converser.nz

NZ Tekonverse

  • Power Tools: Best brand of home power tools?

    If you are working at the cheap end of power tools there are a few brands to choose from. I have bought Ryobi stuff a few times, weedeaters have been good, also a good 1200 watt electric drill (a knockoff of a Bosch or Hitachi drill) with variable speed, hammer, 2 speeds, reverse etc. I…

  • Python Scripting: Planned Scripting Projects Update

    Back in February this year I set out a list of planned scripting projects following my acquisition of Python programming skills. The sequence of planned or implemented projects to date is: NZ Rail Maps project script to copy a set of GIS raster layer files based on reading a QLR file produced by Qgis. Currently…

  • OverGrive seems to work again…for now.

    OverGrive is a Google Drive client for Linux. It has been around for several years. I used (and licensed) an earlier version of the product, which I was forced to stop using last year because it stopped working (this quite often happens when Google updates their API to a new version which requires software changes).…

  • Red/green/white handheld signalling lamp

    Anyone who is associated with rail heritage knows that on the professional railways in New Zealand, train crews used hand held signalling lamps that could produce red, green and white light, for use when shunting a train. The older style lamps of this type worked with a mechanical rotating filter holder to move red and…

  • Rsync Backup System [4]: Linux File and Directory Security Using ACLs

    As per our series on Rsync backups, we desire to use a different user from the one that owns the home directory in order to ensure they have only the permissions they need when logging in remotely. At this point whilst by default the backup user could access many things on the computer, there were…

  • Arlec Plug In Heater Controls [2]

    In my previous post in this series I described the PC900 2 hour plugin countdown timer which Bunnings have been selling for some time. The oddity of this product is that it is described on the packaging as having “adjustable switching increments”. This is a rather clumsy phrase more worthy of adjustable 24 hour timers…

  • Rsync Backup System [3]: Using Rsync For Full Backup

    So last time we talked about how to set up a single disk with ZFS to use compression. Having got our backup disks sorted, the next step is to work out how to use rsync to do the actual backups. rsync is written by the same people that devised samba and is a very powerful…

  • HOWTO: Set font size in virtual consoles

    In Debian you can have virtual terminal consoles, which are different from a terminal emulator window. Before Buster came along, a lot of commands could be run in a terminal emulator, but these days, more often than not, commands have to be run in a virtual console instead. The difference is that a virtual console…

  • Rsync Backup System [2]: Using ZFS For Compressed Backup Disks

    So last time I talked briefly about ideas for using Rsync to do my backups. Over time this will gel into a whole lot of stuff like specific scripts and so on. Right now there will be a few different setup steps to go through. The first stage is to come up with a filesystem…

  • Rsync Backup System [1]: Introduction

    In February of last year I was looking for a new backup solution (I had used rsync to that point but found some issues with it) and tried a few different things. I have been using rdiff-backups since then (it comes as a part of Debian) but this has its issues too. At the moment…