Category: technology
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Plex – How To Create Smart (auto updating) Music Playlists
I love my Plex server. I stream my music basically around the world (I travel regularly). But it took me a while to figure out how to create playlists that automatically update (i.e., “smart playlists”) based on search filters. At home, I use a native music client (e.g., Strawberry or Clementine) to play my music.…
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Restarting KDE’s Plasma Shell via Konsole (command line)
As much as I love KDE as my desktop environment (on top of Ubuntu, so Kubuntu), it does occasionally happen that the Plasma Shell freezes up (usually when I’ve been running my computer for quite a while then boot up a game and begin to push the graphics a bit. Often, I just shut down…
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Linux – Music File Naming Conventions
I have been collecting music files for decades, like a lot of people. My total collection includes over 10,000 tracks. When I built my own NAS recently, I decided it was time to do a careful audit of my music as I hadn’t organized my music in a very long time. In the process, I…
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Linux – Fixing “apt-get” failed installation
Occasionally, when I try to install an update or install software via the console using apt-get, something goes wrong. To date, I have never had the failure of a package to install ruin my system. However, it isn’t uncommon after such an incident to get an error the next time I run apt-get. The easiest…
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Linux – Downloading YouTube Videos with VLC
I occasionally need to download a video from YouTube (e.g., my son’s school posts a video of him and I want a copy). There used to be browser extensions to do this. Most of those don’t work anymore. But I did find a new approach that is pretty slick and uses software I already have…
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LibreOffice Calc – Creating Charts with Conditional Formatting
I was working on creating a chart in LibreOffice Calc that was kind of weird. Basically, I wanted to show change over time in a dichotomous variable (e.g., political party affiliation in the US – Democrat or Republican). I could, theoretically, make a chart where presence is indicated by “1” and absence is indicated by…
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Building My Own NAS (with Plex, Crashplan, NFS file sharing, bitTorrent, etc.)
NOTE: As of 2020-06-22, I have a new NAS build. You can read about it here. For about the last seven years (since 2012), I’ve been using a Synology NAS (Network Attached Storage) device in my house as a central repository for files, photos, music, and movies. It has generally worked well. However, there have…
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Linux – OCR PDF
One of the few tasks I have not been able to do on Linux since I switched over from Windows more than a decade ago is optical character recognition (OCR) of PDF documents. I work with a lot of PDFs. Most of them were digital documents to begin with and the text is readily selectable.…
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LibreOffice – Impress Templates and Object Styles
I just upgraded one of my computers to Kubuntu 18.10. With that upgrade came the latest version of LibreOffice (6.1.2.1). With this new version, when I try to create a new Impress document, I’m now forced to pick a template. The options aren’t terrible, but I am of the opinion that presentations should focus on…
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LibreOffice – animating elements or series in a chart/graph in Impress
I really like LibreOffice. It’s not just my default office suite because it’s free. I like it because of the control it gives over so many elements of what I do in my day-to-day work. However, this post is one of those where I lament the fact that it is missing a feature that other…