Building QEMU 8.0 on Raspberry Pi OS

Introduction

Another passing year brings the 8th major release of the incredibly versatile emulation platform QEMU.

As always, the fastest, simplest way to get QEMU onto Raspberry Pi OS is via the default package manager. Unfortunately, version 5.2 – the version currently offered via the package manager – is almost 3 years out of date and an awful lot of development has occurred since.

Fortunately building QEMU 8.0 is not that difficult.

QEMU in the Raspberry Pi OS package manager…

…alas the offered version is incredibly out of date!

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Losslessly Joining JPEGs with JPEGTran

The Introduction

On occasion, you may find that you need to join – or tile – two or more JPEG images into a single image and that you need to do so without the usual JPEG degradation that comes from saving an edited JPEG again and again and again. Fortunately, under some circumstances, there is a solution – JPEGTran from the Independent JPEG Group.

The Images

Our sample images are two tiles taken from The Map Project – in this case map Yorkshire Sheet CLXXIV.SW, a 1950s map of south-west York in the United Kingdom.

‘Image_A.jpeg’
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Disabling Windows XP Ballon Tips

And it’s time for an aide-mémoire for a fact that seems to be disappearing into the ether.

Windows XP bubble tips can be disabled by:

  • Opening Regedit
  • Navigating to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
  • Creating a new String value of ‘EnableBubbleTips’.
  • Setting this value to ‘0’.
  • Restarting Windows.

Jamie Zawinski’s notes on the early days of the Netscape/Mozilla Transition

On January 20th, 1998, Netscape laid off a lot of people. One of them would have been me, as my “department”, such as it was, had been eliminated, but I ended up mometarily moving from “clienteng” over to the “website” division. For about 48 hours I thought that I might end up writing a webmail product or something.

That, uh, didn’t happen.

Jamie Zawinski
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