Travel, Tech, Thoughts…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…