I recently launched a coming soon landing page for Engineering Tourist – a side project I’ve had in mind for a while. The goal is to highlight and discover engineering or technical tourist sites depending on your location. For example if you were in Tucson Arizona, you might discover the Pima Air & Space Museum which is really fantastic. Putting together this landing page was pretty simple (after all, it’s just a single static page), but involved learning and wiring up a bunch of services. Also, every service here is at the free or nearly-free level, so that keeps the…
As part of my ongoing effort to clean up all my old computer hardware, I finally organized all my video games for donation, and used a cheap barcode scanner to take inventory.
I’m finally making some good progress sorting through all my old computer hardware for donation or recycling. My collection of old laptops, desktops and computer cables are finally out of my garage and donated to my local Goodwill. This mostly went quickly except for a brief nostalgic time spent with my old workhorse, a Dell Precision Workstation 410MT.
Newer versions of Microsoft Word (in particular, Office 365) will no longer open older .DOC files. If you want to convert these to the current supported .DOCX format (especially if you have a batch of files to convert), LibreOffice is a good option. LibreOffice is free open-source software and you’ll get the benefit of doing everything on your computer. There are a lot of online services which advertise converting these files, but for anything personal or confidential I prefer keeping everything local.
In past years I’ve listed a few favorite tech advent calendars, each focusing on a different technology and revealing some new content each day from December 1st through 25th. Each year I also have great plans to follow along with each as the days go by, but it’s not easy to keep up. Even though Christmas has passed, here’s my roundup of interesting technical advent calendars, which I’ll hopefully spend some time reading through over New Year’s!