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NZ Tekonverse

  • Escaping The Skylake 14nm Intel Architecture Circus

    Once upon a time, there was the Intel Skylake CPU architecture. Skylake was introduced in 2015 for the sixth generation of the Intel Core CPU. Using the Intel tick-tock cycle, it was the tock component, the tick being its predecessor Broadwell. Broadwell introduced the 14nm process node to the Core architecture and after Skylake, there…

  • StarTech 8U Open Rack

    Anyone who has worked for any length of time in the fields of professional computing or audio is familiar with the concept of equipment racking. The ubiquitous and very common 19″ (48.25 cm) equipment racks used in these fields and many others (in the computing realm, network patch panels as well as servers are often…

  • REVIEW: Ryobi OB18150 150VA 240V One+ Power Inverter

    One of the useful developments in battery operated power tool systems of recent years is that manufacturers have woken up to the merits of having a universal battery system that powers a large range of different tools, ranging from power tools for the workshop to garden tools and even some general domestic devices for home…

  • Setting up a second swap partition for Linux [2]

    In the first post of this series several years ago, I wrote on how to add a second swap partition to increase the size of the swap space, by adding a second swap entry to the fstab file. This is very much the simplest way of increasing the swap space by using multiple disks, if…

  • Hibernation fails with Kubuntu 20/22 on HP computers if Secure Boot is enabled.

    Some months back I did write about how to enable hibernation in Kubuntu as it is not enabled by default like it is in Debian. I have particularly noted that this is an issue on computers made by HP in that following the given instructions still does not make hibernation available in some HP manufactured…

  • Gimp 2.99.12 beta fails to fix major undo bug from 2.99.10

    Currently, the Gimp project is developing a new release, 3.0. The beta version is being produced as version 2.99 with nightly releases having odd subversions e.g. 2.99.1, 2.99.3 etc and the production releases having even subversions e.g. 2.99.0, 2.99.2 etc. The project has now released version 2.99.12. However, a major bug in the undo function…

  • HPM Countdown Timers

    I have used various types of countdown timer for my heaters for years. They ensure the heater will be turned off automatically after a set period, usually two hours, so as not to waste power. HPM used to sell specific mechanical countdown timers, and I had several of these. Unfortunately they all stopped working after…

  • Bye Bye Debian

    Well since writing about steps in migrating to Kubuntu from Debian I have pushed ahead and migrated practically everything so now it is only a spare or two that is still running Debian. This is quite a step forward as I have previously regarded Debian as being the distribution of choice for someone like me.…

  • Flatpak rollback to previous version of Gimp Beta

    I did blog this before, but I have this time around had a successful instance of using this, because in this instance the application concerned did have sufficient commits available to roll back a point release. This example is the beta edition of Gimp, which I have been testing on a computer for some months.…

  • Upgrade from Debian/KDE to Kubuntu

    So I have upgraded one of my systems from Debian bookworm to Kubuntu 20.04, this system was freezing a lot on bookworm so it is better to have something more stable/reliable. The other bookworm system has also been migrated to Kubuntu. Current plans are to use the built-in upgrader to take it up to 22.04…