NZ Tekonverse

  • Raspberry Pi [4]: Raspberry Pi vs Chromecast

    I last wrote about my Raspberry Pi back in July, and since then it hasn’t been used. I decided against using it to play videos because it had some trouble playing some of the ones in my collection. At this point I went back to playback from a computer, and subsequently pc4 was used for…

  • OpenSong, Video editing, Computing resources optimisation [2E]

    OpenSong is a FOSS open source worship presentation package that is produced for Linux, Windows and macOS platforms. It was first released quite a few years ago, and is a bit out of date, with presumably no regular maintenance at present. Obviously my interest will stem from it being both FOSS and Linux capable. I…

  • Free Linux video editors [2]

    I have written a few times about video editing, in May this year I talked about a few free packages I had tried out that didn’t work. As mediapc now has more memory and a better hardware spec, I am planning to install Blender, Handbrake, Lightworks and ShotCut on it and see if those packages…

  • Ubuntu Touch may step in where Firefox OS finished….maybe?

    We certainly have a strong case for an alternative to Android because we should get a choice to be free of Google’s massive data collection infrastructure that is tracking everything we do and everywhere we go with our phones. Revelations for example that Android 8 screen scrapes every app in the system are mind boggling.…

  • Computing resources optimisation [2D]

    I am going ahead with this so I have been busy over the last few days installing and removing things around the place. To date I have installed the old mediapc chassis with a new board, CPU and RAM, GA-B250M-D3H with Kaby Lake Pentium G4560, and moving all three disks across from serverpc. It was…

  • Linux video driver issues

    One of the challenges with Linux is that bug fixes can be slow to be developed and there can be issues when libraries are updated in a component of a distro in a different time cycle from other parts and therefore break software. For example, in Qgis there is a version of it that depends…

  • Computing Resources Optimisation [2C]

    Still looking at this, really just fine tuning expectations / specs. Last time I talked about task separation. Running stuff on mediapc is still a test case really. What has turned out to be important however is limitations on mediapc caused by it having an old CPU that is slow to decode some video formats.…

  • Scanning with Linux

    As we all know, I have gradually moved lots of things I do from Windows to Linux over time, but still have a computer running the Home edition of Windows 10. One of the few things that still runs on Windows 10 is my Epson Perfection V200 Photo scanner. Well it did work well on…

  • Computing resources optimisation [2B]

    Last time I wrote a post in this series it was looking at upgrading some of the hardware that I have. This time it is looking at task separation, or in another way, using mediapc to do some stuff like I have looked at previously. This keeps coming up because I have four computers and…

  • Qgis functions for labels

    One of the great things about Qgis is being able to use expressions in a range of things. This is just a little bit about using a function to combine various fields together to make a caption on a label of a feature. In NZ Rail Maps I have features called Locations which are a…