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Apple iOS 6.1 update is now officially rolled out for public consumption, the update adds LTE (4G) support for 36 additional iPhone carriers and 23 additional iPad carriers worldwide. Other minor changes include ability to purchase movie tickets through Fandango with Siri (USA only), iTunes Match subscribers can now download individual songs from iCloud and new button to reset the Advertising Identifier. Apart from these minor changes the update features numerous other bug fixes and security updates. Direct download links to Apple iOS 6.1 update are posted below.

We have already setupped the Raspberry Pi to download files from internet and share them wirelessly over network acting as an NAS. Now it's time to further enhance this functionality to share multimedia content (audio/video/images) using DLNA protocol so our Raspberry Pi can act as an self contained multimedia downloader and server.

Enabling DLNA allows compatible networked device like TV's, cellphones, music systems and computers to enable seamless sharing and playback of digital media between devices. DLNA uses Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) for media management, discovery and control. Follow the instructions ahead to install and configure popular Linux DLNA server utility MiniDLNA on Raspberry Pi running Raspbian.

We can launch applications and scripts as services during boot at various Linux run-levels as demonstrated earlier, however at-times we need to launch applications or perform scripted tasks only after the Graphical interface is loaded. For example in my usage scenario with Debian running on a Raspberry Pi, few services were failing to work as expected when launched using inti.d method as they require the host to be properly connected to the internet which only happened (in my usage scenario) after the GUI started loading.

Here is another handy way to auto-launch applications and scripts in a similar manner to "autostart" in Windows, we will be using LXDE "/home/pi/.config/autostart" folder to create shortcuts which will launch our executable after GUI starts loading.

In it's simplest definition watchdog is a hardware and/or software timer-register which can used to trigger an system reset or action if something doesn’t works as expected. The watchdog timer performs regular heartbeat checks and if failed performs the pre-defined corrective tasks.

The now hugely popular mini-computer Raspberry Pi features the BCM2835 SoC which has an built-in hardware watchdog timer, this can be used to check tasks like network connectivity, system load, system freeze and other metrics like temperature to perform corrective measures like automatic system reset. Just follow the steps as instructed next to get started with using watchdog timer.