Travel, Tech, Thoughts…

  • Questions to Ask Missionaries and Evangelists

    I was hurriedly walking to a meeting across my campus about a week ago when a young man stopped me and asked, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” Without waiting for me to respond, he asked, “What church do you go to?” When I told him I don’t go to church, he…

  • A bridge too far: The failure to capture ‘spiritual fitness’ in the US military

    After massive resources have been spent trying to assess spiritual fitness in the military, scholars now admit it is not a meaningful concept.

  • Backing Up Files to Prevent Data Loss

    Backing Up Files to Prevent Data Loss

    It took years to figure this out and it’s not free, but I don’t ever lose files anymore. Not losing files is worth the $240 I pay for these services per year. Do note that I use Linux as my operating system, which is part of the reason why I chose the software that I…

  • Does religion really improve educational outcomes?

    Horwitz makes the claim that religiosity is beneficial for working-class young men when it comes to their educational attainment. The claims in the article are clear illustrations of two logical fallacies – faulty generalization and cherry-picking.

  • Replacing Paragraph Breaks with Double Paragraph Breaks in LibreOffice Writer

    Replacing Paragraph Breaks with Double Paragraph Breaks in LibreOffice Writer

    Here’s the problem I was facing. I had a document with a lot of text that I had to analyze. The text had been copied from a spreadsheet and pasted without formatting to get rid of the cells. As a result, there was a single “return” or “paragraph break” between each passage of text. That…

  • LibreOffice Calc – Conditional Formatting

    LibreOffice Calc – Conditional Formatting

    I haven’t used this feature of spreadsheet software as much as I probably should, but I have a spreadsheet I have been working with a lot lately and conditional formatting has been key to helping me orient myself in the spreadsheet. However, in the process, I realized that I am really a noob when it…

  • How To Fix PDF Forms Not Showing Contents in Okular (Linux)

    How To Fix PDF Forms Not Showing Contents in Okular (Linux)

    I have had this problem happen twice now, and I don’t know exactly what is causing it, but I found a solution. Here’s the situation… I received a PDF that has forms. Typically, that isn’t a problem as Okular is able to open most PDFs with forms and show both the forms and what has…

  • Cooking Tips

    I’m not a professional chef. I claim no real expertise as a cook or chef other than the fact that I cook for my little family a lot and I like to eat good food. As a result, I spend a surprising amount of time cooking. There are lots of other places where people can…

  • Mexican Restaurants in Central Tampa

    My New Year’s resolution for 2021 was to try a new Mexican restaurant (primarily food trucks and small places close to us in Wellswood) each month for all of 2021. To make the comparisons across restaurants I tried to be fairly consistent and order Mexican street tacos (at least one chicken and one steak) at…

  • Plex Playlists with Amazon Echo

    My music library is stored on my NAS. On my primary desktop at home, I mount the music folder and use Clementine to listen to my music. Everywhere else, I use Plex to play my music. Playing my music through Plex via my browser at work, via my Roku in the family room, and via…