Category: Technology

Like a kid in a candy store

Now that I have more free time, I’ve been getting back into Second Life again. I also want to get back into Open Simulator, but it’s sort of hard to know where to start. A few years ago I tried a few different Hypergrid instances, and they were okay, but not mind blowing, so I’m…

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Hacking AI News

Having recently graduated, it seemed like a good time to try new things. Among the new things I’ve recently tried out is a WordPress theme called AI News. It’s an open source theme intended for sites that want to incorporate a ChatGPT plugin to write blog posts. I have no intention of using that plugin…

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Taking notes with Obsidian

For a few years now, I’ve been using Obsidian to keep a daily journal, and it’s been great. It has a lot of options that I’ve never explored or needed but something came up recently and I wanted to find out how to connect Obsidian to Zotero. An online search using DuckDuckGo returned an unexpected…

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Business continuity planning

For the past 20+ years I’ve worked at a large public university in the American Midwest, and over the years I’ve picked up “other duties as assigned.” These are duties that don’t take up all of my time, but are good to work on when things are slow. One of these duties is business continuity…

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Long Live the Classic Editor

When logging into a WordPress blog, the user is first shown the Dashboard, which usually includes links to posts about WordPress. This morning, most of those posts had to do with the announcement that support for the Classic Editor plugin has been extended to 2022, and possibly beyond. In 2018, when WordPress came out with…

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Revisiting the Dell Inspiron 13 7375 2-in-1

It’s been almost two years since I wrote about installing Linux Mint on a Dell Inspiron 13 7375 2-in-1, and in that time I’ve used it pretty regularly. After two years of using the laptop on a nearly daily basis, it seemed like a good idea to write about my experiences with it. I’m not…

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Vlogging

A few months ago as I was doing updates for the fundraising platforms, I decided to try something new in the future. Since I’m a big fan of YouTube, I thought I might start doing videos. Except of course, that it isn’t as easy as just filming and uploading. I started paying attention to the…

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Installing Linux Mint 19.2 on a Dell Inspiron 13 7375 2-in-1

Over the past few years I’ve noticed that my personal laptop has been showing its age. It is a Dell XPS 13 L321X, one of the original Project Sputnik laptops from Dell. It came with pre-loaded Ubuntu 12.4 and has a Core i7 CPU, 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD. One of…

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Goals

Gazing in my crystal ball and reading some tea leaves, it looks like the Fediverse is going to grow substantially over the next few years as people realize Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter act are acting against their interests. There are a growing number of websites that are federated and interconnected, on top of the thousands…

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Protocols

There are a lot of different protocols on the web (XKCD sums it up nicely). Basically, every big company has their own way of doing things making stuff easier to find, or putting stuff in context. The three protocols below are encouraged by different major tech companies, though they all kind of do the same…

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Rabbit holes

Several years go I used to get sucked into the rabbit hole that is Wikipedia. I used to visit its Main Page, then click on some random link, go to an article, and get caught in this loop of clicking random links and reading random articles. It was exciting and it felt like I was…

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That’s Amore

When the site you visit first Is on the Fediverse, That’s Amore! It’s almost winter break, so it almost goes without saying that I’ve been thinking about a project to keep me from getting bored. Over the past month or so I’ve been looking at the Fediverse and the projects associated with it. It sort…

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