I’ve had a Raspberry Pi lying around the house for a few months now. Every once in a while I’ll take it out and tinker around with it. When BitTorrent released the BitTorrent Sync Alpha a few weeks back, I decided to see what kind of options I had for using the program with my Raspberry Pi.

BitTorrent Sync is awesome. If you don’t know about it, you can read all about it here. In a nutshell, it allows you to sync folders between machines using P2P. No cloud necessary. I’ve been using it for syncing several gigabytes of RAW photos and video across my various machines. There is the occasional scenario however, where I’ve wanted to grab a few files, but my other machine is turned off. To solve this problem, I’m using a Raspberry Pi as a low power, always-on device with Sync installed. Just for kicks, I’m also using Owncloud (open source) to provide me with a web interface for accessing my files from any computer, including my mobile phone. Sound interesting?

If you have a DIY attitude and aren’t afraid of a few terminal commands, then read on to learn about how I did it.

First, you’ll need the following:

• A Raspberry Pi
• USB Keyboard for setup
• USB Mouse for setup
• SD card (faster, the better)
• A thumb drive (I like using this for its low profile). You can also use a self powered external hard drive, or just the space available on the SD card.
• Micro USB charger
• WiFi adaptor (optional. I use this one)
• Some type of display for setup. I just used HDMI out to my TV.

Step 1: Setting up Raspbian

Fire up your favorite torrent client and download the Raspbian “wheezy” image. Click here for the link.

I won’t go in to full detail on how to write the images to the SD card. There are plenty of resources available for that. If you are using Windows, check out this link. If you are on a Mac, check out this link.

When that is done, plug the SD card into your RasPi and fire it up. For the initial configuration screen that appears I recommend setting your username and password, expanding the root partition, setting your boot_behavior to start desktop on boot and enabling SSH. Exit the configuration screen and you’ll eventually be presented with the Wheezy desktop.

Step 2: Installing BitTorrent Sync

Make sure you have an ethernet cable plugged in to your RasPi, and fire up lxterminal (there is a shortcut on the desktop). We’ll need to download the binary for Sync. To do this, type in:

wget "http://btsync.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/btsync_arm.tar.gz"

Then change the download directory:

cd /home/pi

extract the tar.gz:

tar -zxvf btsync_arm.tar.gz

And finally, run the program:

./btsync

Now, we want to make sure Sync will run at startup. This requires an extra step. In terminal, change your directory to the config folder:

cd ~/.config/

Create a new folder called “autostart”

mkdir autostart

Now create a new text document. You can use the leafpad program that comes pre-installed. The contents of the text document need to be as follows:

[Desktop Entry]

Type=Application

Exec=/home/pi/btsync

Save this file in the newly created ~/.config/autostart as: syncstart.desktop

Sync is now up and running on your tiny Raspberry Pi. You can access the web GUI by opening a browser and typing in [YOUR IP ADDRESS]:8888/gui. For example: 192.168.1.2:8888/gui. You can find the IP address for your RasPi by opening terminal and typing in: ifconfig

At this point, you can stop right here. If your SD card is big enough, you can set up Sync and have your always-on Sync device….but why stop there? Lets add a thumb drive so that we can have more space.

Step 3: Adding a thumb drive

As mentioned, you have plenty of options for adding hard drive space to your Raspberry Pi. If you want to, you can plug in an external hard drive and go crazy. For this blog post however, I’m just using a micro-sd thumb drive. I love how small it is.

Plug the thumb drive in to the Raspberry Pi. (if you are short on usb ports, I would suggest setting up remote desktop). Open up terminal and type in:

df -h

Find your thumb drive. Mine was at the bottom and was called /dev/sda1. Take note of the name. You’ll need it. Format your hard drive by doing the following (replace sda1 with the name of your drive):

sudo umount /dev/sda1
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 -L SYNC

If you aren’t interested in Owncloud, then you can stop here and simply set up Sync to point to /media/SYNC. If you are interested in Owncloud, then keep reading.

step 4: Setting up Owncloud

Setting up Owncloud on linux is a mess of various terminal commands. Thankfully, Github user Petrockblog has made it very simple. He created a shell script for installing and updating Owncloud. Simply do the following:

Install Github:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y git dialog

Download the latest setup script:

cd
git clone git://github.com/petrockblog/OwncloudPie.git

And execute the script:

cd OwncloudPie
chmod +x owncloudpie_setup.sh
sudo ./owncloudpie_setup.sh

…and wait. This will take a while. Grab a coffee. Watch this video. When it is done, you can navigate to [Your IP Address]/owncloud to set everything up. It is very important that you click on “advanced” and set your data folder to /media/SYNC before finishing setup.

Step 5: Combining BitTorrent Sync and Owncloud

First we need to clear up a few file permissions. Add sync to the www-data group:

sudo usermod -a -G www-data sync

Allow sync to write to the thumb drive:

sudo chmod -R 770 /media/SYNC 

Now open up the BitTorrent Sync WebUI (YourIpAddress:8888/gui) and add a folder. You’ll want to add: /media/SYNC/USERNAME/files where “username” is the name you selected when setting up Owncloud. Generate a key and you are done. You can now use that key to set up a folder on any computer you want. Any files added to that folder will be synced to your RasPi and be available through the Owncloud web interface. While this is pretty cool, there’s just one more little step to make this much more useful.

Step 6: Set up Owncloud to be accessed from anywhere (including mobile phones)

To access our files from anywhere, we’ll need to first set up a static IP address. If you used the wifi dongle I recommended, you can simply plug it in and it will work. Open terminal and type in:

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

You’ll need to make a few changes in order to get a static IP address. Below is what I ended up using after a bit of trial and error. Your address, gateway, net mask, SSID, and PSK will need to be changed according to your network. The settings may be different if you used a different wireless adaptor, or if you are only using an ethernet cable.

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet static
        address 192.168.1.20
        gateway 192.168.1.1
        netmask 255.255.255.0

auto wlan0
#allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet static
        address 192.168.1.22
        gateway 192.168.1.1
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        wpa-ssid "YOUR SSID"
        wpa-psk "YOUR PSK"
#wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
iface default inet dhcp

Finally, you’ll need to forward a port so that owncloud can be accessed from outside networks. I just forwarded port 80 for the IP address of my RasPi. In this example, my IP address when using wifi is 192.168.1.22. The procedure for forwarding ports is different for every router. If I grab my real IP address from a site such as this one, I can now access Owncloud and my Sync files from anywhere by going to [MyRealIpAddress]/owncloud (where the IP address is what you find from the website I linked to). You can also set up Owncloud with an Android or iOS client for mobile access.

Phew. If you made it this far, congrats. I had fun creating my own personal BitTorrent-powered cloud and I hope you found this walkthrough helpful. There are so many uses for something like BitTorrent Sync, and I think we’ve only begun to scratch the surface.

If you have found any creative uses for BitTorrent Sync, then share with us on our forums. We’d love to hear about it.

In this edition of FDL: magical/simple/pretty folk-pop, in the form of three live show torrents from The Weepies. The band name sounds supersad, but we promise it’s happy. How could it not be? IT’S FRIDAY.

Friday Download: The Weepies

1. El Rey / Los Angeles, California / 2012
2. Butternut Ridge / Oberlin, Ohio / 2004
3. Dizzy’s / San Diego, California / 2004

You can read on the setlist(s) if that’s your thing.

El Rey, 2012

Intro / When You Go Away / Please Speak Well of Me / Hideaway / Can’t Go Back Now / I Was Made for Sunny Days / Orbiting / Riga Girls / Gotta Have You / Be My Honeypie / Hard to Please / How Do You Get High? / Take it From Me / They’re in Love, Where Am I? / Sing Me to Sleep / Little Bird / Be My Thrill / World Spins Madly On / Just Blue / Citywide Rodeo / Hummingbird / Not a Lullaby / Nobody Knows Me At All / Hope Tomorrow

Butternut Ridge, 2004

Somebody Loved /Rocks and Water / How Will He Find Me / Vegas Baby / The World Spins Madly On / I’ve Got To Have You / Post Ivan Day / Sing Me to Sleep / Thanks to Brian / Tell Your Story Walking / Big Strong Girl / Cherry Trees / San Francisco / Love Come Knocking / Riga Girls / Personal Dimensions / All That I Want / Rock Hall / Don’t Pay No Mind / Slow Pony Home / CDs and Cake / Keep It There / Comfort / Strange Place Now

Dizzy’s, 2004

Rocks And Water / World Spins Madly On / How Will He Find Me / Somebody Loved / Vegas Baby / San Francisco / I Gotta Have You / Sing Me to Sleep / Tell Your Story Walking / Keep It There / Riga Girls / All That I Want / Slow Pony Home / Late Night Phone Call / Comfort / Jolene

Image credit: Rachel Kramer, Wikimedia Commons

Last month, Youtube hero and DIY artist Alex Day kicked off a collaboration project with BitTorrent fans. He posted stems from his Epigrams and Interludes tracks to SoShare. You guys picked them up, and made them yours. Awesome. This playlist has pretty much become our favorite thing on the Internet. (We’re probably not alone – these videos have been watched over 31 thousand times.)

The winning track, as decided by Alex: Tess Beighton’s remix of Forever Yours. It adds edge and originality; it comes from the same feeling and place as the original. It’s pretty epic, and we’re reminded again how amazing songs can sound in the hands of fans. On behalf of BitTorrent: congrats! You can find more from Tess here.

In this week’s Friday Download: a decade’s worth of live shows and bittersweet melodies from Death Cab for Cutie, preserved by the dedicated curatorial team over at archive.org. Set list after the jump.

Friday Download: Death Cab For Cutie

1. Emo’s / Austin, Texas / 2001
2. Kamp / Bielefeld, Germany / 2006
3. 80-35 Festival / Des Moines, Iowa / 2012

Emo’s: Austin, Texas, 2001.

Steadier Footing / A Movie Script Ending / For What Reason / We Laugh Indoors / Why You’d Want to Live Here / Photobooth / Amputations / Information Travels Faster / Company Calls / Coney Island / Pictures in an Exhibition / Here Comes the Rain Again (Eurythmics) / Blacking Out the Friction / Fake Frowns

Kamp: Bielefeld, Germany, 2006.

Marching Bands of Manhattan / We Laugh Indoors / The New Year / Title and Registration / Soul Meets Body / Photobooth / Crooked Teeth / Different Names for the Same Thing / Amputations / A Movie Script Ending / Company Calls / What Sarah Said / Brothers on a Hotel Bed / Why You’d Want to Live Here / Expo ’86 / The Sound of Settling / I Will Follow You into the Dark / Transatlanticism

80-35 Festival: Des Moines, Iowa, 2012.

Intro / I Will Follow You into the Dark / Home is a Fire / I Will Possess Your Heart / Crooked Teeth / We Laugh Indoors / Doors Unlocked and Open / Long Division / Grapevine Fires / What Sarah Said / Lightness / You are a Tourist / Underneath the Sycamore / Company Calls / Company Calls Epilogue / Brothers on a Hotel Bed / Cath… / We Looked Like Giants / The New Year / Crowd / A Movie Script Ending / Soul Meets Body / Transatlanticism

Ultra is a label that has changed the landscape and creative culture of music. Today, we’re working with them to do it again.

Over the years, Ultra has been the home of, and catalyst for, artists like Kaskade, David Guetta, Tiesto, deadmau5, and Calvin Harris, among others. In 2013, starting now, they’ll be the first label release content direct-to-fan using an Alpha media format we’re calling the BitTorrent Bundle . Here’s the deal.

We used to buy music at independent record shops downtown. We bemoaned their disappearance, but still shopped the chain mega-stores that took their place. When these moved online, in the form of iTunes or Amazon, we were there, wallets out. For fifty years or more, the path to purchase has essentially been the same. Go to the physical/digital record store, buy an album.

But what if the record store was inside the album instead?

What if every single piece of content could function as a flyer, and a standalone storefront?

What if you could code a checkout counter into each media file published by an artist?

You’d be able to reach the people who slip through the cracks of traditional retail outlets – the other 40% of the Internet. You’d be able to build content that appreciates in value over time; that grows more powerful, each time it’s shared. That’s the idea behind the BitTorrent Bundle.

The BitTorrent Bundle is not an album, an MP3, or an MOV. It’s a multimedia format. It’s an early build of a new type of torrent file where fan interaction, like email collection or donation, happens inside the torrent. We’re collaborating with electronic music innovators Ultra Music to see what happens when you let people choose how they want to connect with content.

Ultra’s BitTorrent Bundle is a behind-the-scenes look at Kaskade’s 2012 “Freaks of Nature” tour, designed to support the artist’s May 14th documentary release. It’s a flyer. It’s a direct-to-fan social object. And it’s the world’s largest stage; ready to reach 170 million fans from all over the world.

When you download the Ultra Bundle from BitTorrent, you get half the content gratis: the Dada Life remix of Dynasty, and the “Freaks of Nature” tour trailer. The other half of the content inside the file? It’s a functional record store, with content you can unlock using your email. Opt to keep in touch, and Kaskade will hook you up with unreleased footage from his historic 2012’s Staples Center show, as well as an exclusive digital tour booklet. Either way: you get to bring home a little piece of “Freaks of Nature”.

In partnership with Ultra Music, Kaskade, and the people of the Internet, we’re working on a distributed technology solution for creators. We don’t need another digital radio station. We don’t need another walled garden or standalone content store. We need ways to place value exchanges within the content itself – allowing these exchanges to travel freely, without barriers or limitations; allowing these exchanges to multiply as content is shared.

Our goal is to move the interaction to where it matters; making it a property of the file, versus the distribution framework; giving artists real data about, and real access to, their fans.

Go behind the scenes with Kaskade, and see how the Bundle Alpha works.

Like many of you, we’ve been following Netflix with great interest. We are subscribers. We are fans. We believe in the work that they are doing. And we support their effort to innovate and evolve digital distribution, in ways that are sustainable for creators, other rights-holders and fans. That said, we were surprised by some of the comments made by Ted Sarandos recently during an interview with Stuff.tv.

We strongly agree with his perspective that making more good content more accessible will curb piracy. However, we want to take a moment to correct two of his comments. The first issue is the application of BitTorrent as a synonym for Internet piracy. The second is the assertion that BitTorrent traffic drops as Netflix is introduced to new markets. Neither statement is true.

Mr. Sarandos can perhaps be forgiven for making the first error. It is a common misconception that we are working hard to address. The truth is that BitTorrent is an Internet protocol, like HTTP. For over a decade, it’s been the world’s most efficient way to move data across the web. It’s what the Internet’s core platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, use for code deployment. It’s what leading gaming brands, including Blizzard and Eve Online, use for updates. It’s what genetic researchers use to move human genome sequences. And it’s relied on by the scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider. Any company moving large data sets uses BitTorrent. Any person trying to preserve terabytes of data uses BitTorrent. They are not Internet pirates.

BitTorrent was designed to move data. It was not designed for piracy. In fact, as a stand-alone tool, it’s not even a very good technology for piracy. We have never hosted infringing content. We have never endorsed it. To be clear, we are not a file-sharing site. Our technology does not rip DVDs, nor does it capture movies in the theater. We have never pointed to, indexed, or promoted infringing content in any way.

We do, however, promote creators and curators who publish and preserve content using BitTorrent. Today, we have more than 2,000,000 (yes, you read that correctly) pieces of legal and licensed content in the BitTorrent ecosystem. To put that in perspective, Netflix has previously reported having 60,000. We are engineers and scientists focused on making the Internet sustainable and creatively viable through distributed computing. Which leads to the second point.

In 2009, we implemented μTP, or “Micro Transport Protocol.” This was done, voluntarily, to help solve a major problem facing the Internet: congestion. Many of you will recall the Net Neutrality crisis a few years back. Our implementation of μTP helped resolve the issue. μTP dials back BitTorrent traffic during peak hours in order to give priority to other applications, such as Netflix. In doing so, we saved the ISPs a lot of money and public relations headaches. We did so at our own cost, because it was the right thing to do for the Internet and the people who rely on it.

We do things big. We make things durable. We have introduced several award-winning technologies. Those who know us see us as champions of the Internet. Even Hollywood is realizing that we are not the Boogeyman, and we’re finding ways to work together. Fast Company named us one of the world’s most innovative companies for our work with content creators. And we’re just getting started.

We understand this storyline is being framed by those looking to stir up controversy. But those who know better realize there is no such thing as a “BitTorrent Pirate”, and that we are not competing with the likes of Netflix. We’re actually finding ways to support companies like them, content creators, studios, and other rights-holders directly. At this very moment, we’re getting ready to roll out an Alpha program that we believe could drive more traffic to Netflix (and others), should the content creator or rights-holder so choose.

Watch this space for further news on that front. We’re alive and kicking.

Oh. And regarding that 4K issue, we think we can help.

On April 23, we opened up a little Alpha project called BitTorrent Sync. The response from users has been: awesome. Together, they’ve been helping build a better way to sync.

BitTorrent Sync was designed to solve for what we see as real, fundamental challenges to data synchronization: limitations on speed, size, and space; limitations on file security and dependency on cloud infrastructure. Because BitTorrent Sync is based on distributed technology, you can sync as many big files as you want. Transfers are encrypted, and information isn’t stored on any server, or in the cloud. Your content belongs to you, and stays on devices of your choice. That’s the way syncing should work.

Turns out, it’s working for you guys, too. To date, more than a petabyte of anonymous data has been synced between BitTorrent Sync users. A petabyte! To put that into context, the Internet Archive, one of the world wide web’s largest repositories of media, houses 10 petabytes of data. Sync is massive. And it’s growing. Over 70 terabytes of anonymous data are synced daily.

But Sync isn’t just working in ways we imagined. It’s working in creative ways that we never could have predicted. A hacker team at TechCrunch Disrupt built a private distributed blog platform off Sync. Users are sending us on scavenger hunts. We’re inspired. And we’re excited about what’s next for Sync.

If you haven’t yet tried BitTorrent Sync, you can grab the open Alpha here. Happy Syncing, people.

Update

Sync was built for secure sharing. While we have general statistics about the app, we don’t have any access to private information.

The client reports back anonymous usage statistics in the same way our other clients do. Sync uses this call to check if there’s a new build available. This call also contains some anonymous statistics that allow us to understand how Sync performs, and how it’s being used; data transferred directly, through relay, size of folders, and number of files synced.

This is the only information we collect, and we left it open intentionally – so that people could see the data we’re collecting. That way, it can be easily verified that we don’t have access to any private information. Read more here.

In this week’s FDL: three live shows from the Arizona punk luminaries. This is the evolution of a great American band, recorded and perserved by the intrepid curatorial team over at archive.org. Happy Friday, people.

Friday Download: Meat Puppets

1. UCSB / Santa Barbara, CA / 1988
2. Velvet Slego / Rimini, Italy / 1992
3. Mercury Lounge / New York, NY / 2013

In March, we got the chance to catch up with some creators, change-makers, and heroes of the free world at SXSW. Our intrepid film crew (Jeph, Danimal) captured the conversations so we could share them with you. Herewith: a series of small talks about big things.

In this week’s edition: words with Just Blaze, the super-producer behind everything from The Blueprint to the Harlem Shake. He played six shows in three days at SXSW. He played ours without a sound system; a stolen moment of real hip hop.

Fresh off that set with Young Guru, Just Blaze talks to us about the brave new world of music production; his experience with Higher, the role of direct-to-fan, and how BitTorrent is picking up where the record industry failed. After the jump: photos from his set at SXSW.

One of the really interesting uses for BitTorrent is archiving content. If a few people think a thing is important enough to keep seeding it, it will always be available to anyone who wants it. The people who are seeding can come and go. As long as there’s one person who’s holding a copy, it will be both preserved and made available. Thanks to nonprofits like ibiblio and the Internet Archive, we have the beginnings of serious perma-seeding infrastructure.

Webhosts come and webhosts go, but BitTorrent can be forever. A great example of that is the Archive Team’s torrent of all of Geocities (650GB compressed!). When Yahoo announced they were shutting down Geocities, Archive Team kicked into gear and saved the site for posterity. Geocities is a photo album of the web’s growth, starting when it was a toddler just learning to walk and going through to its awkward early teenage years. It’s a crucial part of the heritage of early “Digital Natives” (myself included), and an invaluable resource for people studying the way people and cultures acclimatized to the new model of the world we all live in.

It’s also a great resource for art. A favorite project of mine was “The Deleted City,” which took viewers on a little tour of the Geocities archive on a video monitor. The artist behind it has released a follow-up piece, making it an interactive tour.

“The Deleted City” is an artifact of the enabling power of BitTorrent as a decentralized storage/dissemination tool. It’s also really neat, and rather nostalgic for those of us who remember those very MIDIs. (This is from a world before MP3s were ubiquitous, if you can imagine that.)