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NZ Tekonverse

  • Facebook doesn’t live up to its promises

    Well here I have attacked or critiqued Facebook many times. Look in the category archives to see what I have written in the past. The key problem I am wishing to address in Facebook today is that it’s becoming abundantly clear that it is nearly impossible for even someone like me who only uses Facebook…

  • Brief History of Fisher & Paykel Top Loading Autowashers [4]: SmartDrive

    So last post I took a look at the ECS, which was Fisher and Paykel’s first electronic washing machine, and it was an interim design that was produced between the Hotpoint based machines that F&P produced under license in NZ from probably the 1960s until around 1985 when ECS came onto the market. The next…

  • Brief History of Fisher & Paykel Top Loading Autowashers [3]: ECS Washers

    In the last part of this series I took a look at the Hotpoint based washers which F&P licensed for assembly in NZ until the 1980s. In 1985, after a five year research process, F&P unveiled its own replacement for what was, by then, becoming a fairly dated design. The new washing machines were called…

  • Drawing Outline Rectangles (Boxes) In Gimp

    The designers of Gimp are at pains to tell us it is not a drawing tool. Yet it can convert a selection into an outline. So we can for example draw a rectangular selection and make an outline from it. Outlines are useful in the NZ Rail Maps aerial mosaics, where a lot of pixels…

  • Gimp Config Files

    Gimp now seems to be consistently storing its config files in ~/.config/GIMP/x.xx (where x.xx is the version/release number). This applies even to the flatpak version, which is supposed to be sandboxed within the var area. The files such as menurc which stores the keyboard shortcuts can be copied from one computer to another using these…

  • Debian Font Reinstallation for Carlito Fonts

    Carlito is a very useful font in Debian but it is not necessarily installed automatically at reinstallation of the operating system. The steps that are recommended to reinstall some useful fonts are: apt install fonts-crosextra-carlito fonts-crosextra-caladea Caladea is the other font that is installed by the above command line. These two fonts are effective substitutes…

  • Brief History of Fisher & Paykel Top Loading Autowashers [2]: Hotpoint Washers

    As noted in part 1, Associated Electrical Industries (AEI) in the UK had the British rights to the Hotpoint brand and around 1965 introduced the Hotpoint 1500 automatic washer. These were a top loading design with a number of sophisticated features. Although their exact history in NZ is not too clear at present, Fisher and…

  • Brief History of Fisher & Paykel Top Loading Autowashers [1]: Introduction

    Fisher and Paykel is a major New Zealand appliance manufacturer and has a lengthy history going back over 80 years. About 1938 they started in business as an importer of washing machines from various sources (including Bendix in the US) and soon were assembling wringer machines and Hoovermatic twin tubs in their Auckland factory. Their…

  • Managing Web Map tiles on a Debian computer, and other Webmap technical complexities

    Webmaps are a great tool for everyday use to view a map in a browser, and they are getting a lot of use from Google Maps and Open Street Maps down. What is not really seen in these technologies is some of the challenges that have to be overcome to produce them ready to go…

  • Install mb-util on Debian

    I use a Python script called mb-util to build the mbtiles files for the NZ Rail Maps webmaps site. It takes the raw tiles and builds what is effectively a SQLite database that encapsulates the millions of little tiles into one file, which is much easier to handle for file storage and uploading, although slightly…