Easter display
A little thing like Covid was not going to prevent my Zsuzsi creating one of her Easter displays. We photographed the 2020 edition in the garden. Related Images:
Journal
This area is reserved for my occasional ramblings and musings.
Not a plane in the sky
It’s a beautiful spring day here in south east Hampshire. And it’s dead quiet thanks to the Coronavirus lockdown. And the northern sky that normally liberally criss-crossed with vapour trails is a perfect clear sky blue, with no aircraft within 50 km or more. Related Images:
Roamer Ten
I was 12 years old when I built my first multi-band shortwave radio – a Radio Exchange Roamer Ten kit – as pictured above. After many nights surreptitiously listening to it hidden under the bedclothes so my mum never found out, I soon realised just how insular and generally pisspoor most our media is in…
Sony ICF2001
The lovely Alexa Allure wearing a cheongsam dress and listening to the world on a 1981 vintage Sony ICF 2001 multiband receiver. Back in the day, Sony used to be one of the market leaders in shortwave radios. Its big selling feature was the continuous AM band that covered all the standard LF, MF and…
Working from home during the current crisis
Seems a lot of people are struggling working from home rather than going into the office. Some are suggesting that a daily routine helps them. Personally, I don’t really have a daily routine – providing I can start the day with a strong black coffee and have my daily “number two’s”, then I’m sorted. 🙂…
First day of National Lockdown
So here we are, first day of national lockdown here in the UK. How are things in your part of the world? Round here (South East Hampshire) things seem eerily quiet this morning. Our street is a sleepy little cul-de-sac and pretty quiet even at busy times. But we are 300 metres from the main…
Coronavirus misinformation
Evil bastards exploit crisis in order to turn a fast buck Seems Facebook does not have a monopoly on coronavirus misinformation. Just checked a honeypot email account I keep active just to see what spam is currently doing the rounds. In addition to the usual plethora of luscious babes who are dying to have sex…
General | Journal | Nature | Technology
Shattaf – a healthy solution to the toilet roll shortage
Left: complete installation including toilet, cistern, isolating valve hose, mounting bracket and the shattaf itself. Right: Close-up of shattaf. It is quite small, measuring approximately 11 cm long and about 6 cm front-to-back. As the coronavirus crisis deepens, seems we also have the deeply undignified spectacle of fully grown adults publicly fighting each other as…
Covid 19 “Honest Government Ad”
They say “many a true word spoken in jest“. This seems particularly applicable to this short “honest government” video produced by Australia’s JuiceMedia… Background to the video JuiceMedia’s “Honest Government Ad” started life as satire. But its probably the most truthful representation where we are right now with COVID-19. This associated video podcast explains its…
Reliable COVID-19 information
The World Health Organization is arguably one of the planet’s foremost sources of accurate medical information. I have admired WHO for many years and its site is always worth a visit, even when there isn’t a global public health crisis. But its Daily Situation Reports are superb. Lots of information presented in a clear and…
Journal | Linux | Photography
Batch processing in GIMP
In my early days of using GNU/Linux full time, we had an application called Gwenview. It was, and still is an excellent thumbnail viewer. But back then it also used to have an excellent set of plugins called KIPI. Sadly the really useful ones such as resizing and changing format completely disappeared when KDE 5…
Merry Christmas 2019
Where’s Boris? By Zsuzsanna Dora Majlati Related Images:
Digital pictures | Journal | Lighting | Photography | Studio | Technology
Safer modelling lights for Chinese flash head units
An interesting question came up a little while back on one of the photography fora to which I belong “I’d be interested in knowing how you swapped the halogen bulbs for LEDs because I have the same problem and as you say those bulbs are hotter than hell, makes using modelling lights with a grid…
Roamer Ten lit by laser gobo
I recently treated myself to a laser gobo. The patterns it makes remind me of the speaker grille on my old Roamer Ten kit radio. So I thought it might be interesting to combine the two and capture a few snaps. Related Images:
Laser gobo
Just bought an RGB laser gobo cheap on eBay. So I thought I’d have a little fun with it around the studio and garden. Related Images:
Digital pictures | General | Journal | Nature | Photography
Rescuing a starling trapped in our bird feeder
This morning I heard a strange commotion outside the studio window, From the corner of my eye, I could see that the transparent bird feeder appeared to be moving on its own. On close inspection I discovered that the incredibly boisterous and greedy young starlings we have round here had smashed the lid off the…
BREAKING: Brexit voters to be to pay extra “Brexit Tax” to pay for leaving the EU
It appeared on the AP this morning and hasn’t hit the mainstream news yet, but the EU has just announced that ongoing Brexit negotiations have cost in excess of €1,500,000,000. Brussels has decided that the fairest way to recuperate this money is to tax those who actually voted for it. The current proposal is that…
Digital pictures | General | Journal | Nature | Photography
Strange cloud
A strange cloud formation in the northern sky round the back of our house. Related Images:
Digital pictures | Electronics | Journal | Linux | Photography | Technology | Zoneminder
Linux server builds
I had a bit of interest in my Linux media servers recently. In fact I recently completed four Linux media or Zoneminder builds. Here are a few snaps… The machines are based on basic Novatech business PC’s. Nothing special. The media server versions have KDE Neon GNU/Linux. This is a very attractive KDE based desktop…
Journal | Linux | Photography | Technology | Windows
What is a WebP image file, and how do I open one?
Seems there is quite a lot of buzz about a “new” image format called “WebP” that is seeing increasing use on-line recently. Although it is attributed to Google, WebP was not strictly a Google invention. It was originally developed by On2 of New York as part of its VP* series “Truemotion” video codecs. Google acquired…
About GarfNet | FAQ | Journal | Linux | Site Blog
Joomla closedown
As you may have noticed, quite a lot has changed here on Garfnet over the last few weeks. Biggest change of all is the decision to dump Joomla as our main CMS in favour of WordPress. I will go into more detail about the decision in another post. Suffice it to say that WordPress is…
Welcome to the New Look GarfNet
Welcome to Garfnet. This site is currently undergoing a fairly major re-design and upgrade and some parts currently don’t work as well as they should. Sorry about that. I’m working on it as fast as I can.
Merry Christmas 2018
These splendid-looking geese are residents at the Weald and Down Open Air Museum, West Sussex, England.
Temporary Shutdown
Due to a major upgrade to this site, it may be necessary to take GarfNet off line for a while. The business part of Garfnet is already handled by deoss.com, so customers will not be affected. It may take some time to move/update all the legacy material here. Some projects may never reappear. However, we…
Digital pictures | General | Journal | Photography | Studio
Zsuzsi’s Easter display
Zsuzsi’s Easter display through wacky 60’s filters. I just bought a set of these things cheap on eBay and wanted to try them out… Related Images: