LibreOffice Base

Import

I always loved MS-Access…a great MS product for quick databases so I started playing with LibreOffice Base. Thought I’d import my dog database. Found a import extension that wasn’t intuitive and the fonts were so small it gave me trouble. Errors just bounced right to the code. So I had enough of that. Anyhow I downloaded the data from my web MySQL database. Downloaded in CSV but that didn’t have the field names so I downloaded the SQL too. So I opened the CSV with LibreOffice Calc then cut&paste field names from the SQL data file, to the top of the CSV. From the first field, pressed CTRL+SHIFT+END to select all records then CTRL+C to copy them all. At that point from LibreOffice Base go to EDIT>Paste and follow the wizard. It creates a table with the name you gave it. The file is an ODB. And just like that I had 715 records!

Elon Musk

Today marks one month since Elon Musk took control of Twitter. After less than a week people were complaining about Twitters direction. “Nothing’s changed”! As if his ultimate plan could be realized overnight.

Not to single one person out but I follow conservative Catturd. So I notice his posts. Talk about turning on a dime. I remembered and was somewhat shocked at his assessment. I tried to look back at his comments but could only go back to Nov 10th. So I had to google.

And Elon responded. Twitter has 396.5 million users and 206 million users access Twitter daily. And Elon took time to respond to a single user complaining that Twitter wasn’t all better at day one.

I do believe Catturd has since changed his tune. However at what point do you say to yourself “I’m just a a guy with an opinion”. I should leave running a huge complex tech business to someone who is the boss of actual “Rocket scientists”.

He built Tesla…he built SpaceX. And all these armchair quarter backs know best what needs to be done. They have all their amateur shortsighted advice. He made massive employee cuts. Everyone is warning him of the risk of firing all these “experts”. I’m sure he didn’t sink $44 billion dollars into a company without giving it a lot of thought.

Saving my old house phone number to Google voice

This is something I did years ago, but I wondered if the old number worked. I figured I’d document it for posterity and before senility sets in. So I asked my daughter to call me using the old number and it did ring my cell phone. The only thing unusual was a voice telling me to press 1 to accept the call.

For sentimental reasons I didn’t want to loose my old house landline phone number I had for over 30 years. That number was one of the first things I had my kids memorize when they were little. Not really being a heavy phone user, I waited a long time before getting a cell phone. So when I finally got a cell phone I for a while, had both the old and the new phone(s) and numbers.

Back then, I finally just cancelled my house phone and let the number go into that great abandoned phone number graveyard in the sky. Then I heard about Google Voice. I found out you could route another phone number to your cell phone with Google voice. But it only works by transferring a cell phone…not a landline phone number to Google voice. So before using Google voice I would first have to transfer my old landline phone number to a mobile phone. However many months had passed after cancelling my old phone number, but I called AT&T and to my surprise they hadn’t given that number out. So I miraculously I was able to get it back. It might have helped that I bought a cheap AT&T Go phone to transfer my old AT&T phone number to first. All this was still in the AT&T family.

I was then able for $20 to transfer the cheap cell phone number (old house number) to Google voice. Then Google actually forwards calls from the old number to my cell phone or any other phone number I’d like. So for example if I was going to spend a few weeks in a remote cabin with no cell phone access but they did have a landline, I could change my forwarding destination to the cabin landline number.

If I remember correctly…you have a lot more control if you use the Google Voice app on your cell phone. You can actually tell your phone to call out on the old number. It will save voice mails or transcribe voice calls to text.

Google Voice will actually assign you another number for free if you just want another number for your cell phone.

Birthday database change

After all these years of entering a note in my Famous birthday database. I had to increase it’s size. I increassed it from 300 to 500. Because my entry for Sacheen Littlefeather was being truncated. In the grand scheme of famous people she ranks very low on the list however the note length to describe her unusual claim to fame needed to be larger than the 300. It’s certainly possible that past entries have also been truncated and I just didn’t notice. It wouldn’t be hard to write a few queries to flag possible overflows.

Mastodon stuff

Mastodon has become a talking point since Elon Musk bought Twitter. For me it’s nothing against Twitter under Elon, still…it might be good for Mastodon. It has certainly boosted it’s exposure. I’m considering moving to a different Mastodon instance. From here where I joined Oct 11, 2018…

to Fosstodon, because it may be a better starting point for me. They describe themselves as “Fosstodon is an English speaking Mastodon instance that is open to anyone who is interested in technology; particularly free & open source software.”

Related Cool things

Google Plus like app
Move to Another instance
Change Servers