Travel, Tech, Thoughts…

  • LibreOffice Calc – Conditional Formatting

    LibreOffice Calc – Conditional Formatting

    I haven’t used this feature of spreadsheet software as much as I probably should, but I have a spreadsheet I have been working with a lot lately and conditional formatting has been key to helping me orient myself in the spreadsheet. However, in the process, I realized that I am really a noob when it…

  • How To Fix PDF Forms Not Showing Contents in Okular (Linux)

    How To Fix PDF Forms Not Showing Contents in Okular (Linux)

    I have had this problem happen twice now, and I don’t know exactly what is causing it, but I found a solution. Here’s the situation… I received a PDF that has forms. Typically, that isn’t a problem as Okular is able to open most PDFs with forms and show both the forms and what has…

  • Cooking Tips

    I’m not a professional chef. I claim no real expertise as a cook or chef other than the fact that I cook for my little family a lot and I like to eat good food. As a result, I spend a surprising amount of time cooking. There are lots of other places where people can…

  • Mexican Restaurants in Central Tampa

    My New Year’s resolution for 2021 was to try a new Mexican restaurant (primarily food trucks and small places close to us in Wellswood) each month for all of 2021. To make the comparisons across restaurants I tried to be fairly consistent and order Mexican street tacos (at least one chicken and one steak) at…

  • Plex Playlists with Amazon Echo

    My music library is stored on my NAS. On my primary desktop at home, I mount the music folder and use Clementine to listen to my music. Everywhere else, I use Plex to play my music. Playing my music through Plex via my browser at work, via my Roku in the family room, and via…

  • LibreOffice – address label merge (from spreadsheet)

    LibreOffice – address label merge (from spreadsheet)

    I’ve been using LibreOffice for over a decade and have only had to do an address label merge twice in that time – both of which have been in the last month. The first time, I actually did a form letter and a label merge; the second time I just had to do an address…

  • R – Finding and Setting Working Directory

    R – Finding and Setting Working Directory

    R, like many software programs, likes to have a folder or directory on your computer to operate in. When you start R, depending on how you start it and whether or not you previously saved your session, it’s likely that R will set a default “working directory” or folder where it is going to look…

  • Launching HandBrake 1.4.0 in Kubuntu 21.04

    Launching HandBrake 1.4.0 in Kubuntu 21.04

    The fine folks at HandBrake have updated their software and distribution system to a Flatpack approach. Their Flatpack for Linux is based on Gnome, not KDE, which is fine, but it does mean that the GUI is no longer skinned with my system settings on KDE. Oh well… The bigger issue is that, with a…

  • LibreOffice Calc – VLookup with dates

    LibreOffice Calc – VLookup with dates

    In a different post on this blog, I showed how to use Vlookup to match lists. Someone commented on that post and indicated that it didn’t work with dates. It turns out, it does, but… There is a slight tweak required to make it work. So, if you want to learn how to use VLookup,…

  • R – changing mirror in RStudio

    R – changing mirror in RStudio

    CRAN (The Comprehensive R Archive Network) is a distributed set of servers that allow people to download the various R packages from a bunch of servers that are all “mirrors” of each other. These servers or mirrors are called “repositories.” There are many advantages to this: (1) people can download from a mirror that is…