Travel, Tech, Thoughts…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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Linux FFMPEG – Flip Vertical Video to Horizontal
I was recently shooting some videos on my phone to share with someone else and accidentally flipped the phone before filming a clip. I never film vertically as I know that our playback devices are not designed to playback vertical footage. But I screwed up and got a clip that was vertical. Since I would…
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Linux – Batch Convert .wav to .flac
I ran into a weird issue the other day where SoundConverter, a GUI for converting audio files, was generating flac files that my audio player couldn’t see. I’m still not exactly sure what the problem was, but in trying to solve the problem, I went ahead and wrote a command to batch convert a folder…