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.)
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 been a number of serious problems with the Synology NAS I bought (DS413J). First, the amount of […]
Tampa Mayoral Election – 2019
I often rely on the Tampa Bay Times to provide useful information on local political elections. Their coverage is usually pretty good. But they don’t always cover every election or every candidate. And since I like to do my own research, I figured I’d start blogging about the elections. Here’s what I’ve found on the […]
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 […]
WA-Mt. Rainier
Summit Date July 31st, around 6:30 am Party Ryan Cragun & Tom Triplett (plus our guides – Travis and Matt – and two other clients – Drew Herdener and Olivier Colle) Trip Report While I do a fair amount of hiking, mountains like Mt. Rainier are really at the upper end of the types of […]
Salkantay Trek
For my work, a colleague and I decided to propose a new travel study course that would involve a combination of our interests – sociology of sport (hiking, specifically) and exercise science. Our original course proposal wasn’t approved, but our International Programs Office agreed to fund us to scout out a trek in Peru to […]
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 […]