Franchise – Up to 78% off
The Crew – 75% off
Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy – 40% off
Deus Ex Franchise – Up to 85% off
and many moreAlong with the sale is the Summer Saliens Game. Team up with other Saliens to fight The Duldrumz on different planets and free the abducted games. Gain XP as you battle, level up, unlock new abilities, and win cosmetic items to deck out your Salien. Plus, get Summer Sale Trading Cards just for playing.
Choose to battle on a planet that piques your interest and you’ll automatically be entered for a chance to win one of its rewards when it’s conquered. The longer your Salien spends on a planet the higher your chances of winning! The groups with the most tiles when a planet is taken will get to plant their flag as conquerors, undoubtedly gaining Saliverse-wide fame in the process.
The Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale will run until 10 AM Pacific, July 5th. Complete information can be found HERE.
Website: LINK -
Raspbian update: first-boot setup wizard and more
Reading Time: 5 minutesAfter a few months of hiding in a dark corner of the office muttering to myself (just ask anyone who sits near me how much of that I do…), it’s time to release another update to the Raspberry Pi desktop with a few new bits and a bunch of bug fixes (hopefully more fixes than new bugs, anyway). So, what’s changed this time around?
Setup wizard
One of the things about Raspbian that has always been a bit unhelpful is that when a new user first boots up a new Pi, they see a nice desktop picture, but they might not have much of an idea what they ought to do next. With the new update, whenever a new Raspbian image is booted for the first time, a simple setup wizard runs automatically to walk you through the basic setup operations.
Localisation
The localisation settings you can access via the main Raspberry Pi Configuration application are fairly complex and involve making separate settings for location, keyboard, time zone, and WiFi country. The first page of the wizard should make this a little more straightforward — once you choose your country, the wizard will show you the languages and time zones used in that country. When you’ve selected yours, the wizard should take care of all the necessary international settings. This includes the WiFi country, which you need to set before you can use the wireless connectivity on a Raspberry Pi 3B+.
There will be some special cases — e.g. expatriates using a Pi and wanting to set it to a language not spoken in their country of residence — where this wizard will not give sufficient flexibility. But we hope that for perhaps 90% of users, this one page will do everything necessary in terms of international settings. (The more detailed settings in Raspberry Pi Configuration will, of course, remain available.)
Other settings
The next pages in the wizard will walk you through changing your password, connecting to the internet, and performing an initial software update to make sure you get any patches and fixes that may have been released since your Raspbian image was created.
On the last page, you will be prompted to reboot if necessary. Once you get to the end of the wizard, it will not reappear when your Pi is booted. (If you do want to use it again for some reason, just run it manually by typing
sudo piwiz
into a terminal window and pressing Enter.)
Recommended software
Over the last few years, several third-party companies have generously offered to provide software for Pi users, in some cases giving free licenses for software that normally requires a license fee. We’ve always included these applications in our standard image, as people might never find out about them otherwise, but the applications perhaps aren’t all of interest to every user.
So to try and keep the size of the image down, and to avoid cluttering the menus with applications that not everyone wants, we’ve introduced a Recommended Software program which you can find in the Preferences menu.
Think of this as our version of the Apple App Store, but with everything in it available for free! Installing a program is easy: just put a tick in the box to the right, and click “OK”. You can also uninstall some of the preinstalled programs: just untick the respective box and click “OK”. You can even reinstall them once you’ve realised you didn’t mean to uninstall them: just tick the box again and click — oh, you get the idea…
As we find new software that we recommend, or as more manufacturers offer us programs, we’ll add them to Recommended Software, so it’ll be kept up to date.
New PDF viewer
Ever since the first version, Raspbian has included the venerable PDF viewer Xpdf. While this program does work, it’s fairly old and clunky, and we’ve been trying to find something better.
In this release, we are replacing Xpdf with a program called qpdfView, which is a much-improved PDF viewer. It has a more modern user interface, it renders pages faster, and it preloads and caches future pages while you’re reading, which should mean fewer pauses spent waiting for the next page to load.
If you want something to read in it, we are now including the latest issue of The MagPi as a PDF file — look in the ‘MagPi’ directory in your home directory ‘pi’.
Other updates
The Chromium browser is now at version 65. We’ve also updated the links to our website in the Help menu, and added a new Getting Started option. This links to some really helpful new pages that walk you through getting your Pi up and running and using some of its key features.
If you have volume up/down buttons on your keyboard, these will now control whatever audio output device is selected, rather than only controlling the internal audio hardware. The resolution has also been increased: each button push increases or decreases the volume by 5% rather than 10%.
If you are using the network icon to reconnect to a wireless network, the passcode for the network will be shown in the connection dialog, so you won’t have to type it in again.
In Raspberry Pi Configuration, you can now enable and disable the serial port console independently of the serial port hardware.
The keyboard layout setting dialogue now makes settings that should be correct both in the desktop and also when the Pi is booted to console.
There are various other small bug fixes and tweaks to appearance and behaviour, but they’re mostly only the sort of things you’d spot if you’re a slightly obsessive user interface developer…
How do I get it?
The new image is available for download from the usual place: our Downloads page. We’ve also updated the x86 image with most of the changes, and that’s up on the page as well.
To update an existing image, use the usual terminal command:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Here’s a quick video run-through of the process:
Updating Raspbian on your Raspberry Pi || Raspberry Pi Foundation
How to update to the latest version of Raspbian on your Raspberry Pi.
To install the new PDF viewer (and remove the old one):
sudo apt-get install qpdfview sudo apt-get purge xpdf
To install the new Recommended Software program:
sudo apt-get install rp-prefapps
Finally, to install the setup wizard (which really isn’t necessary on an existing image, but just in case you are curious…):
sudo apt-get install piwiz
We hope you like the changes — as ever, all feedback is welcome, so please leave a comment below!
Website: LINK
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Now Available on Steam – The Crew™ 2
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe Crew™ 2 is Now Available on Steam!
Take on the American motorsports scene as you explore and dominate the land, air, and sea across the entire USA. With a wide variety of cars, bikes, boats, and planes, compete in a wide range of driving disciplines.
Website: LINK -
Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale Day 8
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale continues! For the next seven days, take advantage of huge savings throughout our store on over ten thousand games. You can also help unlock free games by playing our Summer Saliens Game.
Today’s Featured Deals include:
Stellaris – 60% off
Steep – 70% off
Dying Light – 67% off
ELEX – 50% off
Batman Franchise – Up to 75% off
Battle Chasers Nightwar – 50% off
Bioshock Franchise – Up to 75% off
Company of Heroes Franchise – Up to 75% off
and many moreAlong with the sale is the Summer Saliens Game. Team up with other Saliens to fight The Duldrumz on different planets and free the abducted games. Gain XP as you battle, level up, unlock new abilities, and win cosmetic items to deck out your Salien. Plus, get Summer Sale Trading Cards just for playing.
Choose to battle on a planet that piques your interest and you’ll automatically be entered for a chance to win one of its rewards when it’s conquered. The longer your Salien spends on a planet the higher your chances of winning! The groups with the most tiles when a planet is taken will get to plant their flag as conquerors, undoubtedly gaining Saliverse-wide fame in the process.
The Steam Intergalactic Summer Sale will run until 10 AM Pacific, July 5th. Complete information can be found HERE.
Website: LINK -
Now Available on Steam – Next Up Hero, 25% off!
Reading Time: < 1 minuteNext Up Hero is Now Available on Steam and is 25% off!*
Fight. Die. Win! (And probably die some more.) There are no health kits. Sorry!
*Offer ends July 5 at 10AM Pacific Time
Website: LINK
