Some Thoughts On My 8th Raspberry Pi

Just about a year ago I bought my first Raspberry Pi out of curiosity and to get my Owncloud server project started. At the time it was an experiment but it turned out to be the most liberating computing experience I had in many years. A large part of this is due to Owncloud that finally let me use cloud services such as calendar, address book synchronization and many other things from home. But it did not stop there, I've since put more Raspberry Pis into service as a water alarm system, to run Selfoss as my RSS server after Google has shut down its service, for daily checks of call by call prices with automatic email reports, for hardware projects to better understand how a CPU works, I'm using one as an OpenVPN gateway at home and another one as a secure VNC remote desktop bridge, another one to stream music to my Hi-Fi equipment, one went to my brother as as a learning kit for his kids and to be used as XBMC media server for his TV, and another one has been put to work as an automatic Wi-Fi and baseband long duration stress tester. The list of things I'd like to do next with it but haven't had the time yet is at least as long. And it's so easy to get started with a new project as the hardware is always the same and the operating system works almost identical to Ubuntu (that I use on my desktops) and most other Linux OS flavours out there. In addition, most of the software available for Linux runs on the Pi as well. So if you are also toying with the thought of getting a Raspi for one project or another I can more than recommend it. But be warned, once you get started there it's difficult to stop. At this point I'd like to say a BIG THANK YOU to all the people at the Raspberry Pi foundation, you've done something really big here!