converser.nz

NZ Tekonverse

  • Python Scripting: Planned Scripting Projects

    I’ve written a few posts about different scripts I am planning to look at. At the moment the ones that are most important are: A script to do segmented layer fractions for NZ Rail Maps. I am doing this very slowly and laboriously with a spreadsheet and keep making mistakes and having to paste things…

  • Firefox Developer exhausts system resources

    One week after reinstalling mainpc I had a repeat of the situation that caused the reinstallation. Firefox Developer, which is the main browser I use, somehow got into a situation where it was using full CPU, RAM and swap for a period. I use the KDE system load monitor widget on the panel to monitor…

  • NZ Rail Maps: Optimising Gimp and using 4x4x4 grid for mosaics [1]

    As recent posts have outlined I am using a new grid system for the NZ Rail Maps mosaics to standardise on the use of 4800×7200 tiles for historical aerial images, because Qgis limitations means it tends to run out of memory exponentially more rapidly and be much slower to update the screen if larger sizes…

  • How to optimise Gimp resource usage

    Since I have one computer for the NZ Rail Maps project that is mostly used just for Gimp for mosaic creation and as it has got 32 GB of RAM and 100 GB of Linux swap on a partition of the SSD I need to make sure it uses the available system resources efficiently. One…

  • The end of NZ Rail Maps

    This post isn’t in the NZ Rail Maps blog, nor is it tagged as NZ Rail Maps because it is not an official announcement for the project. I do however expect NZ Rail Maps will last a few more years and then be mothballed. Exactly how many years I can’t say. But after a break…

  • General update 2019-02-15

    Last week I had some issues with mainpc resulting in it running out of /tmp space which of course is caused or impacted by running out of space on the install volume and caused a number of user files in /home I was working on to become corrupted. I haven’t looked at the bigger question…

  • NZ Rail Maps: Scaling up map mosaics & creating new tile grids

    One of the issues that comes up with doing the map mosaics for NZ Rail Maps is that the resolution of Retrolens aerial imagery can often be very high, when using the official NZR survey images at the scale that they appear on Retrolens. A typical scale is only 1:4300 which gives us a lot…

  • How to auto start x11vnc on LXQt or LXDE (including Raspbian)

    LXQt is the desktop environment of the current edition of Lubuntu. Previous editions of Lubuntu used LXDE as the desktop environment. My personal preference is to use LXQt on Debian instead of XFCE on Debian, due to XFCE development being too slow (the same reason I switched most of my more powerful computers to KDE).…

  • Rapsberry Pi [5]: Using the Pi as the tethered desktop

    Due to the fact that my main internet feed is filtered, I sometimes need to access websites that are blocked by the filter. This is easier than trying to get a site unblocked. For example a Family First website, porninquiry.nz, is currently blocked by the web filtering, as are several misclassified Christian sites I read…

  • Python Scripting [2A]; Syncing a video and music directory tree

    Having completed our first scripting task involved XML extraction and copying files, the next task to be scripted in Python will be the process of extracting audio from our collection of music video tracks and syncing it into a directory tree. The actual steps needed are: Compare two directory tree, one for video and one…