Random Bits from Boredom

A Fedora 26 to Fedora 28 upgrade (with its 4.18.x kernel) broke VMware Player 12.5.7. However upgrading to the newer (14.x or 15.x) version...

One of the great benefits of Linux is that it can run on a whole host of legacy components and still perform well. Re-purposing an old Dell...

Bonding network interfaces for a laptop is a useful feature allowing you to keep the same IP as you switch between a ethernet or wifi connec...

There are numerous tutorials on how to resize/shrinking media but they typically advise using gparted for the task; whilst gparted is a gr...

After finally setting up Kodi to use a DAC mounted on Raspberry Pi for controlling/serving my music controlled by an IOS device, I re-disco...

There are a number of options to connect a Raspberry Pi to an stereo amplier but one option is to use a DAC hat card such as an IQAudio DAC ...

I have a RPi3 with an external USB hardddisk attached which appeared to be not to be spinning down although the setup (via hdparm was corre...

The Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 AI-S is a lens from the late 70s but shares its optical formula with its predecesors (pre-AI and AI) and successor (A...

ffmpeg video processing on an old linux/machine, like a i7 860, running Fedora26 can be painful if you only rely on the CPU. With a recent...

The 28mm f/2.8 AI-S is a well regarded lens from the early 1980s that is still available new today. But what's the point of this compar...

The old time manual Nikkors from circa 1977 had the designation of an AI lens and then sometime leading into 1981 the AI-S lenses replaced t...

A 200mm can be a useful focal length in the bag, albiet a less frequently used length. However the modern and autofocusing xx-200mm zooms a...

The circa 1980 Nikkor 20mm f/3.5 AI lens comes with a reputation for being flare resistant and reasonably sharp as well as being very lightw...

As with all storage, there comes a time where you exhaust the storage and you need to move up. After many years of service, the disks in my...

Many hardware (especially cheap) vendors will sell the same product but replace and gut the internal electronics. This makes finding compat...

The original 2011 Raspberry Pi model B (rev1) with its 256MB is dwarfed by it's younger siblings now but this can still be used a very c...

Basic maintanence and monitoring for your RPi can obviously be achieved by ssh into the machine but sometimes there needs to be an easier w...

One of the big advantages of the Raspberry Pi is that it's form factor makes it so portable; I can have a RPi moved around the home dep...

After jumping on the Raspberry Pi bandwagon, I wondered what could be done with the smallest/stripped down version of the RPi, the RPi Zero...

No messing around: setting up VMware to boot a physical Windows 10 installation from a (GPT) partition from Linux. physical installation ...