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NZ Tekonverse

  • Welcome to the world of M.2 [2]

    Since last month writing about M.2 SSDs several have been installed in different computers. It has been found difficult to use them as a Linux boot device so regular SSDs still do these roles in computers. On an H97 board, six SATA ports went down to four when the M.2 SSD was installed, whereas on…

  • Welcome to the world of M.2

    M.2 is a standard for SSDs (Solid State Disks). As everyone knows, SSDs are starting to replace hard drives and have the advantage of much faster performance. They come in a number of different form factors and one of the first available was the same as the existing hard drives for laptops and using the…

  • Galaxy A12: After Six Weeks

    So I have owned this phone now for six weeks. It has been one of the very few times I have bought a phone that was a completely new model, but it was offered on special at just the right time when I needed to replace my existing phone and had the right combination of…

  • NZRM Webmaps Development Update 2021-03-17 [2]

    Part 1 of this series took a look at some of the technical history of developing the webmaps project. This part will discuss some of the present and future challenges in the NZ Rail Maps Webmaps. As the initial stage of putting all of NZ online in the webmaps is nearing completion, attention will soon…

  • NZRM Webmaps Development Update 2021-03-17 [1]

    One of the features of this blog is that it includes technical posts about the NZ Rail Maps project with which converser.nz blogs are affiliated. These posts are less suitable for a general audience mainly interested in the map content and so are posted on NZTechonverse instead. The NZ Rail Maps live webmaps project is…

  • Shoddy electrical standards cause accidents and fires

    There’s hardly a month that goes past when FENZ is not announcing that someone’s house, school or other premises has been burned down by a faulty electrical power board. This never needed to have happened, because when these devices first started to become widely available in NZ, back in my childhood, they were almost invariably…

  • NZ Rail Maps: Spatialite vs Geopackage

    In the NZ Rail Maps project, I have preferred in recent years to replace shapefiles with databased formats. When using file based dbms (vs client-server) SQlite stands out as a viable alternative that is extremely well supported with an impeccable reputation. There are a number of SQlite based formats of data for GIS layers. Geopackage…

  • Reflection

    I have decided to import all the old posts from Blogger (over 700) so they now appear with the correct dates herein, as well as their categories being added to a now-somewhat-long list. This blog is now 14 years old although previously known as Enzed Tech. It’s interesting to take a look back to the…

  • Samsung Galaxy A12

    Well it’s time to get some posting underway for 2021 (other than rail maps) so here is a brief run down of a recent acquisition, a Samsung Galaxy A12 phone. This model was released late last year so there is relatively little information available for it on a lot of sites. The example mentioned here…

  • DreamHost vs GoDaddy vs local… webhost pros and cons

    Well this time around I am going to write about the choice of webhost platform. Web hosting these days can be a lot cheaper than it might have been in the past as there is a lot of competition. In New Zealand you can get quite reasonable web hosting with 150 GB of disk space…