Travel, Tech, Thoughts…
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Plex – Sports Videos Library
I use Plex to manage my music and video libraries. I actually don’t watch sports very often. The one exception is when I’m grading papers (I’m a college professor). I’ve found that watching soccer/futbol matches in the background while I grade papers breaks up the monotony of grading. With finals coming up, I thought it…
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LibreOffice Calc: Graphs with Two y-axes with Different Scales
While a bit technical, it’s occasionally useful to plot multiple data series that have very different scales in the same chart. Let me give an example to illustrate. Let’s say I want to see whether the number of Mormon temples being built aligns with the number of Mormon stakes (akin to a Catholic diocese) that…
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LibreOffice Calc: Interpolating Missing Values in Graphs
Here’s my situation. I have some data over time but I’m missing values in specific years. I want to graph that data but would rather not have to estimate all of the missing values. It turns out, LibreOffice Calc can do that for you in your chart. Here’s how… Imagine I’m plotting the number of…
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Setting Up a New Windows Computer for Your Kids
I recently had a colleague contact me for some computer advice. He knows I’m a computer geek and was looking for some help setting up a new Windows laptop for his kids. He was wondering which antivirus software to buy. If you’re at all familiar with my blog, you’ll know that I’m not a fan…
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Plex/tinyMediaManager and Doctor Who Specials
I’m a science fiction fan. And I want my science fiction at my fingertips. To that end, I have slowly been digitizing my favorite series (e.g., Star Trek, Stargate, and now Doctor Who) and putting them on my fileserver that uses Plex to serve the episodes to whatever device I want. I recently ran into…
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R – create scatterplot with ggplot2
R has pretty amazing capabilities for creating charts and graphs. One of the most common packages for this is ggplot2. However, it’s not the most intuitive package I have used in R. So, I figured I’d illustrate how to make some relatively simple scatterplots in R using ggplot2. I’ll likely post instructions on how to…
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R – find cases (rows) that match specific criteria
I regularly need to find a specific case or set of cases that meet some criteria when analyzing data, often so I can modify those values for one reason or another. The easiest way I have found to find such values in R is the “which” function. As with most of my R examples, I’m…
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R – delete one or several variables in a dataset
I regularly create variables while analyzing data and then find that I need to delete a variable I created. At times, I just want to get rid of a variable in a dataset (’cause screw that variable). This short tutorial will explain how to delete a variable (or multiple variables if needed). As with most…
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R – create variable filled with zeros
I ran into a situation where I needed to add a variable to a dataset. I knew that I was then going to modify some of the values in the variable, but most of the values were going to be zeros. So, I wanted to create a new variable and fill it with all zeros.…
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Unethical Amazon Review Modifications
I don’t always review products on Amazon. I don’t have the time. But there have been two instances over the past year when I have been contacted by someone because of a review I wrote on Amazon. Both times, these individuals have tried to bribe me to remove my negative review of the product. Here’s…