Journal
This area is reserved for my occasional ramblings and musings.
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Kings Mill, smock windmill, Shipley, in infrared
I visited the recently rewilded Knepp estate earlier today. Consequently I found myself within 1500 metres or so of Shipley, the location of the infamous Kings Mill. Not to be confused with Kings Mill in Castle Donnington, some 200 km or so north-west of here, this King’s Mill (aka Vincent’s Mill) is a smock windmill…
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Digital pictures | General | Journal | Nature | Photography | Travelogue
Storks at Knepp
Today is my wife’s wedding anniversary 🙂 and she has a bit of a penchant for white storks. I think it is a Central European obsession. Anyway, she said we should go visit the white storks at the recently rewilded 1416 hectare Knepp Estate in West Sussex. So I packed my little Lumix DMC-GX7 camera…
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Cobden bridge by Infrared
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…
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Debian | Digital pictures | Electronics | Equipment | General | Journal | Linux | Photography
A modular Debian GNU/Linux digital camera. Feasible or farcical?
Following on from a discussion on a photographic forum who which I belong, an old hobby horse of mine raised its head again. Namely the possibility of building one’s own Debian GNU/Linux digital camera, using Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer, or similar, and one of the camera modules that’s available for it. Or indeed some…
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Zim desktop wiki
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…
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General | Journal | Review | Technology
Lebara, what a con
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…
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Digital pictures | Equipment | General | Infrared pictures | Journal | Photography | Technology | Travelogue
From Portsdown Hill in Infrared
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,…
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United States invades Venezuela
Seems this time it’s Venezuela’s turn to have its infrastructure destroyed and its citizens blown to pieces. Trump claims it’s to stem a drug problem and that President Nicholas Maduro wasn’t fairly elected. Much of the world thinks United States’ Invasion of Venezuela is mostly to satisfy the United States’ insatiable appetite for other people’s…
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Debian | General | Journal | Linux | Technology
My computer won’t run Windows 11
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…
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Digital pictures | Equipment | General | Journal | Photography | Retrospective | Studio Photography | Technology
My favourite old lens
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…
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Harts Farm Way in infrared
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…
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Debian | Digital pictures | Equipment | General | Infrared pictures | Journal | Linux | Photography | Technology
More infrared photography
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…
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Merry Christmas 2025
Well, there goes another year – whizzed past even faster than the last one. Not much else has changed. AI is still over-hyped and yet remarkably lacking in any actual intelligence. Donald Trump is still alive. Still, on the bright side, I have another nice new toy – well a modification to an old toy,…
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Infrared with a fairly decent camera
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…
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AI pictures | General | Journal | Linux | Review | Site Blog | Technology
AI still not all that bright – a whole year later
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…
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Infrared retrospective
I just sent a spare µ4/3 camera body off to Protech Photographic in Crowborough to have it converted to “full spectrum” for Infrared work. Meantime, I thought it might be fun to go back over some of my earlier IR stuff, captured off somewhat lesser cameras. My earliest adventures into IR date way back to…
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Digital pictures | General | Hungary | Journal | Photography | Travelogue
Pécsi Sörfőzde – Pécs beer factory
I found myself in my wife’s old hometown of Pécs, a small university city and former Roman settlement about 200 km south of the Hungarian capital Budapest. She kindly organised a visit to the Pécsi Sörfőzde or the “Pécs Beer Factory”. This is the largest brewery in the Transdanubian region of Hungary. It also has…
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Debian | Journal | Linux | Technology
Additional packages to enhance your Debian (or Ubuntu) installation.
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…
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A fully loaded Debian 13 system
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…
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My Huldra 500mL tankard
Regular readers will know I’m quite a Tandberg fan – especially arguably Vebjørn Tandberg’s greatest works, the Huldra series. Well Tandberg commissioned pewter maker Haugrud to produce several commemorative pewter products to celebrate its products. I’ve had a set of the 50mL whisky tots for years. My late father was given them when he ran…
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Using my redundant TV aerial for DAB and FM radio
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….
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About GarfNet | Electronics | Freebie | General | Journal | Linux | Radio | Technology | Web Application
GarfNet Unit Converter applet
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….
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Install Debian 13
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…
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About GarfNet | Equipment | Freebie | General | Journal | Linux | Photography | Site Blog | Studio Photography | Technology | Web Application
GarfNet DoF Calculator
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…
