Tag: technology
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ZFS – disk upgrade/replacement
I built my own Network Attached Storage (NAS) computer a few years ago but have been looking for an opportunity to upgrade the hard drives so I have more space. Leading up to Black Friday, I found a deal for 10TB drives that finally led me to pull the trigger (roughly $80 per drive). They…
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NoMachine Freezing on Xubuntu 22.04
I have a headless fileserver that runs XFCE (Xubuntu). I recently reformatted the operating system (transferring my files in a ZFS raid to the new operating system rather seamlessly). But the software I use within my local network to access the fileserver, NoMachine, started having problems. Basically, I could access my machine, but the NoMachine…
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Plex – Video Optimization & Converted Files Permissions
I was traveling with my wife and son, staying at an AirBnB a few states away from home, and wanted to watch some videos from my Plex server (server software version: 1.32.5.7349) using an Amazon Fire Stick on a Samsung TV. When I tried to play the videos using the Plex app on the Fire…
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Nexis Uni – Date Search Limited to 1 Year, No Issue Browsing, and No Obituaries
I’m a college professor. As a result, I have access to a number of research resources that most people don’t have, including my university’s library, which subscribes to numerous databases to help me and my colleagues (and our students) with our research. I was looking for some very specific information from the Los Angeles Times…
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Kubuntu – KDE – adjusting screen brightness trick
I just happened upon an interesting little bonus feature in Kubuntu 22.04 with KDE Plasma 5.24.7 that I thought I’d share since it’s so nifty. It’s possible to add a battery icon to a panel. This is done by right-clicking on the panel and selecting “Add Widgets.” Scroll down and find the battery and brightness…
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Kubuntu/Linux – batch convert HEIF images
My son recently went on a field trip. The teachers who went with him took hundreds of photos… on their iPhones. Since I want the photos of him, I downloaded all of them so I could skim through them and find the ones of my son. But I quickly realized that I was having issues…
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Linux: Starting and Stopping Torrents from Crontab
I download my Kubuntu installation images via Bit Torrent and like to keep Bit Torrent running most of the time. However, there are occasionally times when I want to pause my torrents and then restart them (e.g., when I’m streaming videos or otherwise using lots of bandwidth). I can, of course, do this manually, but…
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Kubuntu 22.04 – Pending update of “firefox” snap
In the 22.04 version of Ubuntu/Kubuntu, Firefox was switched from a repository to a snap. I don’t know enough about the technical reasons for that, but it does mean that how Firefox is updated has changed. It also introduced a very annoying notification message that you’ve probably seen (and which is why you’re here: Switching…
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LibreOffice – Set Image as Background/Watermark
I don’t do this very often, but occasionally I need to write a letter or something of that sort and I want to use an image as a background to the letter. A background image of this sort is often referred to as a “watermark.” (If we’re getting technical, a watermark is really a faint…
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Google Calendar Time Zone tricks
I regularly collaborate with scholars around the world. One problem that arises from that, however, is that we have to coordinate time zones. As a result, I have picked up a couple of really nifty features of Google Calendar that manage that for me. Here are the two I use most frequently. Add a Meeting…