Author: snall

Courses I’m Taking or Have Completed

by snall

Even with my time being very constrained, I still try to find time to learn new skills or freshen up existing skills. I thought I would list what I’m currently studying and what I’ve completed. I don’t endorse any specific courses unless specifically stated. The same goes for any platform. I have a lot of courses on Udemy.com but it’s just coincidence since I got a great deal on a bunch of courses when I first started, near Black Friday several years ago. I also use sites like StackSkills, Codecademy, and Adobe. I’m considering putting together some courses of my own since I enjoy sharing and teaching others. Note that none of these courses are accredited, and are only good for a coffee when presented with $5 at a Starbucks location. 🙂

I am currently studying or reviewing Java, Python, Laravel, JavaScript, Business Plan Writing, and other subjects.

Convert Numeric Text in Cells to Real Numbers in LibreOffice

by snall

Occasionally I get a spreadsheet with numbers that are presented as characters in a column. You can tell because the numbers will be left-justified in the cells. This can wreak havoc and waste time when trying to filter and sort data. There are several solutions. You can do a find-and-replace, use the VALUE function, or use a plug-in. The one I found is called CT2N. Once installed, it puts an icon on a tool bar. I had mixed results with it so far.

Select the data you want to modify.

For find and replace, key in ^[0-9\-] into the “Search For” box.

In the “Replace With” box, key in a single ampersand, &.

I usually click on “Replace All” since I have selected the exact I want to modify.

Now you can proceed to filter and sort your data to meet your needs.

This link was helpful for using the find-and-replace and VALUE function techniques.

https://neowiki.neooffice.org/index.php/Converting_a_Text_String_to_a_Number_in_Calc

This link instructs you on installing and using the CT2N plug-in.

https://extensions.libreoffice.org/extensions/ct2n-convert-text-to-number-and-dates

Hope this helps and good luck!

Convert URL Text in Cells to Links in LibreOffice

by snall

I haven’t needed to convert cell text into links until now and I may not need it again anytime soon, but I thought I’d make a note of it here and you might be able to use it as well.

LibreOffice Calc is the tool I employ most often for my spreadsheet needs, though I sometimes have to turn to Gnumeric or Excel. I started trying out Apple’s Numbers spreadsheet program, but it will take some doing to figure out how to use it and I’m not sure it handles certain features of Excel spreadsheets all that well based on my initial tests. And no, Google Docs won’t do for complex and large spreadsheets like this.

I was doing some analysis on a product list for a particular vendor and I wanted the link text to be an actual clickable link so I wouldn’t have to be copying and pasting to see the web page of the link. I found the answer here:

https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/6692/calc-convert-text-to-link/

Essentially, you’ll want to use the Find & Replace function to wrap the text in the cell in the HYPERLINK function. You’ll probably want to convert the whole column, except for the first row if it’s a heading, so select it first.

In the Edit > Find & Replace dialog, fill out and select options as follows:

Search For:

(.*)

Replace with:

=HYPERLINK("&")

Note: If this doesn’t work after a copy-and-paste then type it in manually.

Check option: “Regular expressions”

Search in: Formulas

Click on Replace or Replace All per your needs.
Note that I had a specific column selected and a check box was in “Current selection only” which was just what I wanted.

Bingo! I now have clickable links and can do faster product research.

Watching Facebook Stock (for Grins and Giggles)

by snall

I haven’t been following the markets much lately but I’m trying to get back in sync with them by putting in some screen time after work. A neighbor of mine has a small portfolio and is holding Facebook so I started looking at it and his other holdings. I created the marked up screen shot you see below. It’s a 1-year daily chart, and I drew a trend line along the 3 most prominent lows. Two points make a line, and three points make a trend line. I duplicated the line and it fits nicely among many of the highs, making a channel. It tested the lower trend line today but buyers came in and brought it back up to close above the trend line. It will be interesting to see what it does in the next couple of days in this post-election time. Let’s see if it holds above the lower trend line and heads toward the upper one. I owned some of it late last year and made a nice profit on it but I usually trade on shorter time frames. Too bad because it would have obviously been a good longer-term investment this year. Wouldn’t you like to have sold it near the high before the sell-off — before the last earnings report?

FB from the close of 11/10/2016:

screen-shot-2016-11-10-at-11-00-57-pm

November 11, 2016: I drew in a new trend line at a support and resistance level. It closed below that level and below the lower vertical channel line. It had opened just under those trend lines, tested them (rose above), sold off, and then closed just a bit higher than the daily low. Let’s see what happens in the next few days. Will it continue to drop or push up above the trend lines again in the next few weeks? The volume was about 1.5 times normal at a glance.

And by the way, a mentor of mine said you should always draw your trend lines and pattern lines on a line chart (versus the candles shown here) for more accuracy. The points on a line chart will be the closing prices: an upper trend line will be across positive closes, and the bottom trend line will be across negative closes. I changed my chart to line mode and the lines could then be moved ever so slightly in this case. They say close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, but I think we could add stock charting to that list, too.

FB after the market close on November 11, 2016:

screen-shot-2016-11-13-at-6-59-42-pm

Disclaimer: Don’t make any trades based on anything you see here. I’m just “thinking aloud” and I’m not a financial advisor or certified anything. But with that said, don’t ever trade with your rent money or any other money that you can’t afford to lose. You can always learn with virtual or paper trading. Just be sure to act (as much as you can) like it’s real money on the line so it will feel real and you’ll behave the same way.

Weird Browser Behavior Result of Surprise Browser Add-on

by snall

Tonight I was determined to take time to find out why I was having some strange behavior on my Firefox web browser on my MacBook Air. I’ve been doing some contract programming in Hawaii and finally got settled down enough to get a handle on some things like this. I’d also like to find some time to actually enjoy some of the nice things about Oahu instead of worrying about where I’m going to stay and how I’m going to pay for it. It’s crazy expensive here and like a whole different country. But I digress…

The browser behavior that I noticed initially was that certain web URLs would be redirected to what looked like a Yahoo search page. Is Yahoo getting that slimey? It was one of those sorts of things where if you tried to go back a page it would just redirect you again, ad infinitum. I remember going through and removing Yahoo from the search engine choices in the browser preferences a while back, but now those few site URLs give me a 404 – page not found kind of error. When I flip over to Chromium (not Chrome) the same site would load fine. So tonight I did some searching and found that some people have been having similar things happen to them. There were also the comparisons to the bad old days of Windows XP where malware was everywhere all the time. They recommended looking for plug-ins related to Yahoo and removing them. I didn’t find anything with Yahoo on it, so I started the browser up in safe mode, and sure enough the sites would load normally. So I restarted Firefox again and then started disabling plug-ins one by one, starting at the top of the list since those were the newest. After a few disablings and a few restarts, something further down the list jumped out at me — SearchMe. What the heck? I never installed such a beast. It had apparently snuck in with something else that had been installed or did some sort of cross-execution thing and downloaded itself. Anyway, I disabled it and the sites now load fine. I still have no idea how it suddenly appeared as one of my add-ons, but it did. Firefox is promising a new, safer add-ons model soon. Let’s hope it helps and doesn’t ruin many other good add-ons that we like to use.

Update: The Yahoo search reappeared in my browser and in my browser settings. I followed this guide to remove other traces of the vermin:

Adware Removal Guide : Spigot

Make Money For Web Site Customer Referrals!

by snall

workdesk

Hi, my name is Stephen and I will build you a professional quality website or blog starting at $2,000. These responsive professional websites are perfect for personal projects, blogs, or small businesses and look great on any device including smartphones. I can incorporate all the features you need including pages, images, links,  Google maps, social media buttons, PayPal buttons, a contact form, etc. There are no contracts required and I’ll teach you a little about the entire creation process so you can continue to update your website on your own after the job is complete. I’ll leave you with all your login information as well as tutorial videos that might come in handy later on when you want to make adjustments. You can always contact me free of charge after the job is complete. Austin based. Please message me with what you have in mind and we can work something out. I can have your website complete for you in less than a week in most cases.

I pay a 10% referral or finder’s fee for any new customer upon successful completion and payment.

Thanks for your business!

Stephen

Our Amazon.com eCommerce Experiment

by snall

In an effort to feed our family, fund our 3 children’s education, attempt to retire with dignity, and buy some time for quality life activities, we have been pursuing some eCommerce projects. This article is specifically about our Amazon.com selling project.

Click here to view our Amazon.com product listings. If you buy anything, please ensure that the seller shows as “FadsAndMore” (it should) and leave a product review and seller feedback with five stars to help us rank higher and get more sales. Click here for specific instructions on how to provide feedback. Also notice the button below “Provide Seller Feedback” in the article screen shot that says “Write a Product Review.” By completing both of these tasks you will greatly help us in our efforts since our seller rank will rise and we will get more views by other customers. In fact, without it, our chances of success are very low.

Our profits continue to increase month after month as we source new products and learn more tricks of the trade. Data is a big focus for us, now more than ever. The goal is to grow the business and eventually have our own products on our own eCommerce web sites. Shipping will be free if you have a Prime account or if you have a specified minimum order total as indicated on the listing. We don’t engage in “races to the bottom” on prices. We focus on quality, in-demand products for our customers. We will also provide discounts to friends and family, so be sure to ask us on Facebook about it. Competition is increasing but there are ways to stand out. We have learned a lot in the last year and a lot has changed. Amazon has changed many of their policies and we continue to remain informed and compliant.

Amazon initially contacted us after seeing our eCommerce web site and asked us to participate in a program to list our products. The products listed there currently have changed considerably since early 2016 and continue to be replaced and augmented with new choices. It has taken a lot of study and effort to get where we are now, but we have a long way to go. Please share this with your friends and family, and thank you for visiting this site!

 

Creating Rounded Corners in Images Using GIMP

by snall

gimpFor the uninitiated, GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a free PhotoShop-like program for creating and manipulating images. This article assumes that you are already familiar with the basics of installing and using GIMP. If you need help getting to that level, please visit https://www.gimp.org/ as a starting point.

Here’s one way to produce images with rounded corners. For this article, I’m going to make an image to be used as my favicon for my site. It appears in the tab when you visit a web site and also in the bookmark or favorite when you bookmark a site.

  1. Open a new image of the desired size. WordPress recommends 512 x 512 as a minimum, so let’s use that size.gimp-rounded_corners-01
  2. In the layers dialog, right-click on the layer for the new image and ensure that “Add alpha channel” is selected. Alternatively, click Layer from the menu bar, then Transparency, then Add Alpha Channel.gimp-rounded_corners-02
  3. Click on the “Select” menu option, and click on “Rounded Rectangle.”
  4. Set the radius to 50% in the dialog that pops up. You can adjust that value up or down to see what works best for you.
  5. Go to the edit menu and select “Copy”, or use Ctrl-C.
  6. Go to the edit menu again and select “Paste as”, then “New Image”, or use Shift-Ctrl-V. You now see transparent corners giving the rounded corners effect.

You can continue to finish your project with your rounded corners base image.

Using WordPress Locally to Build, Modify, and Test Web Sites

by snall

Many people are adopting the WordPress content management system as their platform of choice for blogs and web sites. My latest project will be to convert an existing static web site to WordPress. I worked with WordPress in the past but haven’t done much with it until recently. I have several candidate web sites for conversion. I’m not really sure how well any site will convert, so it may ultimately have to been converted manually. The goal is not really to replicate the old site anyway, but to build a newer, more flexible — and to some extent, user-maintainable one.

The Plan
Rather than installing WordPress directly on my local web server installation on my desktop computer for the conversion and refinement phases, I chose to download and run a virtual machine appliance from Bitnami with WordPress pre-configured and ready to go. I’ll be trying out a couple of plug-ins to import the existing HTML pages and create a complete backup of the newly configured WordPress web site when it’s tested and ready for migration to the live web site domain. The plug-ins I have initially targeted to employ for this are Import HTML 2 and Duplicator. The web site for this is actually for my sister’s farm business, Ricochet Farms at http://ricochetfarms.com. It’s actually pretty amazing that she’s been able to maintain it as well as she has since she’s had no training on computers to speak of. She uses Dreamweaver for most of the work. We also plan to monetize the site with some affiliate links and unobtrusive pertinent ads.

Configuring My Computer For a 64-Bit Virtual Machine
The BitNami virtual machine I downloaded is a minimal configuration of 64-bit Ubuntu 14.04. Initially, 64-bit options were not available in my instance of VirtualBox. There are settings in the BIOS of the Dell 780 computer that are turned off by default. And yes, it’s an older machine I got for free, upgraded the processor to the fastest available with the most cores possible, added 8 gigabytes more RAM (10 GB total currently,) and migrated the system to an SSD (solid-state drive). It’s very quiet and fast enough for most purposes. Before I tackled the BIOS changes, I “upgraded” VirtualBox which required removing the older version first. All of my prior settings for my virtual machines were intact afterward.

I had to ensure that I had the following settings configured:

Security > Execute Disable (set to On)
Performance > Virtualization (set to On)
Performance > VT for Direct I/O Access (set to On)
Performance > Trusted Execution (set to Off)

Don’t ask me why, but I had to reboot twice for the 64 bit client creation options to show up. I rebooted again to double-check the settings, exited the BIOS and continued booting, and then the 64 bit options appeared.

Importing The Bitnami WordPress Appliance
The appliance file I had downloaded was unzipped, the OVF file imported into VirtualBox using the included VMDK file as the existing virtual hard drive, and then it was started up. I logged in to the command line interface that appeared, checked the IP address, and then browsed to it using my desktop browser. The default WordPress web site dutifully presented itself which was gratifying. However, I knew that the work was just beginning.

Transferring Files to the Virtual Machine
In order to import an existing web site, the files have to exist on the same server as the WordPress install. The virtual server is configured with no FTP or SSH access by default. To use SSH or SFTP, sshd must be enabled on the virtual server. Detailed instructions are available here.

$ sudo mv /etc/init/ssh.conf.back /etc/init/ssh.conf

$ sudo start ssh

Now SSH or SFTP access is possible, using an FTP client like the free FileZilla, for example.

Rather than using FTP to get all the files from the live web site, I used the command line utility wget. One reason I did this is because there are a lot of unused image files on the site and I didn’t want to transfer all of them to the virtual machine. I took that subset of files and used FileZilla to transfer them to the virtual machine. Then I used the Import HTML 2 plug-in to import the site by choosing Plugins from the admin interface, then Import HTML 2, and setting the options. I went largely by the instructions provided on the Import HTML 2 User Guide. The result? Well, the first pass yielded a site with most of the pages created, but there is still a lot of manual tweaking to do unless I can specify some different options in the plug-in and try it again. For example, I am seeing links that are absolute to the local machine. That won’t work when the site is uploaded.

More updates coming soon…