Travel, Tech, Thoughts…

  • Virtual Private Hosting – How to Remove a Domain with Certbot SSL Certificate (on Ubuntu 16.04 with apache)

    It used to be pretty easy to remove a domain from my Virtual Private Server – dissable the site in apache, delete the files, delete the underlying database, and remove the domain from my DNS manager. Done. With SSL certificates now a standard part of hosting websites (see here), this is complicated by the removal…

  • Linux – 360 degree video editing on Linux

    I recently purchased a 360-degree camera that I have used a few times. It takes 360-degree spherical photos and also films in 360 degrees. It’s not the most expensive such camera, but it does a decent job shooting 360-degree panoramic videos. However, I have run into a couple of problems with the resulting footage on…

  • National Youth Leadership Forum (Envision Experience and Envision EMI) – Pricey Summer Camps of Questionable Quality?

    My son was “nominated” by his 3rd-grade science teacher for what both the teacher and we thought might be a nice opportunity – a week-long summer camp that focused on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). The camp is put on by the “National Youth Leadership Forum” (or NYLF) and was called “Pathways to Stem.”…

  • LibreOffice Calc – splitting contents of cells into multiple columns (e.g., splitting commas)

    I periodically have to take a column of text in LibreOffice calc that has names like this “Lastname, Firstname” and split them into two columns. I figure it out every time, but then I forget how I did. So, here’s a quick tutorial on how this is done. Open your spreadsheet with the cells that need…

  • NY-Mount Marcy

    Summit Date August 12, 2017 (around 11:00 am) Party Ryan Cragun, Mark Woolley, Tom Triplett Trip Report In my big swing across the US that allowed me to complete most of the highpoints in the Northeast in 2013, I didn’t manage to fit in Mount Marcy. It’s a solid day hike, and I just didn’t…

  • R (Linux) – creating a wordcloud from PDF

    On my professional website, I use wordclouds from the text of my publications as the featured images for the posts where I share the publications. I have used a website to generate those wordclouds for quite a while, but I’m trying to learn how to use the R statistical environment and knew that R can…

  • R (Linux) – basic installation

    To install the R programming environment on Linux is pretty straightforward, but it does require a little bit of know how in order to find the correct packages. As is typically the case with Linux, there are multiple ways to get things done. I like to use Synaptic for installing and removing software, but you…

  • Switzerland – remaining adventures

    I was attending my conference July 4th through the 6th, but skipped out on the last day of the conference (July 7th) to go see CERN (the location of the large hadron collider). Debi, Toren, and Rosemary, meanwhile, had a number of adventures. They took the chocolate train through various parts of Switzerland, visiting the…

  • Switzerland – Matterhorn and Zermatt

    Our trip to Iceland occurred because I was presenting some research at a conference in Lausanne, Switzerland. We spent a week in Iceland before heading to Switzerland. We flew into Geneva then took a train to Lausanne, where we stayed in a nice apartment (AirBnB) with an amazing view of Lake Geneva. I really only…

  • Iceland – final post – drone footage

    I took my drone to Iceland with us. I knew that there were lots of places where I could fly the drone and it seemed like the ideal opportunity to take advantage of the drone to get shots we couldn’t otherwise get. Here’s my Iceland drone compilation: