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Category: NZTekonverse -> Hardware

  • Home Theatre PC and all that…[1]

    A few years ago I purchased a Mini-ITX chassis and installed a Gigabyte board with integrated CPU in it. This was supposed to get me something like a HTPC in a compact form factor that could fit in a small space next to a TV. However that board turned out to be too low powered…

  • Manually specifying network interface parameters on Debian

    I have two computers I use regularly which have two (or with a Vodem, three) network adapters. The reason for this is at present I have two different internet connections I use regularly. One is unlimited data but has certain restrictions on it, the second is unrestricted but has a data cap. I hope to…

  • Galaxy A12: After Six Weeks

    So I have owned this phone now for six weeks. It has been one of the very few times I have bought a phone that was a completely new model, but it was offered on special at just the right time when I needed to replace my existing phone and had the right combination of…

  • PineTab, PinePhone, PineBook

    Pine is a platform of multiple low cost devices, starting with a range of single board computers (things the size and functional level of a Raspberry Pi and in a similar sub-$100 price bracket), which has extended into a laptop, phone and tablet in the last couple of years. The distinguishing factor in the case…

  • How To Get A Very Cheap “Landline” Phone Over The Internet

    These days a lot of people are less inclined to have a traditional “landline” phone as Spark will still charge around $30-40 a month to keep providing the service which may be used relatively infrequently. As Chorus are planning to eventually turn off their old copper network in favour of fibre, everyone will sooner or…

  • General computing update – week 34, 2020.

     Since writing early July about about the need to replace the disks in mainpc I have finally progressed towards this stage by purchasing the first of two disks. As noted in the earlier post, this was prompted by an I/O failure of one of the disks that resulted in it dropping out of the RAID…

  • General update week 30, 2020

    I wrote about a lot of fun getting a system to work with static IP addressing (it is running Debian 10 with LXQt). Since it was able to be made to statically configure its IP with no issues, I configured the other Debian10-LXQt system with a static configuration also. The second computer only has one…

  • Building a Linux PC for under $1000 (TechRepublic)

    TechRepublic have an interesting article on building a great Linux PC for under $1000. Although it’s clear the article refers to US dollars, which in price terms is usually lower, the prices are mostly comparable with what we pay in NZ.  My last couple of build experiences were different. I built a low cost system…

  • Reinstall KDE system with LXQt [3]

    Reinstall KDE system with LXQt [3]

    This is the third article in a series about problems with KDE leading to a reinstallation with LXQt. Both running on top of Debian 10. The computer concerned is running two NICs because it needs to access both networks that I have here. I have the main one based on a corporate wireless link from…

  • Reinstall KDE system with LXQt [2]; KDE network and display configuration extremely difficult with numerous bugs

    As related yesterday I found various issues with KDE on a computer and decided to reinstall Debian 10 with LXQt as the user interface. After completing the installation I attempted to use ConnMan, which is the network configuration manager that comes with LXQt on Debian, to do a manual configuration of the 1.x network adapter…