Ryan and Debi & Toren

Travel, Tech, Thoughts…

  • Pickens, SC – Hiking Trip – Day 2 – Raven Rock Loop Trail

    The plan was to do a hike every morning while it was cooler, then head back to the cabin and relax, playing games, watching movies, cooking, and chatting. We also had some friends who live in North Carolina who were going to visit for a couple of days. Our first hike was the Raven Rock…

  • Pickens, SC – Hiking Trip – Day 1

    Since March 2020, we have been cooped up pretty consistently thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. We have gone out to shop and exercise, but that’s about it. After nearly 5 months of hardly leaving the house, we were getting a little antsy. We eventually came up with a trip that we thought would work well…

  • Kubuntu – Audio CD Ripping

    Kubuntu – Audio CD Ripping

    I mostly buy digital audio these days. My preferred source is bandcamp as they provide files in FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). However, I ended up buying a CD recently (Last Night’s Fun by Scartaglen) as there wasn’t a digital download available and, in the process, I realized that there are lots of options for…

  • LibreOffice – How To Change Icons to a Darker Theme

    LibreOffice – How To Change Icons to a Darker Theme

    I prefer darker themes for my desktop environment (Kubuntu 20.04) and browser (Brave). For the most part, this isn’t a problem, but it does cause an issue with some applications, including LibreOffice (6.4.4.2). One of the first things I do when I install Kubuntu is switch my desktop environment from the default theme (System Settings…

  • Hillsborough County, FL – Fall 2020 Primary

    Hillsborough County, FL – Fall 2020 Primary

    In researching candidates for elections, I have taken to posting links to the information I find on my website to help others. Note, I’m a registered Democrat only so I can vote in the Democrat primaries. I would prefer to be considered an Independent voter as I vote by the candidate, not by party. Here’s…

  • Richard Bartlett’s claimed COVID-19 cure – A Skeptical Response

    A family member sent me this video interviewing Richard Bartlett, MD, a family practice doctor in Odessa, TX. In the video, Dr. Bartlett claims to have found the cure for COVID-19 – an inhaled steroid, Budesonide. Here is my response to my family member: TL:DR version: This guy’s claims are not credible and his proposed…

  • Examples of Religious Syncretism

    I’m always on the lookout for good examples of religious syncretism and wanted a good place to store these. Lôtān -> Leviathan In Psalm 74, verse 14, Yahweh is described as having defeated a sea monster called Leviathan. This sea creature, its name, and its mythology derive from a Ugaritic sea monster named Lôtān, who…

  • HandBrake – Convert Files with GPU/Nvenc Rather than CPU

    HandBrake – Convert Files with GPU/Nvenc Rather than CPU

    I don’t know exactly when HandBrake added the capability of using the GPU for encoding, but it was somewhere between 1.3.1 (current version in the Ubuntu repositories) and 1.3.3 (current version on PPA). Regardless, this option offers dramatic speed improvements, particularly when working with 4K videos. In this post, I’ll show how to use this…

  • 2020 NAS – Plex, nomachine, Crashplan

    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…

  • LibreOffice – exporting high-resolution TIFF/TIF files

    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…