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NZ Tekonverse

  • New “Readjust” feature in Gimp Unified Transform (NZRM Aerial Mosaics)

    Unified Transform is a very useful capability in Gimp since about 2.10 that combines a number of transformation tools together, such as Scale, Rotate and Shear. I have used this tool extensively when creating aerial map mosaics for the NZ Rail Maps project. To create an aerial map mosaic, I start with downloading the current…

  • Raspberry Pi as Livestream Player [4]… Or Conventional HTPC?

    So after recent posts talking about Raspberry Pi possibilities I am probably going to forgo using my Pi as a media player because I have pulled out an old Intel DB75EN board that used to be a desktop computer here and it plays videos very well. So that old computer can be repurposed. It needs…

  • NZ Rail Maps Technical Review 2020-04-18

    So we are now at Qgis version 3.10.4 for the NZ Rail Maps map production task. Back a way we had a lot of trouble with Qgis with WMTS layers which were unusable at that time. Since then however we haven’t been able to replicate the problem but we suspect that their code has bugs…

  • Linux video editing, revisited

    Some way back, I don’t recall exactly, I talked about Linux video editing. When I set up mediapc the idea was that was going to be its key function. Then I ran into some roadblocks trying to find FOSS software that could do this, and just gave up and stuck with Avidemux, which can do…

  • Rolling back a Flatpak application to a previous version

    Today on my main graphics editing PC, I decided to update Gimp from 2.10.16 to 2.10.18. Which should have been OK. Except that it wasn’t. I have spent all day dealing with Gimp crashing during saves and trying to work around with ever smaller files to be saved. It did crash last night as well…

  • Stopping desktop notification popups on LXQt

    I see a fair bit of LXQt, whether it is on my one desktop that is running it on top of a Debian install, or my preference for laptops and virtual machines which is to install Lubuntu for fast pain-free installations, especially with non-free firmware and low resource use. Debian remains my preference for my…

  • Wireless broadband [2]

    So in my last post I wrote about Skinny 4G wireless broadband. I have had this for about 10 days and it’s been really good. I have two computers connected to it, one in each main room of the house, and using a proper computer with it instead of a limited Raspberry Pi is really…

  • Using a Raspberry Pi as a livestream player [3]

    Well since I last wrote about this I have had more time to test, the outcome of which is that the Pi’s CPU still runs very hot even with the lid removed off the top of the case. This undoubtedly continues to be relevant to display performance which generally is still challenging. I have also…

  • Using a Raspberry Pi as a livestream player [2]

    Last time when I wrote this column I was looking at updating the Model 3B Pi that I have to the latest version because the RPi3B seemed to be a little slow for playing live video streams off Youtube. Well a new RPi would cost around $120 including the case and a new power supply…

  • Wireless broadband [1]

    For the past four years I have had the privilege of a free internet connection shared from a corporate site next door to me where I used to work. It has been and in fact still is good and I intend to keep using it. However in order to supplement it and work around some…