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NZ Tekonverse

  • Gimp resource usage challenges

    Whilst Gimp has been great for the NZ Rail Maps mosaics, one of its challenges has been with the layer group feature. This feature unfortunately does a lot more than just organise layers in the layer list. Apparently it adds extra stuff that you may not need. From my experience I have found the layer…

  • Autologin with LXQt

    Autologin isn’t something I do normally, but on my computer that run LXQt, for what they are used for, it gets the computer up faster so it is useful. If you are using LXQt with SDDM which is the default display manager, it is pretty easy to use. Simply edit /etc/sddm.conf.d/autologin.conf and enter the following…

  • Life with Buster

    Well I rushed to get Buster on most of my computers yesterday and this was mostly straightforward. The exception being of course mainpc which ran out of disk space while running the apt upgrade command due to the number of new packages downloaded and installed. There can be literally thousands of packages needed for an…

  • Debian Buster Release due soon

    Debian Buster (Debian 10) has been in development for the last few years, and it is expected to be released about the middle of this year. As was described in some earlier posts, I have had Buster running on some of my systems in the past, but not in the last year or so. However…

  • Python Scripting [3F]: Layer Fractional Segments for NZ Rail Maps 6

    Today’s little bit of fun and games has been to change the script so that it can read in a list file and process a list of source layers and produce the world and auxiliary files for them. Last night I discovered there was some additional aerial photos available for OtiraNorth area, for which I…

  • Python Scripting [3E]: Layer Fractional Segments for NZ Rail Maps 5

    I made a lot of progress on this on Wednesday, mainly due to dropping nearly everything else and pushing on to finish it. After testing it, which so far has worked well, I decided to add an extra step to the workflow. The source layer (base layer) is a jpg file and we are making…

  • Python Scripting [3D]: Layer Fractional Segments for NZ Rail Maps 4

    Continuing from our last post, we now want to find tile segments that need world files written for them and generate those files.  The code to do this (from the steps outlined previously is: Strip the extension off the base file (92XJ7-92MKF.jgw) so that we get 92XJ7-92MKF: baseNameBase = os.path.splitext(baseName)[0] Split the filename at the…

  • Python Scripting [3C]: Layer Fractional Segments for NZ Rail Maps 3

    Last time we had a look at how to read data from our files and store it in a list. This time we are going to get that data and perform the calculations we need on it. First thing is to convert the numbers read out as strings to floats. The numbers we need are…

  • Python Scripting [3B]: Layer Fractional Segments for NZ Rail Maps 2

    Yesterday we looked at how to collect command line parameters easily in a Python script. Today we need to turn the parameters into filenames and then read their contents to memory. First thing is to get the arguments into variables we can refer to and manipulate. This is pretty simple as the arguments are stored…

  • Python Scripting [3A]: Layer Fractional Segments for NZ Rail Maps 1

    This is a technical description of the scripting project which is for dividing a large layer into segments for NZ Rail Maps. As discussed in some previous posts I am taking for example a 0.4 metre resolution tile and scaling it to 0.1 metre resolution making it 16 times the area of the original. Then…