Telenet, our local cable provider, decided that analog cable radio is dead and everyone should switch to either DAB (Digital Radio over the air) or DVB-C (Digital Radio via coaxial cable). For me, that’s a bit of an issue: DAB radio is fine, but requires good reception. Our house is rather well insulated so radio reception is crap at best DVB-C radio would require buying yet another device...
I’ve always liked the Ambilight technology Philips builds into some of their TV’s. I just don’t like the price that they ask for it… so I looked around if there was no way to build that yourself. There is, using a Raspberry Pi, some leds, and some bits and pieces ;)
I’ve been a longtime user of Crashplan, an easy-to-use cloud backup solution. It works well, and it used to work also on nearly any platform that had a java run-time and some add-on opensource libraries. I’ve used it for some time on my raspberry pi to automatically backup my data to the cloud. (Crashplan on ARM (the architecture of the raspberry pi) is an unsupported configuration though).
In my grand scheme of “abuse all the low-power computing things!”, I’ve moved my crashplan backups over to the Raspberry Pi 2 (rpi2 for short). Installation is relatively painless: download the installer from the crashplan site, and unpack and execute. I installed mine under /opt/crashplan.