Category Archives: tips

Pickpockets in China

Have you ever had a pickpocket put your wallet back into your pocket without taking the money? That’s what happened to me in Beijing yesterday. He grabbed my credit cards, my driver’s license, etc. and proceeded to make massive charges. … Continue reading

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Increase Your Blog Traffic

The world needs to know when we post, and it’s difficult ways to shout “Pay Attention To Me” in a polite but noticeable way. WordPress provides a ping-o-matic service and turns it on by default, but I’ve discovered Vladimir’s Ping … Continue reading

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True-Type fonts on Fedora 11

The key insight to getting true-type fonts working was finding this page: http://www.go2linux.org/msttcorefonts-true-type-fonts-on-linux. I had to make some minor tweaks to get this to work. Here’s how my session went: yum -y install rpm-build cabextract xfs ttmkfdir rpm -ivh http://dl.atrpms.net/all/chkfontpath-1.10.1-2.fc11.x86_64.rpm … Continue reading

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ODT to RTF converter

Recently I discovered that OpenOffice can’t really generate RTF files, so I wrote my own converter. It’s rather basic, just handles italic, double space, paragaraphs, and centering. However, for what I need it for it works a lot better than … Continue reading

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Natural Family Planning, the Church’s Best Kept Secret

When I began my journey to becoming Catholic I was focused mainly on doctrinal issues, e.g. what is the nature of the eucharist, did Mary remain a virgin her whole life, did Christ intend for the Pope to be the … Continue reading

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Safe Nontoxic Cockroach Killer

After moving to the South I discovered how large and unpleasant cockraoches can be. I used to think those 1 inch long bugs in movies were just props. (Now I count myself lucky, in South America they can get to … Continue reading

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