Open New LibreOffice Documents Easily

Open New LibreOffice Documents Easily

After the most successful poll in Twitter’s history, I switched from Office to LibreOffice more than one year ago. There were many reasons to this shift, the main one being my non-willingness to pay a licence for software that I use less and less. For instance, Excel is only a UI to have a glance at data, since I analyse and produce graphics and summaries from them exclusively with R; and I use Word and PowerPoint only for compatibility with my colleagues, since I use LaTeX, Markdown, or R to produce text documents and presentations.

However, on macOS, LibreOffice is not a bundle of several apps (Writer, Calc, Impress), but a single application that contains the modules necessary for all these features. The application dynamically shows on the UI only the relevant modules (eg only the ones for a text document, for a spreadsheet, or for a presentation). I’m fine with that, except that there is no shortcut to open any given type of document. If you’re running a text-focused UI, the shortcut to open a new document opens a new text document. If you’re running a spreadsheet-focused UI, the same shortcut opens a new spreadsheet. Etc. But I found a solution.

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Posted by Benjamin in Software, 0 comments

Two New Papers To End 2020

This is nice news before we put an end to 2020: two papers on which I contributed are now published online! They are:

Let’s meet in 2021 for more papers!

Posted by Benjamin in Publications, 0 comments

Back To WordPress

Three years ago I switched to Anchor, an elegant and light CMS*. However, its development was discontinued, I don’t exactly when. I could have kept on using it but something important broke: the possibility of adding media to posts. Since I’m not thrilled by the idea of a text-only blog, I decided to move (back) to WordPress. WordPress is an extremely popular CMS, and one can reasonably expect a long-term support. 🤞

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Posted by Benjamin in Announcements, 0 comments

I found the best way to organise apps on my phone

Once again, I religiously watched the World Wide Developer Conference. Please don’t judge me. I don’t consider myself a developer—even though I’ve already plaid with Xcode—, but I like to watch the WWDC to know what’s coming to macOS, iOS and iPadOS. Actually, since they are running the devices on which I can easily spend up to 10 hours a day (personal + professional use included), I don’t find it particularly crazy to stay posted. 😏

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Posted by Benjamin in Lab Notes, 0 comments

We certainly have achieved a lot!

After two months of lockdown, I sense a general feeling of not having achieved much during this period. I can join this feeling as I haven’t myself worked eight hours a day, five days a week, all the time, but I certainly have achieved a lot of things. Just for the sake of self-pride and self-motivation, I’m going to list what I can think of:

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Posted by Benjamin in Lab Notes, 0 comments

How to reconcile clam and rbacon input files

As palaeoecologist, I work on data retrieved from natural archives, going back in time. It can be a lake sediment core or peat. The time scale of the data, actually, is built by interpolation of a few radiocarbon dates, measured at particular places along the core. This creates an age-depth model. I routinely use two R packages from Maarten Blaauw to do this:

  • clam, for classical age-modelling,
  • and rbacon, for Bayesian accumulation (and it’s an R package, obviously).

Each package defines its own function (clam() and Bacon(), respectively) which only needs the name of the core, to find a CSV file on your computer with the same name. This is in this CSV file that one saves the results of the radiocarbon datings to use them with either clam or rbacon. However, each package expects the data to be presented in a slightly different fashion. But in a file having the same name. Computers don’t allow that. And sometimes, I want to be able to use either clam or rbacon.

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Posted by Benjamin in Lab Notes, Software, 0 comments