These are a few general observations that might be of interest to some people.
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 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 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…
Seems as if it were only the day before yesterday, but it is in fact thirty years to the day since GarfNet had its own domain. Granted, this represents a somewhat trivial achievement on the overall scheme of things. Frankly never I actually achieved all the things I hoped I would with GarfNet. Like it…
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…
My wife took a late-evening home delivery from our local supermarket this evening. Usually when The Boss is in “tidying-up” mode, I find it best to make myself scarce. I was slightly puzzled way it was taking her so long to pack stuff away . So I ventured out of my studio and went to…
Wishing you a very merry peaceful Christmas, followed by a happy, successful New Year. Creating this year’s card This year we wanted to do something a little different. So we decided to deploy Stable Diffusion open source artificial intelligence to generate the main image. Unfortunately AI is not good at drawing signs. So that was…
Seems the British Government has set up an open consultation on copyright and artificial intelligence. It aims to discuss with the public how artwork stored on cloud servers, or processed using cloud-based software should be treated with regard to being used to teach AI (artificial intelligence) machines. Essentially the Government offers three possible choices:- Do…
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…
For reasons I will never understand, it seems the United States has just re-elected 34-times convicted criminal and adjudicated rapist Donald J Trump as its president. As a Brit, sadly there is nothing I can do about this. All I can offer the world is a few futile acts of defiance, whilst mercilessly ridiculing jumped-up…
One of the most annoying features on standard SD cards is the write protect tab. This tab often seems to get caught and pushed into the “read only” position when one inserts an SD card into a card reader or camera. Thus rendering the card “read only”. It seems a particular issue with the slots…
Seems Trump’s re-election plans suffered a bit of a ding today. Well I guess it must come as a shock when senior members of your own party publicly announce their intention to vote for the other side. But Dick Cheney – yes that Dick Cheney – Lord Sith himself has endorsed Kamala Harris rather than…
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…
Tories have just been well and truly trounced in the UK. Labour has officially won the 2024 UK General Election. Results still coming in but it’s set to be an absolute landslide… https://www.theguardian.Com/politics/live/2024/jul/04/general-election-2024-uk-live-labour-tories-starmer-sunak-results-exit-poll Not so much that Labour won, than the Tories lost. Granted, this time it was more about people voting out the Tories,…
Happy July 4 to all our American friends, celebrating the fact their ancestors had the good sense to rid themselves of our awful Royal Family. Here in the UK, it’s General Election time again. For some strange reason, it was called for 2024-07-04. Hopefully the results of this election should be cause for celebration here…
I was pleased to note that our collared doves have returned after several year’s absence. Of course I have no way of knowing if they are the same collared doves. But whoever they are, I’m rather fond of them and delighted to see them back in the garden again.
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…
Today I decided to make my own affordable detachable camera and equipment lanyard straps. I used some cheap generic “Peak Design compatible” buckles, bought direct from China via Ali Express, together with some generic anchors from the same source. I also used some 25mm nylon webbing I’ve had kicking round for ages. Granted, perhaps bright…
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…
Driving through the West Sussex countryside on my way back Chichester, I spotted this tiny stone Chapel, literally right in the middle of nowhere. The board outside read St Mary’s Church Sennicotts. But the odd thing is there is no other building near. Nearest building I could see was about 400 metres away. The church’s…
