Tag: technology
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ChatGPT – checking for personally identifying information
I recently hired a panel survey company to conduct surveys in several countries around the world. With some of the questions, we gave participants the option to select “other” and then fill in the blank. Given the ethics approval that we have for the data, we are not allowed to retain any data that could…
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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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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/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…