What is 14 Squared?

Hello!
14 Squared is a replacement for Raspberry Pi Bakery. The difference between the two is that while Raspberry Pi Bakery was only about the Raspberry Pi, 14 Squared will be about all things tech. We still plan to write Raspberry Pi tutorials and guides, but we will also write reviews, news, and other projects.

How to Backup Your Pi's SD Card as an Image file

In this tutorial, I will show you how to save your Pi's SD card as a .IMG file. This is useful because it allows you to switch operating systems, easily while saving all your settings and files.

Time: 15 minutes.
Difficulty: Easy.

You Will Need:

• A Windows computer.
• An adapter for your Pi's SD card if using a model B+ or 2B.

Steps:

1. Remove your Pi's SD card.
2. Insert it into your Windows computer. 
3. Download and install Win32 Disk Imager HERE.
4. Remove all USB flash drives and SD cards except the one from your Pi.
5. Start Win32 Disk Imager and under "Device", select your Pi's SD card.
6. Select a location for your file under "Image File" and click "Read". WARNING: The .IMG file will be very large. They are usually around 5-7 gigabytes.
7. This will take a while but once it's finished, you will have a copy of your entire SD card.

How to Play Videos on your Pi

In this tutorial, we will be using OMXplayer to play videos on the Raspberry Pi.

Time: Less than 5 minutes.
Difficulty: Medium

To do this, we will be using a feature of Raspbian that allows you to play videos from the command line. I use this feature often at trade shows where we need our video to play on a loop.

Steps:

1. To start, you will need to get a video to play. I have only tested this method with .MP4 videos but it should work fine with most video formats.
2. Find the file path to your video and save it for later. This is easy to do, just open up the file manager and navigate to your file, then right click it and select "Copy Path(s)".
3. Open up the terminal and type "sudo nano /home/pi/VideoPlayer.sh".
4. Insert the following command, "omxplayer -o hdmi (Paste the path to your video here)".
5. Exit the Nano editor and try running the script. It should play your video.
6. This method is not intended for playing all your videos, it's best for just playing one.

A Brief Review of Pidora

Earlier today I decided I would try some operating systems other than Raspbian. The first one I tried is called Pidora. Here is my experience.
The install took about 10 minutes, and configuring everything took about 5 minutes. All the configuration is done through Pidora's wonderful GUI on the first boot. Once you have everything set up, you see this desktop.

 

From the Applications Menu up top, you can launch all of the applications that come preinstalled with Pidora. To install more, you can use Pidora's "Yum Extender".

The first thing I installed was Firefox, because the default browser is Midori, which, to put it lightly, is horrible.
Pros:

• Good UI
• Nice and easy to use
• Firefox
• Yum Extender

Cons:

• Everything seems very slow on my Pi. I hope to try it on a Pi 2. If it is any faster, I might use this instead of Raspbian.