lazaruk.com

Blog

  • Hello world!

    Republishing everything back here, as I get inspired to do so.

    Original site content is available at https://old.lazaruk.com.

  • Fixing my Pelican to display images

    I found that the Pelican site theme I was using was automatically expanding images to 100% width, which I didn’t want to have. I also wanted to use captions on my images.

    Thanks to Joe Lotz I was able to sort this out.

    This involved switching from the Pelican provided Python Markdown to Pandoc Markdown. This adds a whole bunch more Markdown functionality to the site.

    1. Add Pandoc and the Pelican Pandoc reader to your environment.
    python -m pip install pandoc
python -m pip install pelican-pandoc-reader
    1. Update your requirements.txt so the deployments to other environments, like Netlify when this is published, also do this.
    pip freeze > requirements.txt
    1. I wanted to extend the site CSS to use my own CSS file. But I also wanted to not make a lot of changes to the source CSS of the theme if possible. So I created a new CSS file under /theme/static/css and then updated /theme/templates/base.html and added my css file in last. I also had to edit the pelicanconf.py file and change the line NEST_CSS_MINIFY = True; to NEST_CSS_MINIFY = False; without this change the minified css file is used instead and my custom css is ignored.
    2. Now I was able to comment out the width: 100% and height: 100% from nest.css, and add the captioning CSS that I wanted to use to lazaruk.css.

    This also served as a good reminder that css settings for images override the settings on individual images. Because I wanted to use the individual settings to define image size I needed comment those out of the css completely.

  • PowerPoint Wrapping In The Middle of a Word

    I had a PowerPoint document that I inherited where the text boxes were allowing words to be split in the middle of the word. Turns out the solution, copied/pasted below, was this:

    Your presentation was edited at one time on a computer running an oriental language. When that happened, an obscure PowerPoint setting got applied to it. If it’s just a few placeholders that are affected, here’s how to fix it:

    1. Choose File>Options>Language. In the Office authoring languages and proofing section, click Add a Language.
    2. Choose an Asian language (Chinese, Japanese, Korean all will work). OK out and restart all Office programs.
    3. Open your deck in PowerPoint.
    4. Select the text in an affected text box or text placeholder.
    5. Open the Home>Paragraph dialog and click on the Asian Typography tab.
    6. Uncheck the option for Allow Latin text to wrap in the middle of a Word. OK out.
    7. Repeat steps 4 to 6 for all other affected text boxes and text placeholders.

    If the presentation is large and the problem is widespread, take an alternate approach:

    1. Use File>Save As and change the Save as type to PowerPoint XML Presentation (*.xml).
    2. Open the XML file in NotePad
    3. Choose Edit>Replace.
    4. In the Find what field, type latinBreak=“1”.
    5. In the Replace with field, type latinBreak-“0”
    6. Choose Replace All.
    7. Save the file and close NotePad.
    8. Open PowerPoint and use File>Open to find and reopen the XML version. Resave in the normal PowerPoint pptx format. All English text will now break normally.

    Source: PowerPoint text box issue: how to stop text splitting in the middle of words in a text box MS PowerPoint 365 plz i need answer.

  • My Problems with BOINC

    I’m a long time user of BOINC. In fact I was an early user of the old SETI@Home project before BOINC was even established.

    Over the years I’ve tried some project managers with BOINC, starting with GridRepublic, and then moving to World Community Grid when I joined IBM in 2005.

    A few years ago it seemed to me that GridRepublic was no longer being maintained and so I dabbled with ScienceUnited as well.

    But in the end I didn’t like the strain that ScienceUnited was putting on my laptop, and I felt that I had to spend far too much time tweaking and monitoring it so that it completed the work units on time. So I decided to switch back to World Community Grid where I could easily specify limits that I was comfortable with and knew they would be respected.

    At the beginning of 2022, IBM transferred the WCG project to Krembil, and as part of the migration all work was stopped. When the project came back online I wasn’t getting new work units.

    So today I finally took the time to look into this.

    Removing and re-adding the WCG project from BOINC didn’t solve the problem. In fact, I was unable to re-add the project at all to my BOINC manager; I just got errors when trying to do so. So I tried removing the application entirely and re-installing from the version downloaded from the BOINC website, and from the WCG website. Neither of those solved the problem. I was sometimes able to add the project to the BOINC manager, and sometimes not. But even when it did add I was unable to get any work units to transfer.

    Performing a scrub of the program files directories and the registry didn’t move things forward for me either.

    But finally, installing the BOINC client as downloaded from ScienceUnited and then using it to attach to World Community Grid worked. The project attached and new work units are being downloaded in a reasonable timeframe.

    Odd. But it works.

  • Updating Anaconda Navigator

    For whatever reason my installations of Anaconda Navigator always refuse to update through the GUI. No matter how many times I click the Yes to upgrade, nothing happens.

    So finally I found 15 seconds where I was both tired of this situation and had the clarity of thought to do something about it.

    conda deactivate
conda update anaconda-navigator

    Problem solved. Sigh.

    Source: Updating Navigator — Anaconda documentation.