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.
This article came about as the result of a support call. I thought I would post it in case it were helpful to other people Personally I don’t use Google calendar at all. I have a certain aversion to giving a detailed list of my daily activities to a foreign corporation in a foreign jurisdiction….
I have always rather enjoyed plugging test equipment into a PC and capturing the readings. Way back in my early days of using GNU/Linux I had a lot of fun with a program called QtDMM. I still have my old £15 bargain-bin Tenma 72-6870 which worked almost flawlessly with QtDMM on Ubuntu, back in 2008….
Firefox running in Debian with KDE Desktop has a rather annoying bug, where it won’t open geo URI links using OSM (OpenStreetMap). This was doubly annoying for me because I have taken a lot of care to include geo URI links in this site recently. Moreover, OSM is by far my preferred mapping service. Anyway,…
I just had quite a busy couple of weeks updating all the tables in our “Reference Tables” section. This is the part of the site where we put all the boring but occasionally useful stuff, such as battery sizes, radio frequencies, internet radio streams and an assortment of other tabulated data that comes in handy…
If you live in the UK and you want decent speed at an affordable price, then you need to establish whether FttP (Fibre to the Premises) is available to your property yet? It’s being rolled out across the country right now. Almost 10 years later than former prime minister Tony Blair said it would. But…
Went to try to photograph today’s solar eclipse. I have to say I’m not 100% happy with the results. The mix of a somewhat unsophisticated lens, and a crude homemade filter resulted in lots of unwanted artefacts on the images. I cleaned up the worst ones in GIMP, but everything else is pretty much SooC…
As temperatures in Washington DC reach record highs in excess of 40°C, seven loyal Trump supporters have been hospitalised, due to the excessive heat. Of course, no one can possibly blame the US president’s high-quality, safe, and long-lasting construction projects for any this. It’s not the president’s job to make sure these plebs are safe….
[Jump to gallery | script] These are some almost SooC images BUT cropped square AND with left and right images swapped AND “alignment circles” at the bottom. These 3D square stereograms were captured with my recently constructed stereo camera module. This is part of an ongoing project to create a modular GNU/Linux digital camera system…
[Jump to Gallery] As part of my embryonic GNU/Linux digital camera project, I recently built a 3D camera module. Basically its a ELP board, in an aluminium 1590A type stomp box with a short internal USB3 extension lead. This is a small collection of processed images I created while I was testing my 3D camera…
[Jump to gallery | scripts] This article documents my first experiments in producing red-cyan anaglyphs. The gallery contains of four near-identical 3D anaglyphs with varying amounts of X & Y offset to compensate for the fact that the cameras on the board don’t quite point in the same direction. One can create anaglyphs in GIMP….
[Jump to gallery | script] These are some almost SooC images BUT with left and right images swapped AND “alignment circles” at the bottom. They were captured with my recently constructed stereo camera module. This is part of an ongoing project to create a modular GNU/Linux digital camera system using easily available generic components. Although…
[Jump to gallery | script] These are some almost SooC images BUT with left and right images swapped. They were captured with my recently constructed stereo camera module. This is part of an ongoing project to create a modular GNU/Linux digital camera system using easily available generic components. Although the images themselves are unedited, the…
[Jump to gallery | script to add exif] These are some unedited 3D SooC (straight out of camera) 1600 x 1200 pixel stereo pairs (3200 x 1200 pixel overall) from my recently constructed stereo camera module. This is part of an ongoing project to create a modular GNU/Linux digital camera system using easily available generic…
Found myself near Cobden bridge, in Southampton, armed with my recently converted , “full spectrum” Lumix DMC-GH2 Micro Four Thirds camera. This was converted just before Christmas 2025 by Protech Photographic in Crowborough. So I thought I would capture some images of Cobden bridge by Infrared… Cobden bridge is a busy road and pedestrian bridge…
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 software 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…
