Category: NZTekonverse -> Hardware

  • Escaping Google’s walled garden on handhelds [1]: Intro

    I’ve owned smartphones since 2012 when I was given one as part of a new employment role. It (HTC) was running Windows Phone 7. It was followed by a couple of Nokias running Windows Phone 8 (the later one since updated to 10) and then a low-end Motorola Moto E running Android 4. The next…

  • Networking / Wireless with Debian LXQt

    There are some issues possible with LXQt if you have Wifi because of limitations in the current Buster install. Some of these may be resolved by the time Buster is released…but not all, for reasons explained below. First issue for Wifi is if the drivers are non-free, as is fairly likely. You’ll notice this at…

  • Computing resources optimisation [2G]: Reinstall serverpc and mediapc

    As we know when I upgraded everything last month I just put the disks back in with the new boards and just booted everything up and they just ran. I didn’t reinstall either of the two new ones that I currently have running, serverpc and mediapc. However as neither of these computers is able to…

  • Computing resources optimisation [2F]: Managing Disk Space Usage

    The completion of this computer upgrade project is close to finished. I do have to complete mounting the fourth computer, which is inching along at a glacial pace at the moment, and various small tasks. One of the important ones is that mainpc’s disks which have a total capacity of 1.8 TiB or 2 TB…

  • Raspberry Pi [4]: Raspberry Pi vs Chromecast

    I last wrote about my Raspberry Pi back in July, and since then it hasn’t been used. I decided against using it to play videos because it had some trouble playing some of the ones in my collection. At this point I went back to playback from a computer, and subsequently pc4 was used for…

  • Computing resources optimisation [2D]

    I am going ahead with this so I have been busy over the last few days installing and removing things around the place. To date I have installed the old mediapc chassis with a new board, CPU and RAM, GA-B250M-D3H with Kaby Lake Pentium G4560, and moving all three disks across from serverpc. It was…

  • Linux video driver issues

    One of the challenges with Linux is that bug fixes can be slow to be developed and there can be issues when libraries are updated in a component of a distro in a different time cycle from other parts and therefore break software. For example, in Qgis there is a version of it that depends…

  • Computing Resources Optimisation [2C]

    Still looking at this, really just fine tuning expectations / specs. Last time I talked about task separation. Running stuff on mediapc is still a test case really. What has turned out to be important however is limitations on mediapc caused by it having an old CPU that is slow to decode some video formats.…

  • Scanning with Linux

    As we all know, I have gradually moved lots of things I do from Windows to Linux over time, but still have a computer running the Home edition of Windows 10. One of the few things that still runs on Windows 10 is my Epson Perfection V200 Photo scanner. Well it did work well on…

  • Computing resources optimisation [2B]

    Last time I wrote a post in this series it was looking at upgrading some of the hardware that I have. This time it is looking at task separation, or in another way, using mediapc to do some stuff like I have looked at previously. This keeps coming up because I have four computers and…