Category: technology
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Linux – tinyMediaManager on Kubuntu 18.04
I run a network attached storage (NAS) device at home to manage all my media (e.g., music, videos, photos, etc.). I have used various programs over the years to manage the naming and organizing of my music files but just recently discovered tinyMediaManager for managing video files. Since it’s written in Java, it works on…
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LibreOffice Calc – Comparing and Aligning Two Lists Using VLOOKUP
One of the tasks I have to do regularly as part of my job is to compare two lists to see which items are missing on one list but not the other. I have been doing this by hand but figured there had to be a way to do this in Excel. I finally figured…
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Linux – Adding and Organizing Music with Clementine
In the almost 15 years I’ve been using Linux I have gone through a number of music playing apps. From Amarok to Banshee to Rhythmbox and at least a few more. My favorite at the moment is Clementine. I’ve grown to really like the basic interface of Clementine and it does a good job with…
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Linux – Fixing the Epson (V33 Perfection) Scanner Issue in Kubuntu 18.04
[NOTE: As of Ubuntu/Kubuntu 20.04, the drivers from Epson work fine without this workaround. Download the driver, then follow the directions to install it.] As of Kubuntu 17.10, my Epson V33 Perfection scanner stopped working with Linux. I bought this scanner specifically because it did work with Linux. That it stopped working was a serious…
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Linux: How to Install Zotero Standalone (in KDE or Kubuntu)
I’ve used Zotero to manage my collection of books, articles, and other citations since Zotero was released. The software has become much more robust over time. As of the latest major milestone release (5.0), Zotero has moved to standalone software exclusively (they no longer piggyback on Firefox). With Mac and Windows, you can download executable…
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Virtual Private Hosting – How to Remove a Domain with Certbot SSL Certificate (on Ubuntu 16.04 with apache)
It used to be pretty easy to remove a domain from my Virtual Private Server – dissable the site in apache, delete the files, delete the underlying database, and remove the domain from my DNS manager. Done. With SSL certificates now a standard part of hosting websites (see here), this is complicated by the removal…
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Linux – 360 degree video editing on Linux
I recently purchased a 360-degree camera that I have used a few times. It takes 360-degree spherical photos and also films in 360 degrees. It’s not the most expensive such camera, but it does a decent job shooting 360-degree panoramic videos. However, I have run into a couple of problems with the resulting footage on…
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LibreOffice Calc – splitting contents of cells into multiple columns (e.g., splitting commas)
I periodically have to take a column of text in LibreOffice calc that has names like this “Lastname, Firstname” and split them into two columns. I figure it out every time, but then I forget how I did. So, here’s a quick tutorial on how this is done. Open your spreadsheet with the cells that need…
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R (Linux) – creating a wordcloud from PDF
On my professional website, I use wordclouds from the text of my publications as the featured images for the posts where I share the publications. I have used a website to generate those wordclouds for quite a while, but I’m trying to learn how to use the R statistical environment and knew that R can…
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R (Linux) – basic installation
To install the R programming environment on Linux is pretty straightforward, but it does require a little bit of know how in order to find the correct packages. As is typically the case with Linux, there are multiple ways to get things done. I like to use Synaptic for installing and removing software, but you…