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This area is reserved for my occasional ramblings  and musings.

Issues upgrading to KDE Plasma 6 from Plasma 5 -SOLVED!
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Issues upgrading to KDE Plasma 6 from Plasma 5 -SOLVED!

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…

Ruffle to the rescue for Macromedia Flash
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Ruffle to the rescue for Macromedia Flash

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…

Tux Racer soundtrack
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Tux Racer soundtrack

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…

Icom IC-R20 header image
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Shortwave radio recordings

“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…

How to upgrade Debian 12 (Bookworm) to Debian 13 (Trixie)
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How to upgrade Debian 12 (Bookworm) to Debian 13 (Trixie)

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…

BBC stations database file for Advanced Radio Player widget for KDE Plasma desktop
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BBC stations database file for Advanced Radio Player widget for KDE Plasma desktop

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…

More Bees
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More Bees

Took some more time out to grab some more snaps of the bumblebees working the lavender today. Like the snaps I took yesterday, I used  my “gardening lens” – a rather battered 90mm f/2.5 Tamron prime macro between f/8 and f/11, attached to my  Lumix DMC GX7 µ4/3 mirrorless interchangeable lens camera.  Weird as it…

Managing a large image library with Piwigo
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Managing a large image library with Piwigo

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…

Vegetables
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Vegetables

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…

Perplexity logo
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Perplexity

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…

Emulating Tungsten lighting with RGB+CCT
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Emulating Tungsten lighting with RGB+CCT

Question appeared on a forum to which I belong with regard to emulating tungsten lighting with RGB+CCT. To find out, I fitted a good old fashioned Philips “Photocrescenta” incandescent bulb and a Mi-Light FUT-105 LED into a double E27 double bulb holder and mounted the assembly on a standard studio boom arm. The Mi-Light FUT…

Tor Logo
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Installing Tor Browser and accessing onion sites

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…

A cameraless photography story for St Valentine’s Day…
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A cameraless photography story for St Valentine’s Day…

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…

New BBC internet radio streams 2025
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New BBC internet radio streams 2025

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,…

BBC-broken
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BBC internet radio streams broken again!

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…

Merry Christmas 2024
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Merry Christmas 2024

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…

British Government’s open consultation on copyright and artificial intelligence
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British Government’s open consultation on copyright and artificial intelligence

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…

Very Lidl help
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Very Lidl help

I had a pleasant surprise today, when I took delivery of a Lidl’s own-brand “Parkside” laser level, sent as a Christmas gift from my mother-in-law and sister-in-law in Hungary. Unfortunately the user manual is in Hungarian, Slovakian, Czech and German. Not English. “No problem,” I thought. “I’ll get onto Lidl and request an English language…

New darktable is out today
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New darktable is out today

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…

Problems with KDE Plasma 6 on Debian Trixie
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Problems with KDE Plasma 6 on Debian Trixie

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,…

Unflattering AI images of Donald Trump
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Unflattering AI images of Donald Trump

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…