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Notes index links

Links to all my notes (includes mini-projects and source code etc)

(+) 0001 How do I change the Pi System partition size ?

(+) 0100 Device tree settings

(+) 0201 Power over Ethernet - (PoE)

(+) 0202 Solar Power - (with WiFi)

(+) 0203 Power Bank pass through

(+) 0400 Accessing the SDHC card system image

(+) 0401 Accessing PC shares from the Pi

(+) 0402 Installing samba - (the Pi as a Network Share on your PC)

(+) 0900 Can this approach be scaled up to a PC UPS ?



(-) 1001 Pandora Spotify on the Pi


Pandora / Spotify on the Pi

Note that to get Pandora (the most common Internet 'radio') you must have an American IP address. Proxies are reported to work just fine, however don't forget that for BBC iPlayer you must have a UK IP address :-) So here in UK, Spotify is a reasonable alternative.

However the 'free' versions of both Pandora and Spotify will feed you annoying adverts, and (of course) in the UK, to escape the adverts, you have to pay more than in USA

There is, of course, a whole 'sub-culture' dedicated to blocking adverts on the Internet, and that includes avoiding the adverts on the 'free' Pandora / Spotify feeds.

For those who are interested, the 'secret' to avoiding all those annoying adverts is how Internet radio 'streaming' is delivered to your PC. Music tracks are not sent as a single audio stream. Instead, each separate track is fetched by the player software on your PC 'one after the other'. Adverts are thus just 'another track' that your player 'fetches' - and since the adverts are held on a different 'server' to the music, even a simple browser 'ad blocker' can prevent them being 'fetched'. Pandora / Spotify are now clever enough to 'spot' a simple ad blocker, however dedicated 'blockers' are clever enough to 'spot' the ad. and allow it to play whilst muting the PC speakers (or you can try blocking the 'advert control path', tcp port 80/443 outbound, on your PC's firewall, for application spotify.exe) ... and so the 'battle' goes on.

Of course the 'battle' between adverts and ad-blockers can never be 'won' by the advertisers. The fact is, the 'wanted' content has to be 'played' to the user at some point. Modern PC's can do real-time frequency analysis on the audio stream, so if all else fails the same approach as used by 'spam blockers' could be adopted (i.e. generate a 'black list' of 'advert frequency analysis signatures'), however even if it does become 'impossible' to 'spot' the adverts 'programmatically', there's nothing to stop you recording the audio and 'time shifting' the playback. Even if the 'recorders' can be 'fooled' into recoding the adverts (current ones aren't fooled and dont' record the ads) the listener could still manually 'fast forward' over the adverts during playback (in the same way as old VHS video tape machines were used to skip TV adverts).

Todays 'blockers' are actually 'muters' (i.e. they don't skip the ads, only mute the PC speakers). So if you really want to skip the ads, you really do have to 'time-shift'. However this can be done quite simply using any one of the current 'Spotify Recorder' apps.

The simple method requires two machines - one has no speakers and is just left running Spotify and the 'recorder' app. (which places the recorded tracks into a 'shared' folder). The second machine (which could be your Raspberry Pi) 'watches' the shared folder contents and plays back each new track as it appears

This note last modified: 17th Sep 2016 08:10.

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(+) 1002 Playing movies on the Pi

(+) 1003 Getting VGA from the HDMI socket

(+) 1004 Using the RCA socket

(+) 1005 Using the Pi RS232 serial links

(+) 1006 Using the GPIO pins

(+) 1007 Controlling the Pi Zero ACT LED

(+) 1200 List of standard camera modes

(+) 1300 Auto file names

(+) 6500 How to make the System partition read only ?

(+) 6501 Minimising SDHC corruption on power down

(+) 9000 diode switch

(+) 9001 Auto shut down

(+) 9001 MOSFET switch

(+) C201 High speed photos

(+) Dec 1969 (no desc)

(+) a000 Display setup - (for PhotoFrame)

(+) a001 go photoframe - (how it works)

(+) a002 set photo - (select for display)

(+) a003 go button script - (photoframe pause control)

(+) a005 get photos - (fetch resize)

(+) a00x Other display utilities

(+) c000 CCTV UPS requirements

(+) c001 countering low speed motion detect

(+) c002 Pi Overclocking

(+) c203 Pi ram disk - (tmpfs)

(+) c901 iR illumination

(+) c902 Viewing a video stream

(+) c905 Image anotation

(+) Dec 1969 (no desc)

(+) raspicamdocs.txt (no desc)

(+) s010 Elevation sensing

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