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.
I had a studio photoshoot booked for last weekend. Unfortunately, my model had to cancel due to ill health. It was too late to book another model. So 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…
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, complete with clickable URL’s – well, around 61 of…
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…
While the Clownstrike fiasco rumbles-on in the West, and people in our particular part of the planet can’t even purchase a train ticket, it seems both Russia and China are almost completely unaffected. Editor’s note 2024-08-17: Seems we’re not the only site referring to Cloudstrike as “Clownstrike”. Crowdstrike has issued several takedown notices to a…
Today our planet is suffering what appears to be Microsoft’s biggest ever outage. Seems the culprit is a piece of buggy “security” software provided by a company called Crowdstrike. Or is that Clownstrike? It sends Microsoft Windows computers into a never-ending boot loop, from which users cannot escape, without going into “safe mode” and removing…
If like me, you are tired of having your screen cluttered full of stupid ads, c/w the general enshittification of the Internet by commercial interests, then you may wish to try /etc/hosts file “hostile server blocking”. It’s free and no additional software is needed. This is because your /etc/hosts file part of your computer’s TCP/IP…
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…
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…
EDITORS NOTE 2025-01-22. BBC changed its streams, yet again. Consequently, most of the BBC of the streams on this page no longer work. New streams that do actually work can be found at:- Internet radio player URLs Following the fiasco at the end of last week, when the BBC killed all its HLS internet radio…
Editor’s note: a list of new BBC AAC HLS internet ratio streams can be found here. Over the last few hours, some new BBC streams have appeared. At the moment I don’t know whether these are official BBC streams or if some public-spirited person is re-streaming. Though I’m pretty sure the ones coming from the…
Editor’s note: a list of new BBC AAC HLS internet ratio streams can be found here. Seems the BBC has decided to make all its AAC HLS streams only available to wealthy people who have Apple or similar devices. And the good old-fashioned “shoutcast” MP3 streams have gone altogether. Seems that if you can afford…
I don’t quite know how I managed it but my personal/business dataset has now grown to around 17 Terrabytes. Most of it is spread across multiple smaller disks. This is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. In fact, we are decommissioning our 4TB drives. This is partly because they are well beyond recommended end of life,…
We’re busy replacing a customer’s ageing Sonos distributed sound system with a Linux Media Server (c/w SAMBA for remaining Sonos kit) c/w these tiny Linux-powered SBCs (single board commuters) as replacements. Granted, this is merely a prototype. This unit us based upon a Raspberry pi 4B c/w 8GiB RAM, a capacitative touchscreen and an external…
Due to its construction, ours is quite a difficult house for “whole house Wi-Fi” due to its solid internal dividing walls, downstairs and upstairs. In fact, my first DIY job when we moved in here, back in 2012, was to run Cat 5e Ethernet cables to every room that we were likely to use a…
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) format for images has served us well for nearly three decades. But is is essentially a 1990’s format. Today we have better ways of compressing images. The most popular currently is Google’s WEBP (Web Picture) Format. Many modern websites use WebP as its default format for uploaded images that it…
A few folks have asked me what I use to keep our various networking and internet connectivity kit neat and tidy, yet reasonably service friendly. Well, I have to admit that it was rather a muddle for a many years. That was until I decided to make a simple multistorey stainless steel router rack. Moreover,…
“I want to move to Linux, so where do I start?” or variants thereof, is one of those frequently asked questions that often land in my in-box and on various fora. Such questions usually come from disgruntled Microsoft Windows users who are fed up with the cost, the privacy breaches, the malware infections and the…
This is a remake of an earlier video, driving through the Hungarian M6 / E73 Tunnels, with the soundtrack written by Rob Weller.
For reasons I won’t bore you with now, my wife and I need to be rather careful regarding respiratory infections. I did my last model shoot 2020-03-08, shut everything down pro tem due to COVID. Amongst other projects, I used the time-out to undertake a fairly major refurbishment of my studio. I wanted to get…
Some interesting questions arose recently on a forum to which I belong. Members were comparing conventional broadcast TV with on-line video sites such as Youtube, and asking… What are people watching on YouTube? Are they watching new material ? Or are they watching old repeats that are be being shown in breach of copyright? Are…
One of the problems with modern life is the plethora of plug-in mains adaptors or “wall warts” as they call them on the other side of “The Pond”. Aside from the mess of wires, and the fact that often they are plugged into multi-gang power sockets an heaped on top of one another, building up…
I belong to several online photography fora. One of the questions that repeatedly pops up is “what image editing software do you use?” and “what alternatives are there to Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom?” In this article, I hope to demonstrate that high quality image processing is perfectly possible using FOSS (free open source software). I will also…
