Dell TB16 docking station with Dell XPS/Fedora 35

With the Thunderbolt enabled laptop there are now more options available to integrate with your different workspaces; a docking station is one that has been a business staple for a long time but a lot of enterprise solutions are pricey but legacy and decontinued solutions exist, such as the Dell TB16 but do they perform?

Fedora 35 on a Dell XPS13 9305

The Dell XPS 93xx (2020/2021) line with its Intel Iris XE integrated graphics has a native Debian developer edition available directly and its interesting to see how this works.

One of these is not like the other: iPod classic upgrade

One of the great things with electronc devices in previous years was the ability to replace/repair items but also importantly as the device ages, to replae the battery. Apple have a certain reputation when it comes to repairability of their portable devices (iPhones, iPods etc) and its not positive as they cram more and more into smaller spaces. However there is a set of iPod that can be relatively easily self serviced and revived.

Windows drag n drop Batch Image Metadata Updates

Batch modifying the exif metadata on your images (NEF, DNGs, jpegs ....) in Windows can be a little painful. Exiftool is a great tool that can perform the metadata updates but most would associate this with command line updates.

With Windows, there exists a neat tick with batch files that you can drag and drop files onto batch file under Windows explorer and the batch file will accept them as arguments. For example, to set the lens information on any exiftool support file, create the following .bat file and then drag and drop your files!

@echo off FOR %%i IN (%*) DO exiftool -overwrite_original -Lens="Nikkor 20mm f/3.5 AI" -MaxApertureValue="3.5" -FocalLength="20" %%i pause

Overcoming missing DisplayCAL dependacies on recent Linux distros with X11 container

DisplayCAL has been a great free tool to partner your hardware colour calibrator, like your DataColor Spyder etc. However installing this on any of the newer mid-2020 distributions (like Fedora 32 and above) has become problematic due to the python 2 requirements being dropped by a number of distributions.

How can we continue to use your DataColor Spyder with DisplayCAL on a recent linux?

Finally migrating from VMplayer to KVM

I have been running VMware, and in particular VMplayer 12.5.x, on my aging Sandybridge (circa 2010) i7-870 desktop for many years and over many interations of Fedora upgrades there have been fights to get it to continue to work.