Rio Rancho Native American Families (RRNAF) Group

At the end of March 2020, we were starting to get into the full impact of Covid-19 here. People began to stay home and schools like Rio Rancho Public Schools were assessing impacts. In an effort to help bring the Native American families together (like school district students and families) using technology, I started a group on Groups.io called Rio Rancho Native American Families (RRNAF). Over the subsequent months we have managed to pull together many people and now hold weekly coffee talk meeting on Saturdays to talk about our various concerns. It’s been very useful to talk informally to fellow native parents and students to see what is happening with each other, compare notes about the realities of school now, and learn how we can leverage each of our talents. RRNAF is an open group, so if you are interested in joining, just click the link above.

– Dom

Chromebook Users of Rio Rancho

I live in Rio Rancho, New Mexico and my kids attend the Rio Rancho Public Schools District. One of the changes that have happened over the last couple of years in the district is the adoption of the Google Education infrastructure and the use of Chrombooks throughout all the schools. I’ve seen investment in classrooms where teachers now have over 30 chromebooks to use for classroom instruction.

With these changes, what I have not seen is any general education for the students, siblings, or parents in the community (and surrounding tribal communities). I decided to try and change that with the free resources available through the City of Rio Rancho.

I am a volunteer with the city and this enabled me to teach my Raspberry Pi classes in 2017 at the Loma Colorado Public Library. This library has great resources … rooms, tables, chairs, laptops, monitors, keyboards, mice, and great internet bandwith! So all I really needed to do was schedule and coordinate to get this new set of classes started.

One of the challenges in starting anything new is awareness, so I decided to use the Meetup.com to raise awareness initially, then moved on to a email list. The email list page is at:

https://groups.io/g/cuorr

We had our first class/meetup on July 27, 2019 at the Loma Colorado Public Library Auditorium, I brought 12 Chromebooks for folks to use … we had 11 people attend, some hands on time, and many questions around the Chromebook and Google services. I was excited about the attendance and am looking at holding this class once a month for now and maybe more frequent based on interest and demand.

I will be scheduling new meetups or classes via meetup.com so, keep an eye on this website for new events or check out to the library calendar.

– Dom

GnuCash 2.6.15 Accounting Software on the Raspberry Pi

I updated one of my Raspberry Pis to the new Strech OS for the Raspberry Pi and was pleasantly surprised to see a update to a newer stable version of GnuCash 2.6.15. A major update since the 2.6.4 version … Woo hoo!!!

GnuCash Accounting Software on the Raspberry Pi

I’ve recently had the need to use some Accounting software to dive into some Revenue and Expense allocation for a company to understand the business better. There was the hurdle of downloading and buying Quickbooks desktop version or buying a online version instance for a month maybe more, and I didn’t know the Quickbooks user interface.

At one time, many years ago, looked at GnuCash and thought it had potential but never spent the time. Now that I had the need and revisited GnuCash, much to my surprise, the open source software had improved and I decided to take the plunge and learn it.

I do have an accounting class under my belt from graduate school, so the whole double entry accounting was not new to me, and I was glad to see how the concept of accounts was implemented in GnuCash. Long story short, I was able to enter about 10 months of bank account data into GnuCash, then allocate expenses to get a quick picture of where 2 major projects were with respect to their direct costs and indirect costs.

I’m thankful that GnuCash was an option and it took me several hours to get the answers I was looking for about this business. If I used Quickbooks, it likely would have taken me longer and had a cost to it.

Here are a couple screenshots of the GnuCash application, It’s easy to use and free on Linux, Windows, and Max OSX. I tried the version on Windows also, the data file (FILENAME.gnucash) can be copied/moved and used on Linux too, I tested editing on both instances of the GnuCash data file.

To install GnuCash on your Raspberry Pi, simply run the following commands from a command line:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnucash

When GnuCash is installed a new icon will appear under the Office grouping. The version that was installed was GnuCash 2.6.4, and I copied this icon to the desktop for frequent use.

rpi3gnucashmenu