While on holiday recently, my wife bought a 32GB micro-SD card, which she intended to use in her tablet. Since then, it has been giving various errors, so I thought I should take it and verify its quality.
In order to test the card, we’re going to run three tests:
Take your files on the go with Android and Linux. In this howto, I’ll show you how to easily attach your phone or tablet to your Linux PC and transfer files.
The Change Masters: Corporate Entrepreneurs at Work
To begin, Kanter defines innovation as:
Innovation refers to the process of bringing any new, problem solving idea into use. Ideas for reorganising, cutting costs, putting in new budgeting systems, improving communication, or assembling products in teams are also innovations. Innovation is the generation, acceptance and implementation of new ideas, processes, products and services. It can thus occur in any part of a corporation, and it can involve creative use as well as original invention. Application and implementation are central to this definition; it involves the capacity to change or adapt.
As such innovation is a central aspect of most modern businesses. There are very few businesses which can continue to do the day job unchanged as the years pass. Every business will eventually be faced with new challenges which will require it to innovate new strategies, management methodologies, or products to aid its survival. That said, innovation doesn’t happen every day, as the majority of the time, the work of the business will still continue along routinised jobs within siloed departments.
As discussed by Kanter, creating an environment to allow innovation to flourish is possible, but difficult. Non-innovating business tend to run along siloed departments or lines of business where problems in one line are solved by the same line, with little opportunity for sharing problems and solutions across lines. This results in a rather segmentalist organisation which fails to capitalise on shared solutions for shared problems, and in some cases can have different teams arrive at different solutions for the same problem.
By breaking down the barriers between lines, a more integrative approach can realise benefits of a multidisciplinary approach. Different skills of employees from different departments can analyse and propose solutions to shared problems which cross the business.
When it comes to creating an environment to allow innovation, Kanter suggest the following as a minimum set of requirements:
Encouragement of a culture of pride. Highlight the achievements of the company’s own people, through visible awards, through applying an innovation from one area to the problems of another – and letting the experienced innovators serve as “consultants”.
Enlarged access to power tools for innovative problem solving. Provide vehicles (a council? and R&D committee? direct access to the steering committee?) for supporting proposals for experiments and innovations – especially those involving teams or collaborators across areas.
Improvement of lateral communication. Bring departments together. Encourage cross-fertilization through exchange of people, mobility across areas. Create cross-functional links, and perhaps even overlaps. Bring together teams of people from different areas who share responsibility for some aspect of the same end product.
Reduction of unnecessary layers of hierarchy. Eliminate barriers to resource access. Make it possible for people to go directly after what they need. Push decisional authority downward. Create “diagonal” slices cutting across the hierarchy to share information, provide quick intelligence about external and internal affairs.
Increased – and earlier – information about company plans. Where possible, reduce secretiveness. Avoid surprises. Increase security by making future plans known in advance, making it possible, in turn, for those below to make their plans. Give people at lower levels a chance to contribute to the shape of change before decisions are made at the top. Empower and involve them at an earlier point – e.g. through task forces and problem-solving groups or through more open-ended, change-oriented assignments, with more room left for the person to define the approach.
Before these kinds of organisational changes can be made, of course, corporate leaders must make a personal commitment to do what is needed to support innovation. They must believe that times are different, understand that transforming nature of our era requires a different set of responses. They need a sense of sufficient power themselves that they can be expansive about sharing it. They need a commitment to longer-term objectives and longer-term measures. And they as individuals must think in integrative rather than segmentalist ways, making connections between problems, pulling together ideas across disciplines, viewing issues from many perspectives. In short, top executives need at leas some of the qualities of corporate entrepreneurs in order to support this capacity at lower levels in the organisation.
Creating an environment for innovation, is itself an innovation, almost requiring an inversion of the typical management hierarchy. Top level managers must support the innovation environment while allowing the solutions to be driven from the bottom up. The power to affect change must be pushed down the hierarchy so those closest to the effects of the business problem are given the opportunity to propose their solutions, and once an acceptable solution is found, then it must be fixed in place by process and organisational change.
My first attempt at a time lapse script came up a little short. That script was intended to be quick and dirty. In order to make it easier to use, I’ve written some improved scripts. Continue reading
As part of our CanSat endeavours, we are going to use a Raspberry Pi to do some time-lapse photography as we descend after launch. In order to do this we’ll need to configure our Pi to do this automatically. Read on for a description on how to do this.
Continuing with our series on CanSat, we discuss how to detect atmospheric pressure using an Arduino Uno R3 and an MPX4115A Pressure Sensor.
As part of the CanSat Primary Mission, we need to measure temperature. For this our starter kit has given us an Arduino Uno R3 micro-controller, as well as some resistors and an NTCLE101E3 NTC Thermistor.
Enclosure – Raspberry Pi by SparkFunElectronics
So in Part One, we took an old external had drive, and added it as storage to a Raspberry Pi. In Part Two, we took that Raspberry Pi and shared the new folders on the local network. In this final tutorial, I’ll show what all of this has been for, and show you how to create your own Home Theater Raspberry Pi.
File Folders by One Way Stock
In part one of our tutorial, we discussed how to mount an external hard drive or USB drive on to our Raspberry Pi (or any other Linux based) computer. In this tutorial we will discuss how to share folders from that computer to your local network. I am doing this so I can share the media files I have on my external hard drive, and access them from many places on my network, such as my laptop, my android phone, and my Raspberry Pi running XBMC. You can use this tutorial to share files in a similar way.
Hard disk dissection by Roberto F.
I’ve got a Raspberry Pi, and I’ve got an old external hard drive. So what can I do with them? I decided I was going to create a networked shared drive from them, so in this first tutorial, I will show you how to mount the drive on a Linux operating system. Doing this is easy, but can get a little tricky when you attach and remove drives on the fly.
Chris Collins 