I am a massive GNU/Linux fan. I switched to GNU/Linux back in 2007 following Microsoft’s Vista fiasco. Never looked back. Today, all my workstations and server run GNU/Linux. Mostly Debian these days, or some derivative thereof.
Windows 10 officially reaches end of life 2025-10-14. Unfortunately for Windows users, Windows 11 has some rather specific hardware requirements that a lot of perfectly serviceable PC’s currently running Windows 10 do not satisfy. Consequently, lots of Windows 10 users are asking me about alternatives to Microsoft Windows. My stock answer these days is simply…
Skip preamble and launch METAR_applet now. This is a modern rework of a very old PHPWeather project that we eventually abandoned nearly a decade ago. I built this new version in PHP/MYSQL pretty much from scratch, albeit with a lot of help from PerplexityAI. Its main emphases are speed and simplicity. Basically it collects data…
Finally got decent fibre to the property (FttP) broadband here on Hampshire’s new high-speed “CityFIbre” network as retailed by local provider ‘toob’. I immediately took the opportunity to dump the appallingly poor internet provided by a British outfit called Global4, that we’d put-up with for the last decade or so. Which also meant I could…
Question that comes up from time to time amongst the Android users I support is, “How do I change my email password in FairEmail?” Now FairEmail is generally pretty straightforward to setup, and it works with most email providers, including Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo! It also works well if you have email addresses on your…
In this article I will attempt to address issues upgrading to KDE Plasma 6 from Plasma 5 that I have encountered lately. This is not an exhaustive list. But having undertaken a number of Debian 12 (“Bookworm”) to Debian 13 (“Trixie”) upgrades recently, these are the KDE issues that cropped up for me. I thought…
Do you remember Macromedia Flash? Now, thanks to the canny lads and lasses at Ruffle, Flash is back! To celebrate Garfnet’s 30th anniversary, we thought it would be fun not merely to reinstate the Flash presentations we used to host here, Only this time we’ll fix it so that readers can watch them on any…
I’m not a big fan of computer games. Generally I take the view that computers are difficult enough already, without installing software that effectively makes them even more recalcitrant. However, I make an exception for Tux Racer. Originally written back in 2000 by Jasmin Patry, Tux Racer is an open-source winter sports racing video game…
Debian version 13, aka Trixie is due to be declared “stable” 2025-08-09. I’ve been using Trixie as “testing” for a couple of years now and have found it very good indeed. So much so that we are already upgrading our Bookworm machines to Trixie. In all cases so far, this has proven a relatively smooth…
Considering that internet radio has become quite a hot topic on this site, I thought it might be useful to compile a database file for Yuri Saurov’s excellent and increasingly popular Advanced Radio Player widget for the KDE plasma desktop. This list contains international streams for all the BBC national and local stations. It also…
I like taking photos. Trouble is that I’m a tad trigger-happy with the shutter button. Over the last few decades I have captured around ½ million of my own digital images and about 33,000 scanned from 35mm neg. On top of that there are around 45,000 edited/retouched images – not to mention a thousand or…
Whilst I am deeply sceptical about artificial “intelligence”, I’m also having quite a lot of fun with it too. Over the last eighteen months, I’ve gone from generating header images for blog articles, ugly images of unpleasant politicians and surreal greetings cards, to creating entire virtual shoots. Today, it also serves as a serious learning…
What is TOR? TOR, is an abbreviation of The Onion Router, usually written as “Tor”. It is a free and open-source network that enables anonymous communication on the internet by routing users’ traffic through multiple layers of encryption, similar to the layers of an onion. It helps protect users’ privacy, hides their IP address and…
I had a studio photoshoot booked for last weekend. Unfortunately, my model was poorly and it was too late to book another. Consequently, I was in the unusual situation of actually having a free day, whilst also being in an experimental frame of mind. So I thought it might be rather good fun to try…
Editor’s note: TL;DR Latest streams can be found here. For reasons best known to itself, the BBC decided to close many of its internet radio streams yesterday (2025-01-21). Fortunately there are alternatives. After a bit of scrambling and hacking, I’ve been able to cobble together an updated list of BBC national and local radio stations,…
For an increasing number of Brits, BBC Radio is about the only thing the modern BBC has to offer that might justify its antiquated and much resented television licence fee. Or rather it was up until yesterday (2025-01-21), when sadly 3/4 of its AAC/HLS internet radio streams inexplicably fell silent. I’ve written to BBC Sounds…
It’s quite an exciting time in the FOSS graphics world at the moment. After a long, long wait, GIMP 3.0 is finally at RC1 (first release candidate) stage. Debian 13 (Trixie aka Testing) users have just received the long-awaited KDE Plasma 6 desktop – with full Wayland support. Which I have to say that after…
I’m a big Debian fan and I’m currently running Debian 13, aka, “Trixie” on my main laptop workstation. Currently Trixie is Debian’s “testing” branch. Despite being a test version, Trixie has generally proven very stable and reliable. And we users get all the new stuff very promptly. I’m also rather keen on the KDE desktop,…
I’m often amazed by the money some Hi-Fi buffs spend on their systems. I’m something of a tightwad, and I took a rather different approach. This involves mixed tech – or as I prefer to call it, “appropriate technology“. I run one of these. It used to be an Acer Windows box, but all that…
While the Clownstrike fiasco rumbles-on in the West, and people in our particular part of the planet can’t even purchase a train ticket, it seems both Russia and China are almost completely unaffected. Editor’s note 2024-08-17: Seems we’re not the only site referring to Cloudstrike as “Clownstrike”. Crowdstrike has issued several takedown notices to a…
Today our planet is suffering what appears to be Microsoft’s biggest ever outage. Seems the culprit is a piece of buggy “security” software provided by a company called Crowdstrike. Or is that Clownstrike? It sends Microsoft Windows computers into a never-ending boot loop, from which users cannot escape, without going into “safe mode” and removing…
If like me, you are tired of having your screen cluttered full of stupid ads, c/w the general enshittification of the Internet by commercial interests, then you may wish to try /etc/hosts file “hostile server blocking”. It’s free and no additional software is needed. This is because your /etc/hosts file part of your computer’s TCP/IP…
I suffered my first hard disk failure way back in 1987. Fortunately I recovered 99% of my data. However, successful recovery required quite a lengthy struggle and a somewhat inelegant bodge. Since then, I’ve held something of a fascination, some might even say an obsession with backup systems. Over the years, I have tried all…
Problem is that memory cards can and do fail – even the expensive ones. And of course the world is littered with fakes. Being a bit of an old skinflint, almost all my memory cards have come from Amazon or similar. But I always add one extra precautionary step to the process between purchase and…
EDITORS NOTE 2025-01-22. BBC changed its streams, yet again. Consequently, most of the BBC of the streams on this page no longer work. New streams that do actually work can be found at:- Internet radio player URLs Following the fiasco at the end of last week, when the BBC killed all its HLS internet radio…
Editor’s note: a list of new BBC AAC HLS internet ratio streams can be found here. Over the last few hours, some new BBC streams have appeared. At the moment I don’t know whether these are official BBC streams or if some public-spirited person is re-streaming. Though I’m pretty sure the ones coming from the…
