These are some of my technology writings. I am a firm believer in the value of open source software and the culture of openness and cooperation that surrounds it. So most of my written work today is about open source rather than proprietary products. If you are looking for information about Microsoft products or anything Windows-based, then you are probably in the wrong place – though please feel free to look around anyway, if you have a few moments to spare.
I suffer dreadful mental blocks at times. I’m also a tad forgetful. To work around this, I use Jaap Karssenberg’s ‘Zim’. This is an excellent indexed, searchable, cross-linkable, exportable, cross-platform note-taking program. Described by its developer as a ‘desktop wiki’ Zim turns effective note-taking from a tedious chore into a simple and routine task. And…
This is the tale of yet another crappy British telecoms provider. On 2025-12-05, I bought and paid for 30GB per month Lebara data SIM card from its Amazon store. But the SIM card Lebara sent was ONLY 25GB. What a con! https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DQLKFN4H I did not notice that I had been cheated, until it was too…
It was a cold but sunny day today. So I decided to take my “full spectrum” converted camera up to Portsdown Hill for some infrared snaps. I thought it might also be interesting to try it on my 120 year old Bausch & Lomb + Beck 101.6mm lens. Whilst this is not a sharp lens,…
Fora all over the worldwide web are buzzing that Windows 10 reached end of life, c/w cries of “…but, but, my computer won’t run Windows 11“. Whatever shall we do? These fora offer various solutions, almost all involving using more proprietary products of the same large foreign IT corporation that caused this problem in the…
End of year tends to make one reflect, and look back over the last year or so. As I did so, my “inner six-year-old’s” mind wandered onto the subject of my favourite camera lens. Problem is that I kinda like them all and I’ve had a lot of fun with them. My favourite lens is…
I am slowly becoming accustomed to infrared photography, with the “full spectrum” Lumix µ4/3 camera that by Protech Photographic recently converted for me. I’m finding that near-infrared images can make even very boring ugly things look quite interesting. So I decided to pop out to what is generally reckoned to be the ugliest of Havant’s…
Well today is Boxing day, and the sun just managed to struggle its way out of the clouds around 14:00. As luck would have it, my variable infrared filter actually arrived from Shenzen late Christmas eve. So, following on from my early IR adventures on Christmas Eve, I thought I’d pop out to our backyard…
It’s Christmas Eve and my old Lumix DMC-GH2 has just been delivered back, Special Delivery, following its conversion to “full spectrum”, by Protech Photographic in Crowborough. Infrared photography is something I have wanted to do for many years. So this year, as a sort of “Christmas present to self”, I decided to have one of…
On one of the photographic fora to which I belong, there seems something of a panic with regard to AI photography taking over the likes of Instagram, Facebook et al. Well, what does or doesn’t get posted to foreign antisocial media websites is a matter of total indifference to me. And even on sites…
These are some rather useful additional applications or features that are not currently in the Debian repositories. However I find them very useful and I don’t consider a full installation complete without them. It is the final part of our three part “Moving to Debian” series. Moving to Debian series… Dedicated to my friends and…
Now here’s something you can’t do with Microsoft Windows – install a fully loaded Debian 13 system in a single command. In this article we are going to install a whole shedload of applications all at once with a single shell command – albeit quite a long one! This is a quick and easy way…
I don’t have a TV licence – I don’t intend to buy one either. We have a nice big roof mounted TV aerial which I have repurposed for much better things. For a start, it receives FM and DAB radio perfectly adequately. We’re only a 35 km crow’s flight from the hefty Rowridge VHF transmitter….
Skip preamble and launch Units Converter applet Another GarfNet software project snatched from the grave, this is a complete rebuild of the original GarfNet Unit Converter. The main feature of the new GarfNet converter applet is that it is bi directional. Whatever “Quantity:” box you use, the conversion will automagically appear in the other box….
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 PCs 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 DoF calculator applet now. Welcome to the latest rework of the GarfNet Depth of Field Calculator. It is based on quite an old JavaScript application that appeared on the web back in the mid 1990s. I rewrote and extended it in the mid 2000’s. Consequently, it was looking rather old and…
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…
How do I change my Google password is another of those frequently asked questions that customers regularly ask me. It’s one of those “easy when you know how” things. But it is rather nested away amongst all Googles various other settings. So here’s how to do it… Open a browser and go to: https://accounts.google.com. Log in…
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…
“Shortwave radio recordings” is a small collection of recordings of various HF and VHF transmissions. These have been hanging around since I recorded them using my Icom IC-R20 radio scanner back in the mid-late noughties. I’m not sure how much interest these will be to other people. But considering Garfnet’s 30th anniversary is only just…
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…
I rather like Micro Four Thirds. Currently I have three µ4/3 bodies and a collection of both dedicated AF (autofocus) and adapted vintage MF (manual focus) lenses. Trouble with µ4/3 is that whilst we are very well catered-for in terms of long lenses, there’s a bit of a vacuum in shorter ones. So I decided…
