Ryan and Debi

Category: technology

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…