NaNoWriMo Begins on November 1st

NaNoWriMo (nanowrimo.org) begins on November 1st. For the uninitiated, this is the National Novel Writing Month, in which everyone participating tries to write at least 50,000 words towards a novel (or, perhaps, a tome of poetry or short stories). In any case, it’s an interesting challenge in which I hope to actually have better success this year; the last time I attempted to participate everything went straight to Hell and I accomplished about 5,000 words. Not much to brag about…

LibreOffice 4.x Crashes on Xubuntu 14.04

This information should apply to Ubuntu as well as Xubuntu and applies to all LibreOffice v 4.x that I tried. If LibreOffice 4.x is crashing after the document has been open a few seconds, try opening the document but do not try to navigate at all. Instead, pull down the Font box and see if any of the fonts are set with an italics appearance (other than italics-based fonts). For example, if you have Comic installed, it should appear as itself and not in an italic font. If it does, the font is most likely mising from your system.