Archives: Write-ups

(November 2021) The objective of this exercise was to automatically generate text transcriptions of podcasts and other audio recordings, without resorting to proprietary off-site cloud services. Transcription We chose to use Vosk, an offline open source speech recognition toolkit. It is not as accurate as cloud-based commercial services such as Otter (used by Zoom teleconferencing), […]

Whilst working on a project that required us to extract information from Wikipedia, we recognised the need to host our own local copy so as to avoid stressing the main Wikipedia servers with API calls. Options   Kiwix – offline-reader – no API XOWA – Dynamic HTML generation from a local XML database dump – […]

Having received a letter from NHS England, inviting you to book an appointment at a vaccination centre or community pharmacy, you go online to www.nhs.uk/covid-vaccination. Unfortunately, both your initial jab and the booster (at least 11 weeks later) have to be booked together. This makes it extremely difficult to succeed. You go through the following sequence: […]

(July 2020) Two obvious scenarios spring to mind (although there are others): Want an additional monitor, but have no spare monitor port. Could use USB to HDMI adaptor (£20), but many are tricky (often impossible) to get working with Linux. Diamond Multimedia make some that do work with Ubuntu, but they are £50. Want to […]

A relative needed to print invoices from a Samsung XE303C12 Chromebook, to a small mono laser, so inks won’t dry out if only used occasionally (the Achilles’ heel of inkjets). Information on what works with Chromebooks is sketchy (and conflicting), but we ruled out refurbished small laser printers due to questionable compatibility and settled on […]

We recently replaced an old misbehaving UPS with a new PowerWalker VI 1500 LCD unit. This is supplying power to three servers and physically connected to the USB port of one of them. The downsides of not going with the market leader, APC… Now, PowerWalker (a German fronted outfit, manufactured in China) are a relatively […]

IKEA sell some very affordable wireless controlled lights and power outlets, such as the TRÅDFRI Control outlet kit – a 3kW socket outlet with on/off remote for £19. These can be bought individually: Wireless Dimmer (on/off remote) for £6 Wireless Control Outlet (3kW socket outlet) for £10 But whilst you can control (from a computer) […]

Tracking the Rat This began at the beginning of October 2019, when it was noticed that we had an uninvited visitor. So we decided to set up some cameras to identify what it was, and where it was coming from. We started with a pair of USB Logitech Webcam Pro 9000 HD, coupled with an […]

An architect provided a builder with floor plans and front/rear/side elevations as PDFs, annotated with the usual plethora of construction notes. But only the floor plan contained dimensions (so none of the plans included heights). The builder passed on copies of the plans to a scaffolder to quote for the usual construction stages of scaffolding. […]

(Smart Meter Equipment Technical Specifications) Existing SMETS1 meters are supplier specific and use GSM over existing 900MHz 3G mobile networks (SIM cards). SMETS2 meters allow the consumer to change supplier and retain full smart meter functionality without needing a change of smart meter. SMETS2 uses the DCC network, which is accessed via: North of Lincoln: […]

When running graphical processes on another Linux host, it is common to use the X11 protocol to display back to the desktop of your local client. (Although there are other ways, which may be better depending on circumstances.) However, you may be achieving a connection speed much slower than your equipment and network can actually […]