Category: Random Tech Tips
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Linked data types in Excel
Apparently parts of this have been around for a couple of years, but it just came on my radar last week with this blog post. Did you know that Excel can do lookups from providers like Wolfram, Bing, and Power BI on a bunch of different data types? Only available with a Live365 (and/or institutional?)…
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Historical COVID-19 R-Values for Alberta
Filed under stuff no citizen should have to do, today I went through pages archived by the Wayback Machine in order to provide a patron with historical R-Value data for COVID-19 for the Province of Alberta. This information is updated weekly (since mid-December, 2020) at https://www.alberta.ca/covid-19-alberta-data.aspx, but for some reason the Government has chosen not…
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That cool picture from the cover of The Data Journalism Handbook
The Data Journalism Handbook has been updated from its original 2012 edition, and is available to purchase or for free download from the publisher. When I first tweeted about this a month ago, @Gersart wondered who was responsible for the artwork on the cover. Frustratingly, there was no information about it in the publication, and…
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Preparing a dataset to use in Hydrator
Update – April 18, 2023: From the developer: Twitter's changes to their API which greatly reduce the amount of read-only access means that the Hydrator is no longer a useful application. The application keys, which functioned for the last 7 years, have been rescinded by Twitter. Every few months I get an email from someone…
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Photoshop 2020 blank screen instead of images – fixed
Just had the pleasure of upgrading to the latest version of Creative Cloud at MPOW, and while it appeared to go smoothly I immediately had a problem with my workflow. Importing an image (jpg) into Photoshop would only show a blank white screen. The image WAS correctly rendered on the home screen, but just a…
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How to Find the RSS Feed URL by Guessing
The Zapier newsletter I just got had a link to this article from last year: How to Find the RSS Feed URL for Almost Any Site. It's got some good tips for sussing out RSS feeds, but I have a couple more. I ran across two sites recently that should've had RSS feeds, but apparently…
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3 Simple, Free Apps for Accessing Your Home Computer From Anywhere (Gizmodo)
AnyDesk is totally new to me, so I thought I'd make note of Gizmodo's post on 3 Simple, Free Apps for Accessing Your Home Computer From Anywhere. I use Chrome Remote Desktop at least weekly, and have used TeamViewer to good effect in the past, so can vouch for each of those. The commenters overwhelmingly…
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Search Google Maps via shortcuts
Lifehacker has a post describing how to Map Anything From the Chrome Address Bar. Sounds great, except I recently switched back to Firefox after many years away, so found that there are a pair of extensions for FF that allow you to do pretty much the same thing. Map with Google Maps takes care of…