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Month: October 2019

  • Red/green/white handheld signalling lamp

    Anyone who is associated with rail heritage knows that on the professional railways in New Zealand, train crews used hand held signalling lamps that could produce red, green and white light, for use when shunting a train. The older style lamps of this type worked with a mechanical rotating filter holder to move red and…

  • Rsync Backup System [4]: Linux File and Directory Security Using ACLs

    As per our series on Rsync backups, we desire to use a different user from the one that owns the home directory in order to ensure they have only the permissions they need when logging in remotely. At this point whilst by default the backup user could access many things on the computer, there were…

  • Arlec Plug In Heater Controls [2]

    In my previous post in this series I described the PC900 2 hour plugin countdown timer which Bunnings have been selling for some time. The oddity of this product is that it is described on the packaging as having “adjustable switching increments”. This is a rather clumsy phrase more worthy of adjustable 24 hour timers…

  • Rsync Backup System [3]: Using Rsync For Full Backup

    So last time we talked about how to set up a single disk with ZFS to use compression. Having got our backup disks sorted, the next step is to work out how to use rsync to do the actual backups. rsync is written by the same people that devised samba and is a very powerful…

  • HOWTO: Set font size in virtual consoles

    In Debian you can have virtual terminal consoles, which are different from a terminal emulator window. Before Buster came along, a lot of commands could be run in a terminal emulator, but these days, more often than not, commands have to be run in a virtual console instead. The difference is that a virtual console…

  • Rsync Backup System [2]: Using ZFS For Compressed Backup Disks

    So last time I talked briefly about ideas for using Rsync to do my backups. Over time this will gel into a whole lot of stuff like specific scripts and so on. Right now there will be a few different setup steps to go through. The first stage is to come up with a filesystem…

  • Rsync Backup System [1]: Introduction

    In February of last year I was looking for a new backup solution (I had used rsync to that point but found some issues with it) and tried a few different things. I have been using rdiff-backups since then (it comes as a part of Debian) but this has its issues too. At the moment…

  • If the Government wants to increase local election voter turnout they should mandate STV for all councils

    What is completely wrong is that a council can choose their own electoral system. We don’t believe people would find STV too difficult to understand. Dunedin City Council, as it turns out, has all of its councillors elected at large (no wards) and uses STV to elect them and the mayor. This should be a…

  • How to create a desktop menu entry manually in Linux

    This is kind of an odd thing to be posting about nowadays with Linux desktops mostly including a menu editor or installable third party packages like menulibre and alacarte being able to achieve the same outcome. However, LXQt does not include a menu editor that is comparable to the above options, and whilst both of…

  • Solution To Low Local Election Turnouts: Stop Disenfranchising Non-Ratepayers.

    Well the local government elections are all over, and crocodile tears are being wept over the poor turnout, which is practically a record low across New Zealand. It has been claimed by a former Labour president in Auckland that the local government structure there which puts control of transport and other significant municipial functions outside…