Due to the economic impact of COVID-19 and other factors, there are a lot of people who are out of work right now.
As a hiring manager with over 20 years of management experience, I wanted to offer some resume tips…
Due to the economic impact of COVID-19 and other factors, there are a lot of people who are out of work right now.
As a hiring manager with over 20 years of management experience, I wanted to offer some resume tips…
As I have become increasingly frustrated with misinformation in the media, I found it necessary to put this guide together.
Here is some factual information about the virus, what kinds of masks you SHOULD and SHOULD NOT wear, and additional safety measures that you NEED to take when out in public.
Please share this with others, and stay safe.
In response to the COVID-19 threat, many companies are implementing a work-from-home policy for office workers.
Although working from home can keep you safe from a global pandemic, it can also be more challenging than it sounds.
Here are some tips and tricks for workers and employers, to help you maximize your time, and keep a remote workforce efficient.
Read on…
Crock pot recipes are a quick and easy way to feed the family.
Crock Pot Porkchops
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There are dozens of crock pot recipes online.
Please stay safe.
Rice or pasta is an easy way to extend a meal.
In addition to how to cook Justin’s Perfect Rice®, here is my recipe for using last night’s meat or veggies as today’s Fried Rice
Please enjoy and stay safe.
Stores are out of bread (and tortillas).
Tortillas are easy to make, and they last about a week if stored in an air-tight zip-top bag.
Makes 8-10 tortillas.
Here are things you can do with tortillas:
Toilet paper isn’t scarce. The raw material for toilet paper literally grows on trees. To MAKE it scarce takes layers of stupidity, each with its own nuances.
Not sure who all needs this, but here it is:
In the event that you run out of toilet paper…
Go to your local hardware store, and buy one of these:
This is a 1 gallon “garden lawn sprayer” that you can buy online for about $12, or it should be in your local big-box hardware store for about $16.
Note the angled wand…
After you buy a new one (DO NOT use the one from your garage), wash it out thoroughly.
When you go to the bathroom:
This is cheaper than modifying your plumbing, and warmer than buying a bidet kit that connects to your toilet’s water supply.
I recently had to e-mail a multi-page document – e-mail is that awesome 1990’s technology for submitting documents when the recipient doesn’t have a secure file transfer server – only to find that the attachment size was too large.
I scanned in three separate multi-page documents and then used pdfSAM to combine them all in to a single, 9-page PDF document.
Are you with me so far?
The final file size was over 80 meg!
I didn’t think anything of it, until my e-mail server complained about the attachment size.
After a little bit of thinking…
So it became clear that xsane / sane was just saving a bunch of TIFF files, and then copying them straight in to the PDF.
It turns out that Linux has a built-in command to split a PDF apart:
pdftoppm file.pdf imagefilename -png
This will create an image file for each page of the PDF, stored in PNG format. For example, if file.pdf is 5 pages, you will get:
imagefile-1.png imagefile-2.png ... imagefile-5.png
These can then be recombined using ImageMagick’s convert:
convert imagefile-*.png newfile.pdf
As predicted, the resulting file was around 20 meg – 25% of the original file size.
Internally, PDF probably stores the images as TIFF, but in either case, the round trip through the PNG format is what affected the compression.
PNG performs “filtering” or normalization of the image before it’s compressed, and thus, the resulting image is “more compressible”, and the artifact of this process is that going back to TIFF (or any other format) makes the older compression algorithms perform more efficiently with the normalized image data, resulting in a much smaller file size.
Moral of the story:
If you have a huge PDF (or any kind of source image), try converting to PNG and then back again, which might make the original compression more efficient.
Other options:
To assemble two or more completely dissimilar and poorly integrated components in to one unit, as in the patchwork manner of Frankenstein’s Monster.