OfCom have published a report after conducting research on tablet usage in the UK.

The tablet computer has established itself as a must-have device in just five years with more than half of UK homes now owning one.

Apple’s iPad launched in the UK on 28 May 2010 and, alongside Android and other tablet devices, it is helping to shape the way we surf the internet, communicate and watch TV and video.

Tablets are proving very popular among people aged 35-54 with nearly two thirds of this age group (64%) having a tablet.

The rapid rise in popularity of tablets means that over half of UK households (54%) now have one¹, up from just 2% in 2011.

The trend looks set to continue – 21% of households currently without a tablet told Ofcom they were likely to get one within the next 12 months.

According to the Ofcom report, seven in ten (71%) children aged 5-15 had access to a tablet at home by the end of 2014, up from just over half (51%) in 2013. And many kids do not even have to share a tablet with their parents. One in three children (34%) aged 5-15 have their own device – up from one in five (19%) in 2013.

Tablets are also proving popular with toddlers – one in ten (11%) of 3-4 year olds now have their own tablet to keep them entertained.

Using a tablet out and about

While more than one in three adults (37%) use a tablet to go online at home, only 15% appear to take their tablet with them when out and about – away from home, work or their place of study.

Ofcom’s report can be found here: http://consumers.ofcom.org.uk/news/five-years-tablets/

The online streaming website Grooveshark has been shut down after losing its battle with the music industry on Thursday.

The company reached a settlement agreement after being sued by a number of different record companies. One such suit brought by Universal Music Group was for $15 billion.

The notice on the company’s website says they “…have agreed to cease operations immediately, wipe clean all of the record companies’ copyrighted works and hand over ownership of this website, our mobile apps and intellectual property, including our patents and copyrights.”

Founded 9 years ago by three students at the University of Florida, this sees the end of the company that claimed to 35 million users they could “Play any song in the world, for free!”.

Other legitimate music streaming sites are available such as Spotify, Google Play, Beats Music, etc.

A cyber alert was issued by South Korea after a hacking attack on government websites. Media sites and even the website of the presidential office were hit by an apparently co-ordinated attack on Tuesday morning. The identity of the hackers was not known, a government statement said.

Messages praising North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and claiming that hacking collective Anonymous was responsible were left on the hacked websites. However, Anonymous denied any involvement in the South Korean cyber-attacks on its official Twitter account, AFP news agency reported. In fact, the group Anonymous was said to have planned attacks against North Korean websites.

A number of North Korean websites went offline on Tuesday morning and appeared to have been targeted by hackers on Tuesday, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported, citing unnamed sources.

BBC Report: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23042334

Please remember this is a work in progress and we’ve just created this page on the fly!

The Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi just runs one of the stock images available from the RaspberryPi.org site (Raspbian “wheezy”). On top, we’ve chucked Nginx and PHP. We’ve not given instructions on how to do the Nginx and PHP as a quick Google search shows enough information to allow you to do this 🙂 (You’ll notice that a lot of the content here simply says “Go Google”. Sorry about that!).

At this point you should make yourself aware of the GPIO pins on the Pi. Print out the schema so that you have it to reference: http://elinux.org/RPi_Low-level_peripherals

You can see the GPIO pins on the top left of the Pi

The Relay and the Remote

The relay board connects to the Pi using the pin outs. You’ll need to connect GND to a Ground pin on the Pi, and the VCC pin to the 5v pin on the Pi. From there, you have IN1, IN2, etc. which are just Relay 1, Relay 2 etc. respectively. Don’t change the jumper on the relay board, it should be set to VCC JD-VCC.

The Relay board is pictured below (click on it to see the full size image):

It was bought from Ebay via this link: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/New-5V-8-Channel-Relay-Module-Board-for-Arduino-PIC-AVR-MCU-DSP-ARM-Electronic-/170745298865?pt=UK_BOI_Electrical_Components_Supplies_ET&hash=item27c1367fb1

To make life easier (we originally ripped apart a floppy ribbon and it got verrrry messy and verrrry confusing for the brain!) you should probably buy these individual jumper wires below. The colour coded nature of them makes life easier when connecting between the Pi and the Relay board.

We bought ours from Hobby Tronics in the UK: http://www.hobbytronics.co.uk/ribbon-jumper-female-40?keyword=40JUMPERF

Last thing you’ll need is the remote control set we used. These are just plugs you connect to a wall socket and then pair with the remote control. For safety reasons we decided this was a better way to go about things rather than splicing mains cables into the relay board. It actually worked out even better as it meant we could position lights anywhere in the room without having to trail loads of wiring to the relay board.

Here’s a crude image of the box. We bought a cheap one from a local retail shop for £20. Fair word of warning here: We actually bought a different set to begin with, but the remote control PCB itself was horrible for soldering the wiring from the relays. Rather than buttons it had rubber electrodes that made the connection between the tracks on the PCB itself. This second set actually used proper switches, so it was easy to solder the connection into the appropriate hole in the PCB.

Each channel (there’s four channels to choose from) needs two relays to control. One sends the ON signal, and one sends the OFF signal.

So for example, here’s the PHP script for turning ON channel 1, which happens to be connected to GPIO4.

if( isset($_POST[‘action’]) )
{

$a = $_POST[‘action’];
if($a==”on”) {
exec(‘echo “0” > /sys/class/gpio/gpio4/value’);
sleep(0.75);
exec(‘echo “1” > /sys/class/gpio/gpio4/value’);
}

The first three lines are just checking that we’ve got a POST request coming in. The second if statement is checking that we’re turning the device ON. And then we set the signal on the GPIO4 pin. We echo 0 (which for some reason sets the pin live… I don’t know why), we wait 0.75 seconds to give the remote control unit time to send the wireless signal, and then we switch the relay off by echoing 1 to the same GPIO pin. There! The device is on!

To switch it off, you do the exact same, but wire up another GPIO to another Relay Switch, and then from there to the Off button on the Remote 🙂

Video

The video is just an RTMP-enabled web cam (It’s an Axis M1011, get it here ). The stream is picked up by Wowza broadcast software on an Amazon EC2 box.

This is then played via the website using JWPlayer (http://www.longtailvideo.com/jw-player/). It really is that simple! By allowing an Amazon EC2 box to provide the stream, it lessens the load on the web server providing the main content.

Chat

Nothing exciting about the chat to be honest, it’s just a copy of PHPFreeChat (get this here: http://www.phpfreechat.net/) tweaked to look nice within the design of our page. We were prepared to look at alternative chat methods should the load become an issue. An IRC server could have been set up within 15 minutes to lessen the load of the chat script. But at the time of writing, this wasn’t necessary.

The Code (Raspberry Pi end)

For each GPIO output, you need to set it up. We Googled, we found this:

echo $pin > /sys/class/gpio/export

echo “out” > /sys/class/gpio/gpio$pin/direction

We then chmod the specific pin to 777 (so that php/nginx can happily go about changing values):

 chmod 777 /sys/class/gpio/gpio$pin/value

It’s important to remember that $pin equates to one of the valid GREEN GPIO numbers from the schema. 4, 17, 22, etc. so re-write this as appropriate!

To make life easy, we added this to our /etc/rc.local file so that on boot, the Raspberry Pi would set up all the GPIO pins we were going to use:

echo “4” > /sys/class/gpio/export
echo “out” > /sys/class/gpio/gpio4/direction
chmod 777 /sys/class/gpio/gpio4/value

echo “17” > /sys/class/gpio/export
echo “out” > /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/direction
chmod 777 /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/value

etc. etc. etc. for all pins

Once you’ve got the relay hooked up, you can then go about testing the GPIO output:

echo “0” > /sys/class/gpio/gpio4/value

echo “1” > /sys/class/gpio/gpio4/value

If all is correct, you should see the LED on the Relay Board and hear the click of the Relay. It’s in your hands which way 0 or 1 goes with the relay (either on or off)!

The Code (The Queue System)

This is coming soon! It’s horribly horribly hacked together with two tables in a database. One is the Auth table (you get entered into this table when you log in with a username/Facebook) and a Queue table (this is populated when you click Join The Queue!). Lots of page refreshes later, the magic happens. More to follow!

It’s almost Christmas! This year we’ve taken our decorations to the extreme. We’ve given YOU the ability to log on to our website and take control over Christmas lights!

Jump onto http://christmas.considerit.com and join in the fun!

If it’s busy, you’ll need to wait in a queue for a little bit, but be patient, it’s a great laugh!

Let us know what you think by leaving a message on our Facebook page or sending us an email: [email protected]!

Have a really great Christmas!
The Consider IT Team

Local police in Cambodia have announced that one of the founders of the Pirate Bay, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, has been arrested as a result of an international warrant issued against him last April by his homecountry Sweden.

The country reacted after Warg failed to turn up for the beginning of his 1 year jail sentence for multiple copyright violations.

“His arrest was made at the request of the Swedish government for a crime related to information technology,” Cambodia’s police spokesman Kirth Chantharith told the AFP news agency.

“We don’t have an extradition treaty with Sweden but we’ll look into our laws and see how we can handle this case,” the spokesman added.

Warg, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and their financier Carl Lundstroem were convicted by a Swedish court for encouraging copyright violations in 2009. Lundstroem, Sunde and Neij each had their 1 year jail sentences reduced following an appeal in 2010. The appeal allowed their sentences to be reduced to between four and ten months. In addition, they were also ordered to pay the music and movie companies almost £4m ($7m) in damages for their copyright violations.

Warg did not attend the appeal with his defence lawyer citing being too ill as his reason. The Swedish court decided to uphold his sentence.

Incidentally, no copyrighted material is actually hosted on the Pirate Bay’s website, it simply acts as a linking site to its users torrent servers where the users themselves store the data.