Travel, Tech, Thoughts…

  • Invitation to Commit Scientific Fraud

    Invitation to Commit Scientific Fraud

    I’m probably just naive and am definitely far too idealistic, but the email I just received crushed my spirit. I need to share it. Here’s the email with contact information removed but the website still intact so everyone can see who is doing this: Dear Professor, I’m XXXXX, a researcher at Well-online, the flagship editorial…

  • Batch Convert MP4 to MKV

    Batch Convert MP4 to MKV

    I ran into an issue where a number of my MP4 files on my fileserver were stuttering when I tried to play them back using Plex on my TV. After a lot of googling, I found out that this was due to some header information in the MP4 files and that the simple solution was…

  • FreeCAD Import STL

    FreeCAD Import STL

    I’m not a FreeCAD expert. I bought a 3D printer and am constantly coming up with new ideas for 3D prints to solve issues around my house and office. That required me to begin learning how to use CAD software and, as an open-source advocate, FreeCAD was the obvious choice for CAD. I design most…

  • Chocolate Ratings

    Chocolate Ratings

    I like chocolate. It’s probably my favorite sweet. Closing in on 50 years old, I came up with a new life goal – try as many types of chocolate as I can, rate them, and see if I can find my favorite chocolate. This page documents my ratings. Milk Chocolate Dark Chocolate White Chocolate (coming…

  • Bambu A1 Mini – 0.2 extruder doesn’t work!

    I bought a Bambu A1 Mini with the AMS in December 2023. It was supposed to be a present for my son so he could print some things. Well, he never really printed much on it, but I’ve been using it a lot. After nearly 8 months of printing dozens of projects on it, I…

  • Qualitative Analysis Using LLMs on a Local Machine

    Qualitative Analysis Using LLMs on a Local Machine

    While most of my research is quantitatively oriented, I am a mixed-methods researcher and periodically use qualitative sociological methods for research projects (typically interviews). I have used a variety of software packages to analyze qualitative data over the years, from NVIVO to Taguette to an abandoned R package to just coding text in word processing…

  • Airtable Forms for Third-Party to Submit Updated Information

    Airtable Forms for Third-Party to Submit Updated Information

    I have a use case that is probably more common than I realize. I am a faculty member at a university and our department wants to keep track of our alumni. To do that, we built an Airtable base that contains basic contact information for them. We can obviously update the base by hand, but…

  • Getting Ollama and Open WebUI Working on Kubuntu 23.10

    Getting Ollama and Open WebUI Working on Kubuntu 23.10

    I have two specific use cases for setting up AI locally instead of using ChatGPT (for which I have a subscription as I use it for a variety of tasks, as does my wife). I needed to analyze interviews but couldn’t upload them to the web for security reasons. I also wanted to work on…

  • 3D Printing Flexible PLA or TPU on Bambu A1 Mini

    I had an idea for a print that required flexible filament. The go-to flexible filament is TPU, but I was going to use the print with food, so I looked around for something that I thought would be safer with food and found Flashforge’s flexible PLA. I was excited to try out this print. Once…

  • National Youth Leadership Forum-Engineering & Rice Elite Tech Camp

    National Youth Leadership Forum-Engineering & Rice Elite Tech Camp

    I posted previously about National Youth Leadership Forum (NYLF) and its extremely expensive summer camps. In that post, I detailed what the camps included and that, from my perspective as a college professor, the camps did not seem worth the money involved. Of course, I cannot call these camps “scams” because you are getting something…