Category: technology
-
Bambu A1 Mini – 0.2 extruder doesn’t work!
I bought a Bambu A1 Mini with the AMS in December 2023. It was supposed to be a present for my son so he could print some things. Well, he never really printed much on it, but I’ve been using it a lot. After nearly 8 months of printing dozens of projects on it, I…
-
Qualitative Analysis Using LLMs on a Local Machine
While most of my research is quantitatively oriented, I am a mixed-methods researcher and periodically use qualitative sociological methods for research projects (typically interviews). I have used a variety of software packages to analyze qualitative data over the years, from NVIVO to Taguette to an abandoned R package to just coding text in word processing…
-
Airtable Forms for Third-Party to Submit Updated Information
I have a use case that is probably more common than I realize. I am a faculty member at a university and our department wants to keep track of our alumni. To do that, we built an Airtable base that contains basic contact information for them. We can obviously update the base by hand, but…
-
Getting Ollama and Open WebUI Working on Kubuntu 23.10
I have two specific use cases for setting up AI locally instead of using ChatGPT (for which I have a subscription as I use it for a variety of tasks, as does my wife). I needed to analyze interviews but couldn’t upload them to the web for security reasons. I also wanted to work on…
-
3D Printing Flexible PLA or TPU on Bambu A1 Mini
I had an idea for a print that required flexible filament. The go-to flexible filament is TPU, but I was going to use the print with food, so I looked around for something that I thought would be safer with food and found Flashforge’s flexible PLA. I was excited to try out this print. Once…
-
National Youth Leadership Forum-Engineering & Rice Elite Tech Camp
I posted previously about National Youth Leadership Forum (NYLF) and its extremely expensive summer camps. In that post, I detailed what the camps included and that, from my perspective as a college professor, the camps did not seem worth the money involved. Of course, I cannot call these camps “scams” because you are getting something…
-
Converting EPUB to Mp3 on Linux
I read a lot. It’s part of my job. But I also have times when I have to be physically up and about and could listen to an audiobook (e.g., mowing the lawn). I typically listen to podcasts at those times, but I do have some e-books I’d like to listen to that don’t have…
-
Linux – Adding BPM to ID3 Tags
I spent the better part of a year (in my spare time) organizing my music collection. With my music carefully organized and accurately tagged, I found myself wanting the Beats Per Minute (BPM) for some of my music and realized that BPM can be included in the ID3 tags of MP3 files or the Vorbis…
-
R – Combining Data from Two Variables
(NOTE: This was done in R 4.3.1 using RStudio 2023.03.0.) Here’s the scenario: I have a variable (V1) from Country A with roughly ~1,000 responses that measures religious affiliation with the following options: To be clear, there are no responses to V1 from the participants in the other country (Country B), only from individuals from…
-
ChatGPT – checking for personally identifying information
I recently hired a panel survey company to conduct surveys in several countries around the world. With some of the questions, we gave participants the option to select “other” and then fill in the blank. Given the ethics approval that we have for the data, we are not allowed to retain any data that could…