Travel, Tech, Thoughts…

  • 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…

  • Linux – Video Tag Editing

    Linux – Video Tag Editing

    Not everyone may be as particular as I am about having my files organized, but I like to make sure everything is where it’s supposed to be. I make sure my music is tagged accurately. I also like to have my video files tagged correctly. What does that mean? Just like with audio files, video…

  • LibreOffice 6.4.3.2 – Not Showing Greek Letters/Symbols

    LibreOffice 6.4.3.2 – Not Showing Greek Letters/Symbols

    I ran into an issue the other day that ended up taking me hours to solve, in part because I couldn’t find any other solutions online, which is pretty unusual these days. Here was the issue: I was evaluating a paper (I’m an academic and read lots of papers) that had a bunch of Greek…

  • Plex on Linux – Video Files Not Detected

    Plex on Linux – Video Files Not Detected

    I added a number of video files to my Plex server the other day and, when I checked Plex, some of them had not shown up in the corresponding library. I tried the obvious solutions. First, I selected the options for the library and then chose “Scan Library Files”: That will often solve the problem,…