Category: technology
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2020 NAS – Plex, nomachine, Crashplan
After about a year and a half with my previous NAS (see here), I decided it was time for an upgrade. The previous NAS had served dutifully, but it was no match for 4K video (I don’t have a lot of it), it took forever to transcode files when I wanted to synchronize them with…
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LibreOffice – exporting high-resolution TIFF/TIF files
As a scholar who regularly publishes work with charts and graphs, I’m often confronted with varied requirements from publishers for the format in which they want the charts and graphs. Most often, the format is as a TIFF/TIF file, typically with at least 300 dpi and somewhere around 1500×1500 pixels. I make most of my…
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Linux – Video Tag Editing
Not everyone may be as particular as I am about having my files organized, but I like to make sure everything is where it’s supposed to be. I make sure my music is tagged accurately. I also like to have my video files tagged correctly. What does that mean? Just like with audio files, video…
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LibreOffice 6.4.3.2 – Not Showing Greek Letters/Symbols
I ran into an issue the other day that ended up taking me hours to solve, in part because I couldn’t find any other solutions online, which is pretty unusual these days. Here was the issue: I was evaluating a paper (I’m an academic and read lots of papers) that had a bunch of Greek…
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Plex on Linux – Video Files Not Detected
I added a number of video files to my Plex server the other day and, when I checked Plex, some of them had not shown up in the corresponding library. I tried the obvious solutions. First, I selected the options for the library and then chose “Scan Library Files”: That will often solve the problem,…
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Plex – Sports Videos Library
I use Plex to manage my music and video libraries. I actually don’t watch sports very often. The one exception is when I’m grading papers (I’m a college professor). I’ve found that watching soccer/futbol matches in the background while I grade papers breaks up the monotony of grading. With finals coming up, I thought it…
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LibreOffice Calc: Graphs with Two y-axes with Different Scales
While a bit technical, it’s occasionally useful to plot multiple data series that have very different scales in the same chart. Let me give an example to illustrate. Let’s say I want to see whether the number of Mormon temples being built aligns with the number of Mormon stakes (akin to a Catholic diocese) that…
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LibreOffice Calc: Interpolating Missing Values in Graphs
Here’s my situation. I have some data over time but I’m missing values in specific years. I want to graph that data but would rather not have to estimate all of the missing values. It turns out, LibreOffice Calc can do that for you in your chart. Here’s how… Imagine I’m plotting the number of…
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Setting Up a New Windows Computer for Your Kids
I recently had a colleague contact me for some computer advice. He knows I’m a computer geek and was looking for some help setting up a new Windows laptop for his kids. He was wondering which antivirus software to buy. If you’re at all familiar with my blog, you’ll know that I’m not a fan…
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Plex/tinyMediaManager and Doctor Who Specials
I’m a science fiction fan. And I want my science fiction at my fingertips. To that end, I have slowly been digitizing my favorite series (e.g., Star Trek, Stargate, and now Doctor Who) and putting them on my fileserver that uses Plex to serve the episodes to whatever device I want. I recently ran into…