I am a massive GNU/Linux fan. I switched to GNU/Linux back in 2007 following Microsoft’s Vista fiasco. Never looked back. Today, all my workstations and server run GNU/Linux. Mostly Debian these days, or some derivative thereof.
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
