NZ Tekonverse

  • Windows 10 Store apps for everyday things

    Last time I wrote about becoming a broadbandless household for a while. Since then I have set up the Nanobridge permanently, in that it is located in a different room of the house, and is cabled back to the main network switch in a very neat and tidy way. This involved a lot of work…

  • Broadbandless household

    Well how do you have a household without broadband? You skive off free wifi and use your huge 6 GB cellular data on your $50 phone plan is how you do it. Since Vodafone has just upped the data on my plan to 6 GB for no extra cost. Simply put, I have decided to…

  • RemixOS android emulation

    Well about a week ago I was writing about my experiences with Android x86. That particular OS runs reasonably well in a VM on Linux, but on my Windows computer I couldn’t achieve anything with it because apparently of the hardware virtualisation limit. So then I upgraded the computer to one that does full virtualisation…

  • Windows 10, yay 🙂

    One year after ditching Windows 10 I have bitten the bullet and put together a new system to run it. It becomes more difficult as time goes on, for various reasons, to buck the shift to Win10, but having had to take this challenging step, it still won’t be the main computer that I do…

  • Android desktop options

    So after my last post I have had a play with Android x86 on the Linux PCs with very mixed results. Quite why Facebook finds it difficult to support the desktop / browser based version of Instagram with the ability to post images is hard to fathom considering how well they have made Facebook work…

  • Android emulation options

    A little while back I wrote about trialling a couple of Android emulators. BlueStacks and LeapDroid were the Windows ones that I tried out, Leapdroid being better. I then decided a tablet was a better option for Android and also reinstalled Windows to discover Leapdroid had been pulled by its developers and can no longer…

  • Video conversion with Handbrake

    When it comes to video conversion then Handbrake has to be up there as a FOSS package that is produced for a variety of platforms. Although it doesn’t have a wide range of output formats (just MP4 and MKV) it is a high quality product that I have had no hesitation about installing on Windows…

  • Firefox quality still too variable

    If you had seen my series of earlier posts on browser choices, you’d have seen that at one stage I was recommending Chrome over Firefox. Then later, I changed to recommending Firefox. Stability in Firefox for me has been in two areas: 1. Crashes of individual tabs 2. Websites failing to load completely or being…

  • Android updates not as good as Windows Phone

    If you buy an Android phone, the key issue is getting software updates from the manufacturer. With Windows in particular, which is the nearest equivalent (one OS on many different hardware devices), MS has a very good system that provides updates to their core operating system for many years after it is first released. This…

  • More Samsung self serving crap and ripoffs

    My first Android phone was a Motorola Moto-E dual sim (XT1022) that I picked up from The Warehouse relatively cheaply as it was end of line at that time. A great little phone especially as it was my first use of Android with the main issue being the lack of RAM (only 4 GB). Because…