Author: Elaine

OpenOffice.org and labels

Garry Knight’s Linux Stuff has a useful looking tutorial for creating flat file databases using OpenOffice.org, along with some other Linux stuff. Evidently, you can create and populate dBase format files from OpenOffice.org.

I spent yesterday coaxing OpenOffice.org to produce labels on our aging laser printer (ActionLaser 1500, a LaserJet III clone), but used a spreadsheet as a data source. Making the labels was not particularly intuitive, but the documentation included with OpenOffice.org worked. I printed the labels one page at a time because our printer’s feed mechanism is almost worn out, and tends to jam when presented with anything other than plain text weight paper. I plan to retire the printer when the current toner cartridge empties or the printer jams so badly I can’t free it, but it just keeps going and going. Those old laser printers were tough little beasties, unlike the current crop of inkjet printers that look like they would blow away in a mild breeze.

There seems to be a bug (or at least a distinct lack of flexibility) in using OpenOffice.org to make more than one page of labels. I managed to do, but the label synchronization process slowed to a crawl. It wasn’t a big issue, because of our printer limitations, but would be annoying if you had a more functional printer.

1999 Australia Trip

A few years ago, Jack uploaded a bunch of photos from our 1999 trip to Australia. Due to the space limitations that we had at the time, we had to take it off our website. Then we lost the source for the commentaty, but not the photo scans themselves. Last weekend, Jack recreated it as a photo album, and it is now on his weblog, Exempli Gratia.

TargetAlert

TargetAlert is Firefox plugin that I found when someone mentioned it for its ability to alert that a clicked link will attempt to load an Adobe Acrobat file. What I really value though is that it warns (by a little icon beside the link) that a clicked link will open in a new window, allowing me to Ctrl-Right Click (or Middle Click on Linux) so that it will open in a tab instead.

Slip Sliding Away


Our house is on a school bus route, with a high priority for getting plowed, and we generally have no complaints about how quickly our road gets cleared after a major snowfall. Therefore, I was surprised by the single lane of icy ruts that comprised our road when I left the house to go vote this morning. Fortunately, I met the clearing crew as I went out: two trucks and a road grader, followed closely by the school bus. Jack didn’t have any trouble getting home in the Suburu last night, except for when he had to wait by our next door neighbor’s driveway for ten minutes for someone else who was stuck.

It pays to live in a tiny precinct: despite going to the wrong polling place and standing in line for a bit, then having to find the correct polling place two blocks away, I was done and in my car by 7:30. I took this photo on the road to our valley: snow is so pretty when you don’t have to deal with it.

FlashBlock

Under the assumption that if I find something annoying, someone else has found it annoying, I went looking for a Firefox browser plugin to block the automatic playing of Flash animations, and found FlashBlock. It puts a small button on the page where the animation would have appeared, which you can view the animation if you desire. One note: after you install the plugin, choose FlashBlock from the Tools->Extensions menu, and enable the plugin using Options before restarting the browser. It does not automatically enable itself when installed.