My participation in the 2025 Star Trek Cruise

My brother and I participated in the 2025 Star Trek Cruise, put on by Entertainment Cruise Productions.

My brother and I had gone on the 2018 Star Trek Cruise, and had a great time, but we decided that we weren’t so interested in immediately booking the following year’s sailing, nor during a nebulous period of “about five or so years”. We changed our minds in early 2020, thinking to book for 2021; however, difficulties in getting through the phone lines which were constantly busy and the subsequent world-wide event (which no doubt was the reason for all the busy signals!) made it clear that we shouldn’t continue with our efforts in 2020.

Fast forward to early 2024, we felt confident to book for the 2025 sailing: We booked passage on the 2025 Star Trek Cruise on the Royal Caribbean Explorer of the Seas in mid-March, 2024. This was still a somewhat challenging experience, since the phone lines to reserve were always busy. My brother mused to the effect of “the next time we book passage, I should take the whole day off!” Fortunately, my brother persisted and got through, and managed to get a reservation for the two of us. As returning guests for the Star Trek Cruise, we received a small discount whose amount I don’t recall, and a further 5% discount for paying the full passage at the time of reservation.

Flights were booked in early June, 2024, with a decision in November, 2024, to change things slightly toward flying separately.

We reserved hotel rooms in the Brickell area of Miami in mid-January, 2025. This area was chosen for roughly three reasons:

  • We had stayed in Miami Beach in 2018, which proved to be an excellent experience, except that neither of us were interested in the beachfront luxury that was available;
  • We had a perception, rightly or wrongly, that the Miami Beach area, which seemed to be all semi-luxury hotels and little else, required that any transportation considerations such as Ubers and taxis travel further than from other areas, although this may well have been subjective;
  • We wished to find another location that was as close or (at least apparently) closer to the cruise terminal, while maintaining per-night pricing that was not exorbitant. (Unfortunately, this year, the cruise was at the very beginning of the spring break, and prices went up accordingly across the board.)

Leading up to our departure date, we installed the app for Royal Caribbean, which impressed me as to how sufficiently complete it is and how it integrated my reserved shore excursions and no doubt were I to have made other purchases, those too, the menus in the dining room, and my on-board bill.

Starting about a week before the cruise, and a few days after prompting from the cruise promoters, my brother and I checked in on the Royal Caribbean app – as we discovered, probably too late – and got later embarkation times of 14:00 to 14:30. We also looked at the shore excursion options, and only chose one relatively inexpensive trolley tour in Belize City – which was entirely pleasant and enjoyable.

We did not chose any other shore excursions because we checked sufficiently late such that it appeared that other cruisers had grabbed up many to capacity; as well, many that we might have considered were no longer available. As for the rest, little interested us, or otherwise involved activities that were too risky for the conservative, risk-averse approach we took to the trip (as in, we decided that even laid back swimming-related activities, in which we were not particularly interested anyway, could have been too risky.) Note that we also didn’t choose any on-board paid activities, as we had in 2018, perhaps simply because their availability never really caught our attention, certainly not in time.

My brother and I travelled separately to Miami and arrived at different times. I arrived first, and a few hours later, my brother arrived. Note that we arrived two days before the cruise not because we wanted to do touristy activities in Miami before the cruise per se. Rather, we wished to avoid the consequences of potential logistical changes and delays (and therefore miss boarding our cruise!) that can occur when travelling non-trivial distances. Concerns included airplane delays such as delayed or cancelled flights, airplane maintenance issues, airplane overbooking, and weather-related delays such as snow storms; the cruise was February 23rd to March 2nd, which is prime winter storm season in the northeastern part of North America where we live, as well as the broader region. Winter storms which easily can wreak havoc in multiple ways and multiple times with airplanes and travel, especially in eastern Canada and the US north-eastern seaboard, and which can cause domino effects with severe delays, are simply a fact of life in our region. Essentially, we were planning a buffer period to allow for an impromptu re-enactment of the movie “Trains, Planes, and Automobiles”.

In the end, neither of us had any delays, and I was even sitting at the gate for my departure about four hours before I was to board the plane, in plenty of time for the previous flight at the same gate to have a waiting period. I also used the US customs app, which allowed me to go in a short line at my home airport, and I passed through very quickly.

At this point, I should note that I carried some commercially packaged iced tea powder to always have a drink during my trip, and some commercially individually packaged granola bars for times before and after the cruise, including travel days, when meals may not or could not have been timed conveniently during the trip. I did not have any trouble crossing into the US, despite having declared in the US Customs app that I had “food” which I did not specifically identify. Except as noted below in Cozumel, Mexico, I did not have any other problems with embarking on the ship, or crossing other checkpoints, with my iced tea or granola bars.

As I was waiting at my gate – about three hours – I noticed that it took an extra half hour for people I recognized in the longer lines without the app to pass through and barely make it for boarding for their earlier flight at the gate at which I was waiting!

My brother and I did not do any proper pre-planning for the expected time to be spent in Miami (two days) – despite always telling ourselves throughout the year that we should. The reason for this is a toss-up between mostly procrastination and, at least nominally, saying that the point of showing up in Miami at least 40 to 48 hours before our cruise embarkation was not to do some incidental tourism, but rather to plan for delays in the travel logistical obstacles listed above.

We did, however, do the following activities and go to the following restaurants / brewpubs:

  • Friday evening: Bay 13, a microbrewery / brewpub that also serves excellent food — however, due to the travel arrangements, I had eaten a sufficiently large meal perhaps two to three hours earlier, and so I had to bring the chicken parmesan I’d ordered back to the hotel — a great early lunch on the Sunday morning just before checking out and going to the cruise terminal! Bay 13 was an excellent venue that brews its own beer, and while we were there, they were hosting a wedding practice dinner;
  • Saturday morning: We revisited the Bay of Pigs regimental museum in Little Havana, as well as a costume store, and walked through a busy main thoroughfare in Little Havana, on a tourist-heavy Saturday morning
  • Saturday lunch: We then went to the Tripping Animals Microbrewery tap room, at the brewery in an industrial park, where the beer was excellent, and the food, while secondary to the beer, was adequate and tasty; as I recall, I had the pulled pork sliders.
  • Saturday evening: Black Tap Craft Burgers and Beer. This restaurant was quite nice, but a bit too commercial for my tastes; I was hoping for a more local beer and food experience, much as it had local beers. And, the location we visited in Brickell City Center had open air escalators in a sufficiently widely open area, which triggered my fear of heights!

Traveling with a cell phone:

Over more than 20 years of carrying a cell phone and several models and generations of cell phones, I have never, until this trip, experienced difficulties using my cell phone while traveling. Well, barring having traveled to London and Paris in 2003 and 2005, when I left my cell phone at home, assuming that my North American cell phone would have been incompatible for use in European cities at the time, and in the case that it may have worked, that use would have been prohibitively and exhorbitantly expensive.

Despite my confidence based on prior experiences, I should concede that my telephone is a unit purchased in April, 2020, therefore being about five years old at the time of this trip.

Upon arrival in Miami, I called back home to announce that the airplane had landed safely; while it took a few moments to connect to the network, I thought little of it, assuming that the delay was due to a combination of the unit being just turned on again and trying to connect to the local network, the number of other cellphones being simultaneously turned on and competing for cellphone frequencies, and the relative concentration of cellphones located at the airport, certainly as compared to the presumed number of cellphone towers immediately local to the airport.

However, from that point on, while I had roaming data and SMS texting, as confirmed by my having been able to freely use the internet data on my phone as well as receive confirmation texts from the hotel and airline, I never was able to make a voice call in Miami, nor in any of the ports of call in Mexico and Belize. There was an exception when my brother managed to call my cell phone while in Cozumel, but it was an experiment, and while I was sitting in front of him; further, in the moments following, I could not repeat the experiment by calling him back.

Vague technical notes:

  • OnePlus 7, purchased in April 2020 (and cruise in late February to early March, 2025);
  • The physical SIM card was changed from Bay 2 to Bay 1, to eliminate any presumed possible bias, to no avail;
  • The settings were changed to choose and test with the various local cellphone providers, to no avail.

Sunday, embarkation day:

Come embarkation time, we were originally planning to arrive at the cruise ship port, against recommendations from the cruise promoter, about half an hour earlier than our embarkation time of 14:00 to 14:30. We eventually decided to leave even earlier than planned, at about 12:45 instead of 13:00. Unfortunately – note that I say “Unfortunately” – this proved to be a fortuitous strategy, because there were seven cruise ships embarking at the same time, and the traffic jam leading to the port was excruciatingly, and stress-fully, long. We were fortunate that the tunnel, which was closed at the time and making the traffic worse, opened up as we were approaching it at about 100 metres, and we could go through it. This avoided a long detour. We finally arrived at about 14:40, after a trip lasting close to two hours instead of a half hour or less. Embarkation itself was relatively smooth, during which we needed to simply present our boarding passes through the Royal Caribbean app at a few checkpoints, and pass our carry on bags through airport-style metal detectors and possibly x-ray machines.

Ship:

Explorer of the Seas, Royal Caribbean – this is the biggest cruise ship I’ve been on. It was quite the exercise every day to remember where we were relative to where we were going, including our cabins.

I was fascinated that the ship was wide enough to have five rows of cabins from side to side, at least in the areas fore and aft where there were said width of cabins, as opposed to the central part of the ship, which had four rows of cabins, plus the central promenade.

I found the shower in my cabin difficult to control for the hot water; either I got the room temperature “cold” water – which was far closer to room temperature – or with the slightest adjustment, the water came out too hot. It was not good at blending water. The rest of the room was eminently adequate for one person who spent most of my time in the room asleep.

TV on Board:

The encoding of TV shows was not great, although most of the time it didn’t matter.

  • Some episodes of the various Star Trek series would suddenly lose their sound, which was obviously an issue with the source material being broadcast, because the same issue would repeat at the same time in the episode when the said episode would re-air;
  • Some episodes from the shows that were originally filmed in the old 4:3 format were sometimes stretched to 16:9 or close, and sometimes not;
  • Sometimes, the episodes from the original Star Trek series shown were in the old 4:3 aspect ratio as filmed, instead of the newer re-scanned and re-boxed in widescreen;
  • Screen resolution was fairly low, which was especially noticeable in the movies, showing a good amount of pixelation;
  • No channel was showing Star Trek: The Next Generation, nor did I notice airings of Star Trek: Prodigy;
  • And, two or three 24-hour news channels, a 24-hour sports channel, and a drama channel or two, as well as a channel with the map showing the current location of the ship, as well as a channel with the host “JT” announcing the day’s activities.

Food on Board:

The food on the ship was plentiful, and sufficiently varied, but I was disappointed that there wasn’t more variation from day to day in the WindJammer buffet area, as well as the dining room — a First World Problem :). Not to say that there wasn’t any variation at all – there was, especially in the latter, but it seemed as though there was only daily variation of two of the items in each of the main course and dessert menus of the main dining room menu. I nonetheless managed to find different meals every day, and lots of fresh buns and croissants and butter, a treat for me. A significant number of the desserts in the WindJammer buffet area were disappointing: They looked like professional pastry shop offerings, but were actually rather bland and tasteless. I also, ahem, sought out prune juice – which Lt. Worf described as “a warrior’s drink!” – a few times starting early to mid-week, which I found you could order (for free) at the WindJammer buffet area. The prune juice indeed helped me maintain a warrior’s approach during the rest of the cruise. Ahem. 🙂

Drinks:

I didn’t get a drinks package because while I enjoy nice beers (which incidentally are usually significantly more expensive than most macro-brewed beers – which normally, in theory, could figure in calculation of the cost-value proposition), I am usually a rather light drinker; to make the drinks package worthwhile, I would often have to had to consume, based on a conversation with someone who had such a package and was taking full advantage of the programme, about nine alcoholic beverages per day, every day, of course depending on the value of the individual drinks – about as many alcoholic drinks per day as I reckon I had consumed over the whole eleven days of my vacation! (Including in Miami before embarking, and in the tourist zones at the ports of call.)

I did manage to bring a commercially packaged iced tea powder with me on the trip, which was the bulk of what I drank throughout the trip.

Internet:

I had purchased internet access before leaving for the trip, and I had installed the Royal Caribbean app on my phone. Once on board, I wondered how to access the internet; on my smartphone, I joined what appeared to be the ship’s “free WiFi”, and the app figured out how to sign into the internet on its own, based on the knowledge (sent to the Royal Caribbean app) that I had purchased internet access; the app gave me a code to activate internet access for my laptop. I then wondered how to know that I was connected to the internet (as opposed to simply the ship’s intranet), and asked the person I was travelling with how to access the internet – using an app that required the internet! (The suggestion was to try visiting a well known news website which, were it inaccessible – and were one to have properly working internet access – would be newsworthy on an international level.) The internet was excellent and more than adequate in its speed, with no limits, with no down-times or brownouts or lack of availability that I could tell. (My brother could not use wifi calling on his iPhone, nor VPNs, but he learned that the lack of WiFi calling was probably a problem with the cell phone supplier, not aggressive internet filtering on the ship.) My brother and I constantly used the Signal messaging app on our phones to keep in touch with each other; we learned later in the week that some people found the messaging function in the Royal Caribbean app to be slow and often enough time-delayed, inefficient, and apparently without an obvious notification function.

Swag:

As part of the cruise, we received the following items, which were delivered in our rooms on a daily basis:

  • a poster celebrating the cruise’s theme of 30 years of Star Trek: Voyager, which I left behind because I didn’t want to carry it home;
  • a Star Trek baseball cap;
  • a palette of small Star Trek themed buttons;
  • a Star Trek themed fanny pack;
  • a cruise t-shirt (front, back) late in the cruise (no doubt timed to coincide with the pool party with the complimentary watered down drinks, as well as to not compete with the “embarkation day” shirts you could purchase in advance, and which presumably were sent to the purchasers in advance of the trip via courrier; I did not purchase one);
  • and a bag of roasted coffee beans thematically branded to the cruise and Captain Janeway, who liked coffee a lot, but who had to limit her intake due to resource limitations because of their being stranded in the Delta Quadrant with no access to Federation supply chains (including, in the Star Trek Universe, an ample supply of matter and antimatter to create the energy required to do things like operate food replicators, which were rationed). This was a sore spot for me because I immediately thought that it would be a problem bringing it back into the US upon debarkation in Miami at the end of the cruise (it wasn’t a problem for all the people I saw disembarking), let alone returning back home to Canada (according to the ArriveCan app, it wouldn’t have been). I rashly returned the commercially sealed bag to a room service trolley because I didn’t want the problem of carrying a food product across borders (ironically, considering that I had been carrying iced tea powder and chewy bars, both in commercially sealed packaging, which I had brought from Canada), let alone very fragrant roasted coffee which may be suspected of being used to hide the smell of illicit items (ie. drugs, which *of*course* I wasn’t carrying!)

Cabin door decorations:

Many cabin doors were decorated in various ways, including one door near our cabins that was giving away things like various buttons of the kinds that have messages and cartoons on them, of which I took one, and key chains; the occupants must have spent several hundreds of dollars making the many items they gave away. Neither my brother nor I planned any such activities, perhaps mostly for lack of imagination and creativity on our part. Perhaps, this would also have been seen by ourselves to have been a frivolous expense, and perhaps a not so frivolous logistical difficulty to transport with us given a risk of damage, or inherent (and expensive) logistical difficulties involved in bringing certain types of decorations, which may have ultimately required significantly larger luggage.

Costumes:

There were a lot of costumes, mostly excellent, and even more shirts with a plethora of Star Trek messages on them. I had several such shirts from when I’d been on the cruise in 2018, and all of them still just barely fit, but rather snugly. I had also trimmed my sideburns to the curved Star Trek officers’ style, but nobody said boo (I must admit that I never looked for them on others, let alone noticed any). There was one particular person on the trip who could have replaced Scotty in some of the movies as a body double including his face, and it would have been easy to believe that he was James Doohan of that period of time.

I was fascinated and impressed how certain communities became more visible on the cruise than on land, as expressed through their costumes and other markings, and how several times the expression “safe space”, in reference to the cruise and its participants, was invoked, and sorely appreciated.

Again, we did not bring any costumes (beyond Star Trek themed t-shirts we had from the 2018 cruise), mostly for lack of any interest in participating in cosplay, but also perhaps also because it would have been an expensive additional expense. We also no doubt recognized a definite logistical difficulty to transport costumes with us given a risk of damage, or inherent (and expensive) logistical difficulties involved in bringing certain types of costumes in extra luggage. In fact, I could have brought a Star Trek: The Next Generation era toy phaser, and perhaps another item or two stowed in my luggage, but which I decided were not worth bringing. I have heard stories of people being questioned at national borders for toy replicas of weapons, even if in this case I would hope it to have been impossible to mistake the “phaser” for anything other than a harmless toy (at least insofar as the “weapon” part was concerned); I was also concerned that it could nonetheless be confiscated as being a suspicious item for just about any reason that I might consider inexplicable, but impossible to argue against.

Star Trek Actors / Stars / Special Guests:

I should preface my comments in this section with the following:

I understand that, putting aside the specific agreements for how many appearances the individual actors may have had with the promoters and to which I could never be privy, there were numerous reasons why I didn’t see some of the guests and celebrities as often (or so it seemed) as I might have liked, because of any of the reasons in the following non-exhaustive list:

  • they were busy with photo sessions and autograph sessions throughout the cruise, which did not interest me;
  • “I’m not interested in a sushi class, even if it’s given by Linda Park from Star Trek: Enterprise”;
  • “this show in which such and such is appearing was in conflict with another show which I did choose to attend”;
  • having chosen to be a “day person” who tried to take advantage of so many of the main shows and ports of call during the cruise, I was exhausted by the time the main show came around at 21:00 every evening (sometimes falling asleep during said evening show), and was at a point when I was going to bed. As such, I therefore would miss a show that I might have seen, which may have starred a celebrity I would have liked to have seen, were the show to have been at another time during the day, and were I to have found a time slot during which to attend it;
  • there were a number of paid activities (ie. wine tastings, etc.), fundraising breakfasts featuring or hosted by a given guest celebrity, and the like, which did not interest me, nor which in any case had I been, did not catch my attention early enough to make a reservation;
  • We saw most if not all of the celebrities throughout the collective of the various shows, but not much outside of those events; I suspect that the “Dilithium Pass Holders” (who paid a premium for them) may have had access to special private shows and autograph sessions that kept the celebrities busy beyond the public sessions, and which I did not purchase;
  • and, a somewhat minor point, but which was the case at least one evening: Lining up for the evening shows in the main theater every evening in order to secure seats which we wanted involved missing out on parts of earlier evening shows which we might have seen, were we not lining up.

I did spot John de Lancie sit at a table near me at the WindJammer Café. I saw Tim Russ walk by me one afternoon. I was mildly disappointed that the likes of Robert O’Reilly did not get made up as Gowron, at least not when I saw him; apparently he *may* have been in costume for another event I did not attend.

Guests seen often, whom I am calling “the hard workers”:

  • Lolita Fatjo: Ms. Fatjo, perhaps best known in Star Trek circles as a script coordinator for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager, hosted a number of the panel shows and other shows I saw. Interesting thing I learned in writing up this post, after the cruise: According to her website, Ms. Fatjo’s current career appears to include managing “many actors from Star Trek and other sci-fi shows for convention appearances”, a role my brother and I surmised that she seemed to be performing while on the ship;
  • Dr. Erin McDonald, a science adviser for many of the Star Trek series, who hosted a few science shows as well as some guest panels;
  • Dr. John Grunsfeld, a NASA astronaut who was on at least three space shuttle missions to service the Hubble Space Telescope, who hosted a couple of science and Hubble Space Telescope shows.

Guests seen often:

  • John de Lancie, who played Q, and who led the “War of the Worlds” dramatic re-enactment, and spoke about his sailing adventures, among other things;
  • Jeffrey Combs, who played Shran (Enterprise) / Brunt (DS9) / Weyoun (DS9) / Penk (Voyager) / Tiron (DS9) / Krem (Enterprise), and who was in “The Rat Pack”, the DS9 panel, and “The War of the Worlds”, among other things;
  • Ethan Phillips, who played Neelix (Star Trek: Voyager), and who was in “The Rat Pack”, Star Trek: Voyager panels, and other shows;
  • Robert Picardo, who played the Doctor (Star Trek: Voyager), was in an opera show one evening, hosted a charity auction benefiting the Astronomical Society, and at least one Star Trek Voyager Panel;
  • Garrett Wang, who played Harry Kim (Star Trek: Voyager); I learned, after thirty-some-odd years, that his family name is pronounced the way an English-speaker would pronounce the family name Wong, rhyming with “song”, “wrong”, and “gong”, not, well, pronounced the way the family name Wang is spelled in English, rhyming with “sang”, “rang”, or “gang”. Mr. Wang was in was in the “Voyager Family Feud” show, Star Trek: Voyager panels, and was the center square in Star Trek Squares;
    • Interesting story, again learned more than 25 years later: When the Seven of Nine Character joined Star Trek: Voyager, the producers decided that they needed to eliminate an existing character for the obvious cost issues associated with the rather large main cast that they had. Apparently, they’d chosen Harry Kim to remove from the show, and I’d presumed at the time that Harry Kim was chosen over Kes because the writers had originally seen more potential in writing Kes stories. However, at that point, Garrett Wang, the actor, had just been ranked rather highly in People Magazine’s “Most Beautiful People of the Year” list, and so the producers could not choose to kill off the Harry Kim character.
    • But here’s what I learned on the cruise: Apparently, Mr. Wang was quite the party person during approximately two years early on in Star Trek: Voyager production, and apparently commuted from Los Angeles to Las Vegas every single weekend to take advantage of Las Vegas party life. This led to his being late several times on Monday mornings, often enough delaying production, especially during expensive location shoots (ie. at some outdoor set in an “alien environment” instead of on a constructed studio set), and this led to his being an obvious choice, until of course he was listed in the People Magazine ranking.

Guests seen almost often enough:

  • Jeri Ryan, who played Seven of Nine, and who was in the “Voyager Family Feud” show, Star Trek: Voyager panels, at least one of the Star Trek: Voyager panels I saw, and other shows which escape my memory at this point;
  • Robert Duncan McNeill, who played Tom Paris (Star Trek: Voyager) (who had to leave mid-cruise due to other commitments, and had to wear a mask to hopefully reduce the likelihood of getting sick, because people working on his project at the time of the cruise had had a *lot* of illnesses, and as the director he wanted to not get sick, which would force a temporary shutdown of the project, instead of just a slowdown but under circumstances which would allow for some re-arrangement of the shooting schedule to accommodate ill actors and crew members as well as those who weren’t ill), who was the Star Trek Family Feud show, at least one Star Trek: Voyager panel, and possibly other shows which escape my memory at this point;
  • Tim Russ, who played Tuvok (Star Trek: Voyager), who was in “Voyager Family Feud” show, Voyager panels, and possibly other shows which escape my memory at this point;

Guests Seen Rarely:

  • Kate Mulgrew, who played Captain Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager, and who only arrived mid-cruise, made an announcement on the PA system, appeared in the “War of the Worlds” dramatic reading, and in her show on the last evening. No doubt she was also involved in private-pay-to-attend events and autograph sessions.
  • Denise Crosby, who played Tasha Yar and a Romulan Commander in Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as being known for her “Trekkies” documentary; according to the schedule, she did a late-night ad-libbing of the lines to a silent showing of some Star Trek episode, which I did not see because it was too late for me, and frankly I was so unimpressed with a similar rendition on a previous cruise that it did not seem to be worthwhile to me;
  • Linda Park; she hosted a trivia session while I was at the first evening’s show, and hosted a sushi making event for which I didn’t get tickets;
  • Chase Masterson; she hosted a charity breakfast for which I didn’t purchase tickets;
  • Wilson Cruz, who was Dr. Hugh Culber on Star Trek: Discovery, who was in the Star Trek Squares show and was very complimentary toward Canadians;
  • Jonathan del Arco, who was in the Star Trek Squares show;
  • Celia Rose Gooding; I did see her in a Strange New Worlds panel, and she was in a “birthday party” show early on during the cruise given that it was her birthday a day or two before the beginning of the cruise, and which I did not attend due to its late night time slot.
  • Mary Wiseman was supposed to be on the cruise, according to the cruise t-shirt. I’m not sure that I even remember her being presented at the opening day party!

Shows:

My brother and I attended a lot of shows. Usually at breakfast, which we usually ate “early” at about 7am or thereabouts, we would take out the day’s printed out show schedule and start choosing the shows that we’d like to see that day, marking up the sheet with a pen in order to not forget.

There were a lot of panels with question and answer periods, and often started with “what are you up to these days?” – especially since of course most of the actors were not on the currently produced shows, some for several decades at that point, and of course had current professional and life projects.

The evening shows had an annoying, (presumably) unintended feature: In order to get in and have a decent chance of getting seats of our choice, we had to line up about 45 minutes before the show, since lineups would typically easily extend well beyond a hundred feet. As a result, we spent a lot of time every evening lining up and waiting; as well, this effectively made it impractical to see even a small part of other shows after our early dinner seating but before the main evening show.

We did not got to the even later shows and parties after the main evening show, which we saw every evening at 21:00, and which typically ended at 22:00 or slightly later. At that point, we were tired every day and usually went to bed, except for a couple of evenings when we went to the WindJammer buffet for midnight snacks; unfortunately, the WindJammer buffet only reopened at 23:00, making a couple of the nights we did do this particularly late affairs for us.

Sunday:

  • Pool party / countdown to launch at the pool level, with introduction of the various guests;
  • After dinner, we went to a Star Trek trivia show with J.G. Hertzler, hosted by … I’m trying to remember, might it have been one of the “Morale Officers”, who were young-ish ladies dressed in StarFleet uniforms, who would often help out at shows with things like passing around the public microphone, or marshalling the guests into and out of the theatre, and if they happened to be “just wandering around the ship”, could also provide basic concièrge services relating specifically to the cruise’s theme;
  • Evening show: Star Trek: Voyager Family Feud with Jeri Ryan, Tim Russ, Robert Duncan McNeill, Garrett Wang, against four passengers, chosen by throwing out stuffed “Murf” dolls from Star Trek: Prodigy into the crowds, and the people who caught them got to go on stage.

Monday:

  • “This Year in Space Science” with Dr. Erin Macdonald;
  • “In the Hotseat” with Connor Trineer and Roxann Dawson;
  • Star Trek: Voyager Panel #1 with Robert Duncan McNeill, Jeri Ryan, Garrett Wang, Tim Russ, and Brannon Braga;
  • Strange New Worlds Panel with Celia Rose Gooding and Melissa Navia, hosted by Jonathan Frakes;
  • Qapla’! Meeting the Klingons with Robert O’Reilly, J.G. Hertzler, and Roxann Dawson, hosted by Lolita Fatjo;
  • Federation Trading Post, later in the afternoon of the first day: the lineup was ridiculously long, and the relatively limited selection of goods (and limited selection of shirt sizes, especially in the larger sizes) was rather wanting, and the prices expensive;
  • Evening Show: “Star Trek Rat Pack” with Casey Biggs, Jeffrey Combs, Vaughn Armstrong, and Ethan Phillips: This was an excellent show that surprised me. During the 2018 cruise, I did not see this show; my memory was that they usually performed late at night after I went to bed, and I assumed that they were another musical act that was generic and unrelated to Star Trek. In fact, at least for this show, it seems that Max Grodenchick (who played Rom on DS9 but wasn’t able to make it this year) wrote new Star Trek related lyrics for well known songs, while the group as a whole played parts / roles apparently reminiscent of the Rat Pack from 1960s Las Vegas (which I initially found distracting, but which quickly became endearing for me.) This was a treat of a show!

Tuesday:

  • Port of call: Costa Maya, Mexico, a port we had visited before. We disembarked the ship early, enjoying walking through the shops. We saw “Danza de los Voladore” in action – a ceremony in which people tied to ropes wrapped around the top of tall pole would jump off their perches simultaneously, and “fly” down as the ropes unwound, until they got to the ground. We also drank beer in the tiki hut restaurant, then returned to the ship by lunchtime.
    • One notable thing – in my mind only – is that in 2018, at this very tourist zone, I purchased a “Mexican” blanket, on the premise that the only true authenticity that I expected was that it was indeed a blanket, that was indeed purchased in Mexico. I paid $75 USD for it, after negotiating the price down from perhaps $100 USD (or possibly more), as I recall. At the time, I was suspicious that I may have been a “mark” to see how much money they could extract from me, because I was a tourist coming off of a cruise ship and that I was in a tourist zone. I nonetheless decided that I wasn’t completely taken for a fool, although perhaps not by much. Indeed, I like the blanket very much; I use it regularly to this day, and I expect to continue using it for many more years to come.
    • On this trip in 2025, I had the notion that it might be interesting to purchase yet another “Mexican” blanket, despite my past suspicions, and despite that I already possessed two such blankets meeting the above criteria of “authenticity”. However, I had a hard price limit of $30 USD, and I walked away from the piles of unpriced blankets in Costa Maya without even inquiring about the price, figuring that I would never get the price I was willing to pay, especially since I wasn’t all that invested in buying another anyway.
    • Note that I am supposing that had such a comparable blanket been purchased in Canada (where I live) or in the United States, the $75 USD may have probably been a reasonable market price, or possibly even at the low end. (See below.)
    • As such, having walked away, I moved on with my day, and I bought a souvenir for my Mom back home.
  • Back on the ship, my brother and I spent the afternoon either lounging at the pool or in our separate cabins.
  • When shows started up again, we went to a “Hubble Space Telescope” presentation with Astronaut John Grusnfeld: A standing room only event!
  • Evening show: Based on the announcements, I had hoped that this would be a dramatic reading of the original Star Trek series’ episode “For the World is Hollow and I have Touched the Sky”. However, it proved to be somewhat rewritten to include a lot of juvenile jokes, so it was disappointing. However, the audiovisual part on the video wall was well produced, and unfortunately was perhaps the star of the show for me, given my perception of a poorly adjusted script with juvenile jokes inserted at various points (which normally might amuse me in my mind, but not as much in real life watching it on a stage. To be fair, I should state that I found similar humour far more amusing the evening before in the “Rat Pack” show.)

Wednesday:

  • Port of call: Cozumel, Mexico. My brother and I went to the tourist zone, which was principally a bunch of shops much like Costa Maya, some of which we browsed through. Indeed, at one such shop I found – and purchased – yet another “Mexican blanket” that I liked, but only for $8 USD. Given this spectacularly low price, I am now rather convinced that I might have been overcharged in 2018. However, I also think that the $8 USD price was severely below what the blanket may well have been worth, and would have certainly sold for far more back home in Canada. (Note after arriving back home in Canada: A well known internet marketplace listed “Mexican Blankets” for prices ranging from about $14CDN to about $40CDN with a few outliers up to about $60CDN, plus shipping, about $9.50USD to $27.50USD, and up to $41.50USD — so I *was* overcharged in 2018.)
    • Afterwards, we left the tourist zone, going beyond the gates “to see what there was to see”. We quickly set our sights on a sports clothing store which we could see across and just down the street, to see if they had extra-large size shorts or swim trunks for myself and my brother, which they did not. However, in short order, I insisted on returning to the tourist zone, feeling uncomfortable for unspecified, nebulous reasons related to being in an uncontrolled environment, and – beyond the sports clothing store – not being able to immediately see anything that caught my fancy to continue exploring.
    • Back in the tourist zone in Cozumel, Mexico, we decided to return to the ship by noon or very early afternoon. As a brief reminder, I had always carried a backpack with water and my iced tea powder, which proved to be an issue on this day. Not having brought the commercial package with me when I went ashore, the iced tea I was carrying was a problem when passing through the x-ray security operated, by appearances, by Mexican authorities on shore: The authorities asked about the powder I had, as well as the brown liquid I had in a drink container. They ultimately allowed me through without any hassle when a supervisor agreed – after inspections of both containers – that they were iced tea, and not some other suspicious substance. This was a stressful moment for me since my Spanish skills amount to “Holà” (“Hello”), “Gracias” (“Thank you”), and “No hablo español” (“I don’t speak Spanish”), while the officials principally worked in Spanish (though thankfully appeared to understand English quite handily).
      • Well, okay, I have a spattering of following words and expression in Spanish, which I do not have the wherewithal to use:
        • “Señor” — “Sir”;
        • “Señorita” — “Madam”;
        • “Por favor” — “Please”;
        • “Uno cerveza, por favor” — “One beer, please”, which is such a cliché coming from, well, a “Gringo” — “Foreigner”, usually a derogatory term for an Enlish speaking (North) American which for the purpose of this conversation to which I am equivalent as a Canadian, and which former expression I would think twice about using, even at a bar serving beer;
        • “Amigo” — in the familiar ways that one would use “Amigo” alone, “My friend”, meaning that I would likely never have an opportunity to use it.
  • We again spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing on the pool deck and/or napping in our cabins.
  • Evening Show: Star Trek goes to the Opera with Robert Picardo: This show was better than the “BFF” show that Robert Picardo performed in 2018 (and if I correctly understood half-heard snippets of conversations around me, Robert Picardo repeated his “BFF” show over several Star Trek cruises since, and possibly up to 2024!) for two reasons:
    • In Star Trek: Voyager, the Doctor sang opera on numerous occasions, so they were able to make a show out of the various opera pieces that were featured in the show, with each piece being introduced as being from a given episode, with a large TV screen also showing some of the relevant scenes or pictures therefrom.
    • Also, I thought that the quality of singing was far better than in “BFF” – well, the professional opera singer was unsurprisingly excellent, while Robert Picardo, in my estimation, sang better this year. I should note that I am not a fan of opera at all – in fact, I have a personal running joke about opera to the order of “Call 911! The person on stage is obviously hurt because they are screaming in agony!”
    • Additionally, there was an excellent piece sung, as a duet, in which there was opera music expressly composed so as to be used while singing the well known “Khaaaaaaaannnnn!” scene from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan!

Thursday:

  • Belize City, Belize, where we only got off the ship at about 11:00 since we purchased a trolley tour around Belize City starting at 13:30, which was to last for about an hour.
    • At this point, my brother and I were becoming mildly disenchanted with the completely commercial nature of the tourist zones, which consisted of stores selling souvenirs, silver, cigars, tequila, and rum, hence why we got off the ship so relatively late
    • This port of call required that we use tender boats to go ashore; seeing some discoloration of the water around the ship while eating at the breakfast buffet, I assumed sand was being stirred up by the ship’s stabilizers, which led me to believe that a port for cruise ships was not practical there, due to shallow water.
    • The Belize City trolley tour we had booked was very informative and pleasant: We passed through an area with a high density of schools, we were welcomed by an impromptu school drum band on the street, and we learned about the local stores and restaurants that were proudly mentioned by the guide, but which came across as small, local businesses that might not have existed a few years before, and hypothetically may not exist in however many more years from now, and replaced with another local business.
    • Belize City came across as a lot poorer than the impression that the (admittedly and very obviously completely contrived) privately-owned island in Belize run as a resort by NCL that we visited in 2018 as part of the 2018 cruise gave us. Nonetheless, this was a very pleasant tour.
  • Shortly after the tour, we returned to the ship early, and again, that afternoon, we passed extra time napping or relaxing on the ship.
  • Evening show: Star Trek Squares, with Garret Wang as the center square – I was expecting the center square to be Kate Mulgrew. Unlike in 2018, a Gorn with (intentionally) unintelligible speech did not occupy a square. (See below.)

Friday:

  • First part (about an hour) of “To the Journey: Looking Back at Star Trek: Voyager” documentary;
  • “The Weird and Wacky Science of Star Trek: Lower Decks” with Dr. Erin McDonald;
  • Trek Stars with Dr. Larry Nemecek and Dr. Erin MacDonald, discussing various stars relatively and not so relatively near the Sol System (our solar system!), and often a connection to star systems mentioned in Star Trek;
  • We did a short visit to the pool party with free watered down drinks;
  • “The Search for Life in the Cosmos” featuring Astronaut Dr. John Grunsfeld;
  • Writing for Star Trek with Brannon Braga, where we learned that while Star Trek: The Next Generation did accept spec scripts from the public (which we knew already), at a certain point early on in Star Trek: Voyager, they stopped accepting spec scripts. Apparently, they had roughly 30,000 on hand, and putting aside the overwhelming numbers and presumably the amount of work for re-writes that would no doubt be required in using spec scripts, they were concerned with copyright issues and the logistics of balancing said issues. I presume that were they to mix elements from various spec scripts, or two or more had purportedly similar premises or other elements, by using one, the author of another might decide to sue because Star Trek had their script, which may have been unopened, and may have had a similar idea in it to one that was used;
  • John de Lancie Presents: “War of the Worlds”, which was a well produced recreation of the as-aired “War of the Worlds” broadcast in the 1930s, including a (small) live orchestra, and an increasingly growing Mars on the video wall screen behind the actors throughout the show. However, the show had the problem of not being directly nor specifically relevant to Star Trek, even if we were a receptive crowd given the subject matter. (I was later reminded that the radio programme’s copyright protection might have expired, although some cursory checks cast doubt on this hypothesis. Later still, I learned through Wikipedia that John de Lancie has a history with this radio show (here’s my archive of the page with the reference), having performed it with other Star Trek alumni for Public Radio in Los Angeles in 1994.)

Saturday:

  • “Science Balderdash” with Dr. Erin Macdonald and Dr. John Grunsfeld; the “Balderdash” game with audience participation, and Dr. John Grunsfeld wearing Spock ears and a Spock uniform;
  • The second part of a charity auction of various posters and other paraphenalia, props, and ephemera made for, and publicly displayed throughout the ship during, the cruise and autographed. It was rather stunning to see how much money people were willing to spend on such items, including one item, which proved to have a secret twin which was revealed at a point when there were extraordinary bids between two sole bidders; each sold for an identical extraordinary bid which would have been at or perhaps even beyond what the most luxurious cabin on such a cruise would have cost. (I also wondered how the winning bidders of various items would have been able to pay for some of the more expensive items; surely even most people’s gold cards could not clear at least some of those amounts!)
  • Star Trek: Voyager panel #2 with Lolita Fatjo, Brannon Braga, Kate Mulgrew, Robert Picardo, Roxann Dawson, and I remember Garrett Wang.
  • Star Trek: DS9 panel: Casey Biggs, Jeffrey Combs, Chase Masterson, Nana Visitor
  • “The Gorn’s Gong Show”, a talent show judged by Jonathan Frakes, Denise Crosby, and Nicole de Boer. There were ten contestants: Five were gonged by the Gorn. One participant was a great singer singing a Whitney Houston song I think from “The Bodyguard” movie (but *not* “I Will Always Love You”); another very good lady from Great Britain singing opera (who won with 107 dB of applause);
    • Three acts which were gonged were:
      • A Klingon belly dancer;
      • A lady using lighted balls at the end of strings to dance with, but the batteries for the lights died as she was about to start;
      • And another dancer with something like streamer dancing but using lit glass fibre optic cables.
  • An Evening with Kate Mulgrew, who answered a lot of questions asked by the audience, including a crowd pleasing answer to a contentious question at the end.

Sunday:

As we were leaving the ship, we saw that a good amount of the branding for the cruise’s Star Trek theme had been taken down overnight from Saturday evening to Sunday morning, changing the theme to an 1980’s theme (Radio Shack, anybody? 🙂 )

After the cruise:

We had planned to stay an extra night in Miami, so that we could plan a little extra touristy type activities; if nothing else, following our previous Star Trek cruise leaving from Miami in 2018, we were inspired by some impromptu good luck we’d had with a friend who was visiting Miami at the same time, who provided us with some tourist-like activities while we assisted them with some last minute purchases, before we headed for the airport for our evening flight.

Alas, this year, we did not plan nor do any such tourism; while we indeed did stay the extra night, we were so exhausted that we spent most of the extra time at the hotel resting or napping, save for going out on the last night to yet another brewpub, Biscayne Bay, which was in “The old Post Office building” in Miami. This restaurant had (literally) in house brewing capacity for presumably mostly in-restaurant consumption, as well as a remote microbrewery location where some of the products that are served at the restaurant are brewed, as well as in volumes to satisfy sponsorship agreements with external clients and for general distribution. I was personally so exhausted that upon our return from the restaurant at about 19:15, I went to bed within approximately 20 minutes. Further, due to our offset travel plans, while my brother left the hotel mid-morning on the next day, I only left the hotel at about noon (I couldn’t get an extended checkout beyond noon). I spent the morning in the hotel, and several excruciatingly long hours waiting at the airport during the afternoon.

Also of note, we learned in the days following our disembarkation of unfortunate news from the ship we were on, during the following week’s 1980’s themed cruise by the same production company, leading us to be glad that we were not on that particular sailing. Suffice it to say that any discussions about being on said following sailing – be it specifically for that theme, or as a case of “wouldn’t it be nice to do a second week in a row and not even have to change ships, and have a different theme to boot” – were purely whimsical. Our cruise was sufficiently expensive: Even as compared to a comparable but otherwise un-themed cruise, apparently the pricing for the following week was even more expensive than our trip, while we know that the shows would have been rather different and not as much to our liking as our whimsical discussions might lead one to suppose. That being said, the incident we heard of – which I will not specify for reasons of it being sufficiently upsetting and in any case beyond the scope of this post – would likely have been quite the damper on the on board spirits, as well as no doubt being something of a public relations nightmare for the cruise promoter and the cruise line.

My impressions of the 2025 cruise compared to the cruise in 2018:

This cruise had a slightly different and more polished feel to it compared to the 2018 cruise; this iteration was the eight year that it was produced, versus the 2018 cruise, which itself was only in its second year. In that sense, such a perception made a lot of sense, especially since the promoters also organize other themed cruises (such as the aforementioned 1980’s cruise, a motorcycle-themed cruise, some jazz-themed cruises, at least one 90’s cruise, and so on) and benefited from not only years’ worth of experience, but also many cruises’ worth of experience.

Some things in this polish included the video walls during the shows, and general branding, which no doubt due were due to experience in having produced 1, 2 (x2), 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, instead of just one previous year in 2018 (admittedly, they had a “practice run” the week before with the first sailing).

While there were a number of similar shows in both years, some were produced more smoothly; my principal example would be the “Scopes Monkey Trial” script reading in 2018 vs. the “War of the Worlds” script reading in 2025. I would characterize both as generic performances adjacent to the core subjects of “Star Trek”:

  • The former, questioning and upsetting the unquestioning societal behaviour reacting to arguably arbitrary directives from beyond the situation’s actors (ie. not tv actors but the “real people” in the situation), admittedly a recurring theme in Star Trek;
  • While the latter, a (supposed) visit to a planet from (supposed) outsiders, which itself is effectively at the core of Star Trek’s mantra to “… explore strange new worlds, (and) to seek out new life and new civilizations …”

Firstly I stand by my 2018 characterization of a number of shows put on by John de Lancie and Robert Picardo as “Had the cruise been themed for the Stargate franchise, both John de Lancie and Robert Picardo, who also were secondary characters in that franchise, could have performed almost all of the same shows I saw them perform on the Star Trek cruise, and there would be little difference”, even though for 2025, I can’t include Robert Picardo as much in that characterization. I will also underline that I said “… while I was clapping at the end and otherwise (usually) thoroughly entertained, I was often scratching my head as to what the show I had just seen had to do with Star Trek …” This year, I can say that more of the shows I saw addressed the second comment. In the specific case of Mr. Picardo’s opera show in 2025, I will give full credit that it was tied to the opera appearing in Star Trek: Voyager.

As part of the added polish, “The War of the Worlds” show seemed well-rehearsed – in fact, for the musical parts and the scheduled interruptions in the script, it would have had to be – and the inclusion of the video wall graphic of the planet Mars slowly growing in size over the length of the show. (The “Scopes Monkey Trial” in 2018 was more relaxed, because it *had* to be due to participation by members of the cruise participants, even if they were selected “sufficiently in advance” earlier in the day to allow a short rehearsal before the show.)

Despite my comments above regarding the Tuesday evening show, a reading of “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky” in which I found the humorous re-writes distracting, I also found the video wall integration into the show to have been well done, despite the somewhat fuzzy pictures, which I presume were from the original show. Whether this was a result of enlarging shots done on 35mm film well beyond the size one could have ever expected out of such resolution, whether in 1969, or in 2025, or, if the resolution was intentionally somewhat reduced for any of a variety of reasons, or both, is unclear to me, and is of secondary importance.

Overall, in 2025 I didn’t think as much about copyright issues, although in my mind, it was clearly still an issue. A number of the shows were, entertaining as they were, neither existing Star Trek material, or original Star Trek material: Instead, there were a lot of panel shows, and, perversely, Family Feud and Star Trek Squares (ie. a renamed “Hollywood Squares”) (that were probably concepts reused on the 1980’s Cruise as well as their other themed cruises) which no doubt included royalty payments to the format copyright holders. I have to concede that the panel shows were of course composed of the various personalities, and *of*course* we all wanted to hear from the people who we saw on TV or who worked behind the cameras to learn about the shows and the personalities and the shows.

Music piped through to the public speakers across the ship was, as in 2018, composed of a lot of 1980’s tracks, but was more diverse than the playlists I recall from the 2018 sailing; I expect that this probably an evolution of style, planning, more securing of the rights to play a larger list, and, possibly a desire to be able to reuse the playlists at least during the following week’s “The 1980’s Cruise”.

In my eyes, there seemed in some ways to be fewer trappings than in 2018 – at least in the sense of invoking my “Paging the Squire of Gothos” perception – although in some ways there were at least as many in 2025 (ie. the storefronts in the promenade were “renamed” according to a large variety of Star Trek references.)

Final thoughts:

We thoroughly enjoyed the cruise, and to the surprise of some to whom we have told stories, we were thoroughly exhausted at the end, due to taking advantage of the cruise and its activities as fully as we believed was reasonably possible. (Friends and acquaintances appeared to expect a response along the lines of “Oh, a cruise, how relaxing!”)

Will we be going on next year’s cruise?

(Perhaps, unfortunately) No, since we have other life priorities which we believe outweigh the value of doing so, as well as believing that we thoroughly enjoyed this experience because of the time elapsed between our two Star Trek cruises, as opposed to doing them on a yearly or otherwise more frequent basis.

But did we enjoy it? Of course!

Podcasts, Google NotebookLM, and my Making Coffee post

As indicated at the beginning of the previous post about making coffee, the post was mounted, definitely tongue-in-cheek, as a result of a podcast created by Google NotebookLM about a previous blog post I’d mounted about making yoghurt muffins.

As part of the initial vision I had when I started to mount the post about making coffee, it was a foregone conclusion that a new podcast be generated as a result. As such, my brother and I tried to make podcasts about the post using Google’s NotebookLM Podcast Generator.

I had a few objectives about how the podcast should be structured:

  • There should be a bent that both the post as well as the podcast were inspired by the previous podcast on yoghurt muffins;
  • There was a hope that the new podcast would be somewhat (read I had an expectation of it being “sufficiently”) self-aware, including that the previous podcast was created “by the same hosts”, and therefore, that “the hosts” would at an obvious juncture make a comment to the effect of “In a previous podcast, we jovially suggested that the blog post author create another blog post about making morning coffee, and whaddya know, they did!”;
  • When supplying Google NotebookLM with source material, I entered an expressed expectation that there be a certain incredulity on the parts of the “hosts” that, albeit tongue-in-cheek, that I followed up on the jovial suggestion that I make such a blog post in the original podcast (at about 3:49), as well as the previous two points.

Unfortunately, the results were less than satisfactory.

  • The first podcast that was created, using the original yoghurt muffins post as one of several pieces of source material, seemed to focus more on the post on the yoghurt muffins than the post on making coffee;
  • Said first podcast generally seemed to rehash the podcast on the yoghurt muffins, often word for word or at least re-phrasings;
  • Throughout several of the podcasts that were created, there seemed to be lot more of what I will call psychobabble that came through multiple times, analyzing myself, and went on tangents on how to look at things differently in life — comments which, in general terms, were not fully inaccurate, but which were general human nature and not really what we were looking for. Ultimately there were increasing departures from the content, even ignoring the meta and self-referential parts.
  • The podcasts became increasingly long, one being at least 15 minutes long.

Ultimately, NotebookLM seemed unable — perhaps by design or a known lack thereof, and certainly at what would constitute a cursory glance — to handle levity, self-awareness, and meta conversations / commentary.

Anyway, here is the podcast I settled on after a few tries and was frustrated with the general results; it at least does discuss somewhat the meta nature of the post, as well as just barely enough of the coffee part when taken at face value.

Sigh. (Meaning, I guess that if I want a podcast creator that does what I want, I should find out if such exists. Or, I dunno, make a real life podcast myself.)

Making Coffee — Photos

In October, 2024, I published a post on making yoghurt muffins, and on a whim, my brother fed the post into the Google NotebookLM Podcast Generator, creating a podcast (in fact, two) in the process.

In the first podcast, one of the “hosts” remarks, starting at 3:49, “Like, imagine making a super detailed blog post, like, making your morning coffee.”

Well, here is the post that the “hosts” jokingly “suggested” that I create.

Note that I don’t actually drink coffee because I don’t care for it; I like iced tea (this web page was written somewhere between 1995 and 1997; while the page’s premise still stands some 28 to 30 years later, some of the specific information is rather out of date, principally the beer section: Nowadays, I adore Belgian dubbels, quadruppels, and German bocks — but I digress.) However, I regularly prepare coffee for my mom.

Note that there are a small number of photos which were either taken in a slightly different order, or which were recreated during the session, and one which was taken during a different session, but presented as follows for the sake of the narrative.

Update 20250106: I wrote a post about the trials and tribulations of attempting to make a podcast using Google NotebookLM about this post and its tongue-in-cheek premise.

Making the coffee:

I normally set up a coffee machine for my mom every day, usually the evening before.

Firstly, the coffee machine was taken out:

Coffee machine taken out

Paper coffee filters were taken out:

Paper coffee filters taken out

A single paper coffee filter was taken from the grouping of paper coffee filters:

Paper coffee filter separated from group

The coffee machine’s lid was opened:

Coffee machine lid opened

The paper coffee filter was placed in the plastic basket in the coffee machine:

Paper coffee filter placed in coffee machine basket

Note that my mom finds “medium roast”, fine grind drip coffee machine coffee grounds meets her liking:

Medium roast fine grind drip coffee machine coffee grounds

… which of course has suggested preparation instructions:

Manufacturer’s suggested preparation instructions

We keep coffee in a resealable plastic container in the fridge:

Coffee kept in sealable container in fridge

The coffee container was taken out:

Coffee container taken out of fridge

The coffee container was opened:

Coffee container opened

Three heaping tablespoons of the coffee grounds were measured out:

Coffee measured out

The coffee grounds were transferred to the paper coffee filter in the basket in the coffee machine:

Coffee transferred to paper coffee filter in basket
Coffee transferred to paper coffee filter in basket

Just for fun, a paper coffee filter was placed on a kitchen scale, and the kitchen scale was set to zero:

Paper coffee filter weighed

… then the paper coffee filter was switched out, and the paper coffee filter with the measured out coffee grounds were placed on the kitchen scale, revealing that I’d measured out about 24 grams of coffee grounds:

Coffee grounds weighed, 24g

The paper coffee filter and coffee grounds were returned to the coffee machine (photo from a subsequent setup):

Paper coffee filter and coffee grounds returned to coffee machine

The coffee carafe was taken out of the machine, and brought to the sink:

Rinse water drawn into carafe

A bit of water was drawn into the carafe, and swirled around to rinse out the inside of the carafe:

Rinse water in carafe

The rinse water was poured out:

Rinse water poured out of carafe

Two cups of water — about up to one of the marks on the side of the carafe — were drawn into the carafe:

Two cups of water in carafe

Back to the coffee machine …

Coffee machine with lid open

The water in the carafe was poured into the water reservoir at the back on the coffee machine:

Water poured into coffee machine reservoir
Water poured into coffee machine reservoir
Water poured into coffee machine reservoir
Water poured into coffee machine reservoir

The coffee machine’s lid was closed:

Coffee machine lid closed

The empty coffee carafe was placed into the machine on the hotplate under the basket:

Carafe placed in coffee machine

Since I normally prepare the coffee machine for my mom, I normally place a handwritten sign on top of the coffee machine indicating that all she has to do is turn on the machine:

Sign for my mom placed on top of the coffee machine

I also normally place a coffee mug beside the coffee machine for her …

Coffee mug taken out

… and I normally also place a spoon in the coffee mug for her:

Spoon added to mug

The following morning, a weekend day for me, I prepared the coffee for Mom, and served it to her.

I went up to the coffee machine, which of course was off (and, I noticed in the better morning light, that the machine itself could use a wipe down!) …

Coffee machine ready to be turned on

… and I turned it on:

Coffee machine turned on

The machine started operating, and liquid started flowing through the machine, and into the carafe, fogging up the inside of the carafe in the process:

Coffee starting to drip through the coffee grounds into the carafe
Coffee carafe starting to fill up
Coffee dripping through the coffee grounds into the carafe

After a few minutes, the machine finished, and the coffee was made:

Brewing cycle completed

I reached over to the compost bucket across the counter …

Compost bucket across the counter

… to remove its lid:

Lid removed from compost bucket

The coffee machine’s lid was opened:

Lid opened on coffee machine

… and the paper coffee filter and wet coffee grounds were removed from the basket:

Paper coffee filter and wet grounds lifted out of coffee machine basket
Emptied coffee machine basket

The paper coffee filter and wet coffee grounds were transferred to the compost bucket:

Paper coffee filter and wet grounds placed in compost bucket
Paper coffee filter and wet grounds placed in compost bucket

… and the compost bucket’s lid was placed back onto the compost bucket:

Compost bucket covered with lid

The coffee maker’s lid was also closed:

Coffee machine lid closed

Mom likes to keep milk for her coffee and tea in a plastic container in the fridge:

Milk for coffee and tea in container in fridge

The milk container was taken out:

Milk taken out

Milk was poured into the coffee mug:

Milk poured into coffee cup

For fun, I decided to measure out how much milk I’d poured out, which was a roughly typical amount:

Milk measured for fun

… leading to it being roughly two liquid ounces:

Two liquid ounces of milk

The milk was returned to the coffee cup:

Milk returned to coffee cup

The coffee cup with just the milk was placed in the microwave oven:

Coffee cup with milk placed in microwave oven

… and the milk was warmed for 20 seconds (1100 watts):

Milk warmed for 20 seconds

The warmed milk was brought back to the coffee maker:

Coffee cup brought back to coffee machine

Mom likes sugar in her coffee, so a sugar bowl was taken out:

Sugar taken out

The sugar bowl was opened:

Sugar bowl opened

For fun, I thought I’d find out how much sugar I put in Mom’s coffee, so I took out a kitchen scale, placed the spoon on the scale, and set the scale to zero:

Kitchen scale set to zero with spoon on it

The spoon was placed in the sugar bowl …

Spoon brought to sugar bowl

Sugar was measured out:

Sugar measured out

… and the sugar was weighed, proving to be about 4 grams:

Sugar weighed, 4g

The sugar was transferred to the coffee machine with the warmed milk:

Sugar transferred to coffee cup with warmed milk
Sugar transferred to coffee cup with warmed milk

Coffee was poured into the coffee cup with the warmed milk and sugar:

Coffee poured into coffee cup with warmed milk
Coffee poured into coffee cup with warmed milk
Coffee poured into coffee cup with warmed milk

… until the coffee cup had been filled:

Coffee cup filled

The spoon was picked up …

Spoon picked up

… and the coffee was thoroughly stirred:

Coffee, milk, and sugar thoroughly mixed

The now-filled coffee cup was again placed in the microwave oven, because mom likes her coffee really hot:

Coffee cup with coffee, milk, and sugar placed in microwave oven

The coffee was warmed for 25 seconds (1100 watts):

Coffee warmed for another 25 seconds

… and I served Mom her hot, fresh coffee:

Coffee served

And of course, Mom received a refill!

Making Strawberry Jam Muffins — Photos

As an effort to diversify my offerings of muffins for my mom, I learned how to make these delicious muffins containing strawberry jam, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Mom likes them so much that she declared that she likes them a lot better than both the bran muffins and the yoghurt muffins I make for her!

Note that while this recipe can be easily multiplied several times to make more muffins at once, this recipe is intentionally tailored to a half dozen muffins instead of the usual custom of a dozen muffins, since the original recipe on which it was based allows it to be halved and therefore be baked in a countertop convection oven.

In addition to this recipe, the following recipes can (usually, depending on oven size and specific dimensions) be made directly without adjustment in a countertop convection oven:

As well, here are a number of my other recipes which allow for adjusting by half to be made, or can otherwise easily be made (sometimes in shifts), in a countertop convection oven:

Making the muffins:

First, my countertop convection oven was turned on and set to 350F (yes, the photo says 86F, it’s preheating!):

Countertop convection oven turned on to be preheated
Countertop convection oven turned on to be preheated

A muffin baking tin and some paper muffin liners were taken out:

Muffin baking tin and paper muffin liners taken out

Paper muffin liners were placed in each of the wells of the muffin baking tin:

Paper muffin liners placed in muffin baking tin wells

A mixing bowl, a fork, and a spoon were taken out:

Mixing bowl, fork, and spoon taken out

Flour and a measuring cup were taken out, and some flour was measured out:

Flour taken out and measured out

The flour was transferred to the mixing bowl:

Flour transferred to mixing bowl
Flour transferred to mixing bowl
Flour transferred to mixing bowl
Flour transferred to mixing bowl

Sugar and a measuring cup were taken out, and some sugar was measured out:

Sugar taken out and measured out

The sugar was transferred to the mixing bowl with the flour:

Sugar transferred to mixing bowl
Sugar transferred to mixing bowl
Sugar transferred to mixing bowl

Baking soda and a measuring spoon were taken out, and some baking soda was measured out:

Baking soda taken out and measured out

The baking soda was transferred to the mixing bowl with the flour and the sugar:

Baking soda transferred to mixing bowl
Baking soda transferred to mixing bowl
Baking soda transferred to mixing bowl

Cinnamon and a measuring spoon were taken out, and some cinnamon was measured out:

Cinnamon taken out and measured out

The cinnamon was transferred to the bowl with the flour, sugar, and baking soda:

Cinnamon transferred to mixing bowl
Cinnamon transferred to mixing bowl

Nutmeg and a measuring spoon were taken out, and some nutmeg was measured out:

Nutmeg taken out and measured out

The nutmeg was transferred to the mixing bowl with the flour, sugar, baking soda, and cinnamon:

Nutmeg transferred to mixing bowl
Nutmeg transferred to mixing bowl

Salt and a measuring spoon were taken out, and some salt was measured out:

Salt taken out and measured out

The salt was transferred to the mixing bowl with the flour, sugar, baking soda, cinnamon, and nutmeg:

Salt transferred to mixing bowl
Salt transferred to mixing bowl

A fork was taken out and used to mix the dry ingredients:

Dry ingredients mixed with a fork
Dry ingredients mixed with a fork

A box of eggs was taken out:

Eggs taken out

An egg was taken out of the box of eggs:

Egg taken out

The egg was cracked on the edge of the mixing bowl with the dry ingredients:

Egg cracked into mixing bowl
Egg cracked into mixing bowl

Milk and a measuring cup were taken out, and some milk was measured out, but the milk was not yet transferred to the mixing bowl:

Milk taken out and measured out but not yet transferred to mixing bowl

Vegetable oil was taken out, and some oil was measured out in the measuring cup while the milk was still in it, but the milk and oil were not yet transferred to the mixing bowl:

Oil taken out and measured out but not yet transferred to mixing bowl

Strawberry jam was taken out, and some strawberry jam was measured out into the measuring cup with the milk and vegetable oil:

Strawberry jam taken out and measured out
Strawberry jam measured out

The milk, vegetable oil, and the strawberry jam were transferred to the mixing bowl with the dry ingredients and the egg:

Milk, oil, and strawberry jam transferred to mixing bowl
Milk, oil, and strawberry jam transferred to mixing bowl
Milk, oil, and strawberry jam transferred to mixing bowl
Milk, oil, and strawberry jam transferred to mixing bowl

The ingredients were mixed together with the fork:

Ingredients mixed with a fork

The batter was transferred to the paper liners in the muffin baking tin, using a spoon:

Batter transferred to paper liners in muffin baking tin
Batter transferred to paper liners in muffin baking tin

The filled muffin baking tin was transferred to the pre-heated countertop convection oven:

Muffin baking tin with batter placed in countertop convection oven

A timer was set to 23 minutes:

Timer set to 23 minutes

While the muffins were baking, a cooling rack was taken out:

Cooling rack taken out

Here’s a picture of the muffins rising while baking:

Muffins rising while baking

At the end of the 23 minutes when the muffins were baked, the muffin baking tin with the muffins were taken out of the countertop convection oven:

Muffins taken out of countertop convection oven

The muffins were taken out of the muffin baking tin and placed on the cooling rack:

Muffins placed on cooling rack

A muffin (in the case of this photo, from a subsequent batch) was taken out to serve to mom:

A delicious muffin is served!

Mom loves these delicious muffins a lot these days!

… and I froze the rest of muffins in a freezer bag, as I did with muffins from a subsequent batch:

Extra muffins placed in freezer bag for freezing

Mom now says that these are her favourites!

Making Bierocks (Stuffed Bread Rolls) — Photos

I came to enjoy a type of convenience frozen pizza in the early 1990’s while in residence at university; of course I enjoyed them then, and continue to occasionally enjoy them to this day. However, what really fascinated me was how the manufacturer managed to produce what amounted to a bun stuffed with a filling, in this case pizza toppings, without an apparent seam or other apparent entry point for the contents (such as the small hole one would see on the size of a jelly doughnut). While said fascination remained, it was not strong enough for me to actually try to figure it out.

Fast forward to late 2023, and a snacks table offered bierocks (here’s my archive), which immediately caught my attention. Before I even picked one up and looked at it, including inspecting its bottom, I immediately realized how they had been made. I definitely ate some, and asked the person who had made them for the recipe. Due to delays in setting up a cooking lesson with said person, I eventually just followed the recipe instead of waiting to be shown how to make them.

(And, I am assuming, the manufacturer of the commercial pizza treats uses some kind of mechanical method analogous to the relevant section(s) below, or, a precisely timed continuous dual extrusion system that minimizes seams, and in either case a dough recipe tuned to be susceptible to the process; ultimately, whichever process is used appears to assure that the edges stay sealed, and the filled units are moved along an Archemides’ screw or the like to the next step, in such a way that smooths out any seams.)

Note that in the following narrative, while the photos are principally from a single session, a few are from two other sessions in order to complete the narrative.

Making the bierocks:

One of the common ingredients in bierocks is chopped cabbage; so cabbage was taken out:

Cabbage taken out

A piece of cabbage was cut off to make chopping easier:

Piece of cabbage placed on a cutting board

The cabbage was chopped up somewhere between coarsely to finely:

Cabbage chopped

As the cabbage was chopped, it was placed in a bowl:

Chopped cabbage placed in bowl

I continued to chop cabbage, and froze the excess for future use, since a typical cabbage is far larger than the roughly half pound needed for this recipe.

In the case of this session, frozen cabbage from a previous chopping session was used; as such, a plate was placed on a kitchen scale, and the latter set to zero, so as to only be measuring the cabbage:

Bowl placed on kitchen scale, which was set to zero

About half a pound (about 227g) of frozen chopped cabbage was placed in the bowl:

Cabbage weighed

The cabbage was put aside in order to allow it to defrost.

Frozen ground beef was taken out, and weighed to make sure that the appropriate amount of two pounds (911g) would be used:

Ground beef weighed

The ground beef was put aside to allow it to defrost.

The basket from my bread machine was taken out and cleaned:

Clean bread machine basket taken out

Six ounces of water were measured out:

Water measured out

The water was placed in the microwave oven (1100 watts) …

Water placed in microwave oven

… and heated for 45 seconds.

Timer on microwave oven set

The warmed water was poured into the bread machine basket:

Warmed water poured into bread machine basket
Warmed water poured into bread machine basket
Warmed water poured into bread machine basket

Eggs were taken out:

Eggs taken out

The eggs were cracked into the bread machine basket with the warmed water:

Egg cracked on edge of bread machine basket
Eggs cracked on edge of bread machine basket

Flour and a measuring cup were taken out:

Flour and measuring cup taken out

The measured out flour was transferred to the bread machine with the warmed water and the eggs:

Flour transferred to bread machine basket
Flour transferred to bread machine basket
Flour transferred to bread machine basket

Sugar and measuring spoons were taken out:

Sugar and measuring spoons taken out

Six tablespoons of sugar were measured out …

Sugar measured out

… and transferred to the bread machine basket with the water, eggs, and flour:

Sugar transferred to bread machine basket
Sugar transferred to bread machine basket

Salt and measuring spoons were taken out:

Salt and measuring spoons taken out

The salt was measured out and transferred to the bread machine basket with the water, eggs, flour, and sugar:

Salt transferred to bread machine basket

Oil and a measuring cup were taken out:

Oil and measuring cup taken out

The oil was measured out (oops twice as much as I should have used):

Oil measured out

The oil was transferred to the bread machine basket with the water, eggs, flour, sugar, and salt:

Oil transferred to bread machine basket
Oil transferred to bread machine basket

A little note at this point: Since this recipe calls for using a bread machine, I strongly recommend using bread machine yeast; standard bread yeast behaves differently — although not necessarily badly — and in a bread machine, will produce a strong yeasty odour and taste, no doubt due to different timing required for it to act properly. Should you be making bread dough another way, including using standard bread yeast, of course I do not have any advice on that front. 🙂

Bread machine yeast and measuring spoons were taken out:

Bread machine yeast and measuring spoons taken out

Two teaspoons of bread machine yeast were measured out:

Bread machine yeast measured out

The bread machine yeast was added to the bread machine basket with the water, eggs, flour, sugar, salt, and oil:

Bread machine yeast transferred to bread machine basket
Bread machine yeast transferred to bread machine basket

The bread machine basket with all the ingredients was placed in the bread machine, and the unit was set to the dough only cycle, which in the case of my bread machine is setting #8, with a cycle time of 1h30:

Bread machine set to dough cycle

The bread machine was turned on:

Bread machine turned on

While the bread machine was preparing the dough, baking trays were taken out:

Baking trays taken out

Parchment paper was taken out:

Parchment paper taken out

Sheets of parchment paper were cut off the roll and placed on the baking sheets:

Parchment paper placed on the baking sheets

The baking sheets were put aside for later.

An electric frypan was taken out:

Electric frypan taken out

The electric frypan was plugged in, and the ground beef was placed in the electric frypan:

Ground beef placed in electric frypan, and electric frypan plugged in

The chopped cabbage was placed in the electric frypan:

Chopped cabbage placed in electric frypan

Salt was added to the electric frypan:

Salt added to electric frypan

An onion was taken out and weighed to be sure it was enough (“about” a quarter pound of chopped onion in the end):

Onion taken out and weighed

The onion was placed on the cutting board:

Onion placed on cutting board

The onion was trimmed:

Onion trimmed

The onion was cut in half:

Onion cut in half

The onion half was sliced into half coins:

Onion sliced

The onion slices were chopped:

Onion chopped

The rest of the onion was chopped, and the chopped onion was transferred to the electric frypan, and the ground beef was cut up with an egg flipper:

Onion added to electric frypan

The ground beef was broken up further, and the ground beef, cabbage, and onions were mixed together:

Ingredients broken up and mixed together

Cheese was weighed out:

Cheese weighed

The cheese was grated:

Cheese grated

The grated cheese was transferred to a bowl, and put aside for later:

Grated cheese transferred to bowl

Once the meat mix was cooked, the electric frypan was unplugged:

Fried ingredients cooked

At this point, I took out a large serving plate and a kitchen knife in anticipation of the bread machine dough cycle completing:

Large plate and kitchen knife taken out

The bread machine finished its dough cycle:

Bread machine dough cycle complete

At this point, I started to preheat the oven, set to 350F, and one of the racks was placed in the top position (photo taken after preheating):

Oven preheated to 350F

The dough was taken out of the bread machine basket:

Dough taken out of bread machine

At this point, to get 24 roughly similarly sized balls of dough, I am using what I call the “Jamie Oliver Method” because I saw Jamie Oliver use this method on one of his shows with bread dough:

  • Cut the dough in half (2 pieces);
  • Cut each half into three pieces (2 x 3 = 6 pieces);
  • Cut each “third of a half” into four pieces (6 x 4 = 24).

I concede that Jamie Oliver would have you roll the dough into a long log first to further help with estimating making the sizes relatively even.

The dough was cut in half:

Dough cut in half

One of the dough halves was cut in three:

Dough half cut into three pieces

One of the pieces was cut in four:

Dough piece cut into four pieces

The rest of the bread dough pieces were cut up, resulting in 25 pieces, which eventually were reduced to 24 pieces:

25 bread dough pieces (which will be integrated into 24)

A bread dough pieces was placed on the cutting board, and flattened and stretched out:

Bread dough piece flattened on cutting board

Some shredded cheese was placed in the centre of the piece of flattened bread dough:

Shredded cheese placed on flattened bread dough

Some cooked meat mix was placed on top of the shredded cheese on the piece of flattened bread dough:

Cooked meat mix placed on flattened bread dough

I began to stretch the edges of the flattened bread dough, pulling them together and covering the filling:

Bread dough edges stretched and brought together

All of the edges were brought together and the edges were pinched together:

Stretched bread dough edges brought together
Stretched bread dough edges brought together

The resulting ball of stuffed bread dough was placed on the parchment paper on one of the trays, pinched edges face down:

Stuffed bread dough ball placed edges down on baking tray

The process was repeated with more pieces of bread dough and more cooked meat mix and shredded cheese:

Stuffed bread dough balls placed edges down on baking tray
Stuffed bread dough balls placed edges down on baking tray

The process was continued until there were 24 units:

24 units on baking trays

Margarine, a bowl, and a spoon were taken out:

Margarine, bowl, and spoon taken out

The empty bowl was placed on the kitchen scale, which was set to zero:

Kitchen scale set to zero with bowl on it

Margarine was weighed out, about five tablespoons’ worth, in the area of about 70g to 73g:

Margarine weighed out

The bowl of margarine was placed in the microwave oven (1100 watts):

Margarine placed in microwave oven

The microwave oven was set to 15 seconds:

Microwave set to 15 seconds

The margarine was partly melted:

Margarine partly melted

The microwave oven was set again for 15 seconds, and the margarine was mostly melted:

Margarine melted

A food brush was used to brush the melted margarine on to the bierocks …

Melted margarine brushed onto bierocks
Melted margarine brushed onto bierocks

… until all units had been basted and all the melted margarine had been used:

Melted margarine brushed onto bierocks

The trays of bierocks were placed in the oven:

Baking trays with bierocks placed in oven

The stove timer was set to 22 minutes:

Timer set to 22 minutes

Cooling racks were taken out while the bierocks were baking:

Cooling racks taken out

Pot holders were taken out:

Pot holders taken out

At about halfway through the baking, the trays with the bierocks were rotated back to front within the oven:

Baking trays rotated back to front part way through baking

At the end of the baking period, I turned on the broiler to brown the tops of the bierocks:

Broil cycle turned on at end of baking

… and the oven timer was set to two minutes:

Timer set to 2 minutes of browning

Here’s a photo of the bierocks as they were browning under the broiler:

Bierocks browning under broiler

After the two minutes under the broiler, the bierocks were taken out of the oven:

Baking trays with bierocks taken out of oven

The bierocks were transferred to the cooling racks:

Bierocks placed on cooling racks

A bierock was picked up to check the bottom where the pinched edges of the dough had been brought together to show how it baked (but … not seamlessly! 🙂 )

Underside of a bierock

I bit into the fresh bierock … yummy!

Inside of a bierock — Yummy!!!

A bierock was placed on a cutting board with a kitchen knife:

Bierock and knife placed on cutting board

The bierock was cut into four pieces:

Bierock sliced into four pieces for freezing

Several bierocks were cut up into quarters, because bierock pieces have become part of my usual breakfasts:

Bierocks sliced into four pieces for freezing

… and the cut up bierocks were placed in a freezer bag for freezing:

Bierock pieces placed in freezer bag

The bag of bierock pieces was placed in a freezer for future eating as part of my daily breakfasts.

I find these bierocks to be yummy!

Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 7: Desktop applications

Previous chapter: Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 6: Upgrading the Operating System

Using your computer of course requires some software beyond the base operating system; fortunately, most desktop linux distributions not only have repositories of freely installable software, often more common software as decided by the distro’s maintainers are pre-installed on the system at the same time as system installation.

This post is concentrating on the popular office suite LibreOffice which includes a drawing program, a word processor, a spreadsheet application, and a database application. While this post will show a few functions of each part, it is in no way intended to be a tutorial, but rather a cursory demonstration of each, leaving the exploration of each to you, the reader.

In this post I occasionally refer to operating systems beyond Linux. Also, contrary to my usual habit of not editorializing in this series, I offer the following: Many Linux software suites are largely, although importantly, not completely compatible with other known equivalents on other systems. They will often be able to open and edit files created by them; however, the compatibility and drop-in replacement value of each piece of software for the other (regardless of in which order) is often variable, sometimes quite substantially.

Note that occasionally, some screenshots were taken at different times for the sake of completeness, but presented in the order seen here, for the sake of the narrative.

Pinning Apps to the Dock:

Start from the Activities (hot corner in the upper left hand corner (the horizontal bar; either just quickly move the mouse there, or if necessary, click on the the horizontal bar):

Activites screen

I searched for “Lib” which brought up three of LibreOffice’s apps: Writer, Calc, and Impress, and I right clicked each one …

Searching for installed LibreOffice components

… each of which I pinned to the dock at the bottom, one at a time:

Pinning icons to the dock

Templates:

Note: In this post, the use of existing document templates found on the internet will be generously relied upon in order to demonstrate in a cursory fashion some of the resources available to desktop users — both of free software packages and other systems as well — as well as to simplify the mounting and development of the narrative using said existing documents. The site www.freedesktop.org, by happenstance, is frequently used, as is the templates section of www.libreoffice.org. Of note, especially on the former site, there are a number of templates which are in languages other than English, and some which have been on the site for several years, using older formats. Hopefully, the language barriers as the cases may be will not be too difficult to surmount given online translation services, while the older file formats are normally seamlessly supported by current software suites, with the ability to save in modern formats.

Users are of course free to create documents from scratch as they would on any system.

Going back to the activities screen, choose the Firefox icon (orange and blue, on the left at the bottom):

Firefox launched

In the address bar, enter the address of a search engine, such as www.duckduckgo.com:

Navigating to a search engine

Search for templates. In this case, I specifically asked for templates appropriate for LibreOffice, which brought me to www.opendesktop.org:

Navigating to opendesktop.com

In the search bar, I searched for LibreOffice, which gave me the following options:

Searching for LibreOffice templates

… and chose for ODF Text Templates (for word processessing):

Sorting for odf files
Sorting for odf files

Browsing through the templates, I chose a CV template, for “Tux the Penguin — Brand Ambassador and Mascot”:

CV template chosen

… which I downloaded:

Downloading the CV template

On the activities screen, I opened up the Files application:

Files program launched

Drawing:

… and this is where I learned that the downloaded CV template was not what it seemed. 🙂

Much like other popular desktops, Fedora Linux has several fully functional and fully featured drawing software. One such piece is LibreOffice Draw, which functions similarly to Microsoft Visio, allowing for some basic-to-not-so basic graphical manipulations, editing, basic draughting, and inserting texts.

From the Files program just opened, I navigated to the Downloads directory, where the CV was located after downloading, and despite having believed that the CV I had downloaded was a text document, the file format in fact proved to be a drawing format:

Downloads directory inspected

I double-clicked on the CV file, which, since LibreOffice Draw isn’t always a part of a Fedora base installation, launched the software store, and having found LibreOffice Draw in the Fedora repositories, offered to install it, which I accepted:

CV file double-clicked, launching the software store in order to install required software

Once LibreOffice Draw had been installed, I asked that it be launched:

LibreOffice Draw installed

After closing the offer to see the “What’s New” notes, I went to the File dropdown menu to open the file:

Opening the CV template

… and navigated over to the Downloads directory, where the CV was located.

Navigating to the downloads directory

I clicked on the CV file to open it:

CV file opened

In Draw — depending on the nature of the input file — various existing texts can be modified, as well as many basic-to-not-so-basic graphical manipulations. In the case of this file, the file was designed such that the text could be modified:

Editing the text of the CV

To manipulate images, the picture of Tux (the penguin) was double-clicked to select it, the right mouse button was clicked, and the “Rotate or Flip” option was selected:

Manipulating the penguin image

… and I chose to flip the picture of Tux upside-down:

Penguin image flipped upside down

Some modestly — or more complex — drawings, including multimedia documents such as the CV shown above, can be created and / or modified, which I leave to the reader to explore.

Word Processor:

Much like other popular desktops, Fedora Linux has several fully functional and fully featured word processing software suites. One of the more popular such pieces is LibreOffice Writer.

I returned to the opendesktop.org website, and chose a business card template to open in a word processor — LibreOffice Writer.

I navigated to find a business card template:

opendesktop.org template for business cards

… and downloaded the file:

Business card template downloaded

Similar to how the CV above was opened, the business card template was opened, without having to go through the installation of LibreOffice Writer:

Business card template opened in LibreOffice Writer

The text of the first card was changed to a “Desktop Linux: Revealed” theme:

Name and contact details on first card changed

The modifications were also saved:

Saving modified business card file
Saving modified business card file

Returning to the opendesktop.org templates, I chose the “Organica Business Forms” to download:

More Writer templates viewed

The page for the Organica Business Forms was opened:

Business Forms template page

… and the file downloaded:

Downloading template
Template downloaded and directory opened

The business forms were compressed in the .tar format, analogous to .zip files:

Directory with downloaded file, which was double clicked

The archive was double-clicked, revealing a directory contained within:

.tar file double clicked, opening up the archive

The directory was double-clicked, revealing several templates: Business cards (different from above), a fax cover sheet, four different kinds and sizes of labels, an invoice, and a letter:

Various files in archive revealed

Going back to Writer, the letter file was double-clicked, which again opened the file in LibreOffice Writer:

Letter file opened

A space was added between two paragraphs:

Spaced added between paragraphs

The “Table” drop down menu was opened:

Table drop-down menu opened

… and the “Insert Table” option was chosen:

Insert Table option chosen

… which opened up a window to determine some settings for the table to be inserted:

Window opened to set table characteristics

A table with five columns and five rows was selected:

Table settings changed

The table was selected, and the right mouse button was clicked, revealing a contextual menu:

Contextual menu opened

The option “Table Properties” was selected, bringing up a window:

Table properties window opened

The button for all lines under “Line Arrangement” was chosen in the Borders tab, in order to insert borders around all the cells of the table:

Table borders changed

The “Ok” button was pressed, returning me to the document, showing now all the cells of the table with borders:

Table added to letter

Text was added to a cell in the upper left hand corner (“Linux Desktop”):

Text added to table cells

A number of other cells were filled in:

Text added to table cells

The “File” drop down menu was opened:

File menu opened

… and the file was saved:

File saved

As with the previous section, I leave it to the reader to further explore LibreOffice Writer to see the various options in the various menus, and the various kinds of text documents that can be created.

Spreadsheets:

Much like other popular desktops, Fedora Linux has several fully functional and fully featured spreadsheet software. One of the most popular such pieces is LibreOffice Calc.

After saving the business cards, I returned to the freedesktop.org website, browsing the spreadsheet templates:

opendesktop.org page sorting for spreadsheets
opendesktop.org page sorting for spreadsheets
opendesktop.org page sorting for spreadsheets
opendesktop.org page sorting for spreadsheets

I chose the Amortization Schedule:

opendesktop.org page with amortization schedule

The amortization Schedule was downloaded:

Amortization schedule downloaded
Amortization schedule downloaded

Similarly to previous files, the Amortization Schedule was opened (file double clicked in the file download directory).

Amortization schedule opened in LibreOffice Calc

Several of the balance figures was selected, revealing how the value us calculated in the formula bar:

Amortization schedule, cell calculation revealed
Amortization schedule, cell calculation revealed
Amortization schedule, cell calculation revealed

I chose to modify the table, by adding a value of 1000 in the “Extra Principle Payment”, to change the values of “New Balance” …

Value changed to 1000

… and then I changed the value to 500 to see how it affected the values of “New Balance”.

Again I leave it to the reader to further explore mounting spreadsheets of their own using their own data.

Slide Shows / Presentations

At the opendesktop.org collection of templates, I chose a slide show template to download:

opendesktop.org page sorting for a presentation template

I chose a template to download …

Presentation template downloaded

… and downloaded it:

Presentation template downloaded
Presentation template downloaded

Again through the files directory, I double-clicked on the downloaded file:

File in download directory double clicked

… which opened up the file in LibreOffice Impress:

Presentation opened in LibreOffice Impress

I began editing the title line — in the process, using the wrong branding for this series!

Text modified

The text colour, white, didn’t have enough contrast for my taste, so I selected the text …

Text colour modified

… and went into the options area on the right to by clicking on the letter “A” with a red underline, to change the font colour:

Text colour changed through menu icons on the right

The font colour was changed to a greenish-blue colour:

Text colour changed to a greenish-blue
Text colour changed to a greenish-blue

Other text was changed and added:

Text added below title

I changed to the second page, and similarly started to change the text:

Navigating to second page

Text can be changed as per your needs, as well as pages added through copy / paste or other wizards available.

The drop-down file menu was chosen, so that I could save the file:

File drop down menu to save the file
File saved

Once the file was saved, I opened up the drop-down file menu again, and chose “Export As” so that I could export the file as a PDF. (Editorial note: As mentioned earlier, while there is a good amount of compatibility between LibreOffice and other office suites, it can be disappointingly incomplete, which I have particularly seen and experienced with — but not only — slide shows. For more of a discussion of such from the perspective of the usefulness of PDFs, please see my post on the subject.)

The file drop-down menu was clicked again, and the option “Export As” was clicked:

File menu opened to export the file as a PDF

Exporting to PDFs can be rather easy and direct, or, as I am going to show a little bit here, allows for a large amount of choices …

Options window for PDF options

… including protecting PDFs with passwords for opening:

Tab with options for password setting for opening PDFs
Setting passwords for PDFs

Passwords were set for both opening as well as for “permission” which means to allow editing of the PDF (see my post on the subject), and the slide show was exported as a PDF:

Setting passwords for PDFs

… and the OK button was clicked:

Presentation exported to PDF

As usual, I leave to the reader to explore further. Also, within LibreOffice itself it has a wizard to help the user create a number of presentations with various backgrounds and layouts.

Database:

LibreOffice also includes a database module, called “Base”, which is similar to Microsoft Access; it is essentially a front end manager — a gui interface — for the actual database software behind it that it leverages.

Before I show a properly mounted database, I will show some screenshots about how to start.

Starting from the home screen, the activities corner (hot corner) in the upper left was clicked:

Desktop screen

On the Activies screen, “libreoffice base” was typed into the search bar, and the option to install LibreOffice Base, which is not always installed in a base install, was offered:

Activities screen accessed, and “libreoffice base” searched for; the option to install Base was offered

The option was double-clicked, which brought up the “software store” with the choice of LibreOffice Base …

Software store opened to allow for installation of Base

I double-clicked on the option, bringing up the information page on the package and the offer to install it:

Description page for Base

I clicked the “Install” button:

Base installing

Once LibreOffice Base was installed, an “Open” button presented itself:

Base opened

The “Open” button was clicked, lauching LibreOffice:

Base opened

A wizard came up to select a database:

Wizard opened to allow choice to launch Base

The presented option was accepted, and the “Next>” button was clicked, bringing up a “Save and proceed” window:

Save and proceed window

The “Finish” button was clicked, opening a Save window:

Finish button clicked, allowing for the creation of a database

Once that was done, the following screen came up, in order to start creating a database:

Initial screen for creating a database

Note that from this point on, I am showing some very basic things, and I will soon recommend a tutorial, which will better show how to use the software than I could ever present.

I clicked on the “Table” icon, which brought up a Table Wizard:

Table Wizard launched

I chose the “Personal” category, on the premise — in the context of this post, anyway which presumes that many readers may be seeking to use linux at home and not just at the office, and that a database might not as easily appear to be a personal piece of software.

Personal category chosen

I pulled down the suggested list of topics:

Suggested list of topics

… and chose “Recipes” for what I presume are obvious reasons — we all eat, and presumably many people have a personal collection of varying sizes (here’s my collection of recipes, incidentally NOT in a database format, at https://www.malak.ca/food).

Recipe option chosen

Some field names were suggested:

Field names suggested

I clicked on “Name”:

Name selected

… which moved it over to the column on the right:

Name field moved to right window

I also chose other sample tables:

Ingredients field chosen
Utensils field chosen
Instructions field chosen
Description field chosen

… at which point, I clicked on the “Finish” button, leading to the following screen:

Finish button clicked, leading to a data entry page

I started entering data:

Data entered

I chose to save my changes:

Database saved

At this point, I am going to direct you to a far better tutorial than I could ever present, even in the most cursory of fashions:

As of the writing of this post, a rather complete tutorial on using Base can be found at thefrugalcomputerguy.com/seriespg.php?ser=15/ (no doubt amongst countless other similarly excellent resources):

TheFrugalComputerGuy.com LibreOffice Base tutorial page
TheFrugalComputerGuy.com LibreOffice Base tutorial page

Although I think it best to leave the tutorial to TheFrugalComputerGuy, I will show a small database in action:

Starting again at the desktop screen:

Desktop

The activities screen was accessed through the upper left hand hot corner with the mouse:

Activities screen with the dock

The Firefox icon (orange, on the left on the dock at the bottom) was clicked:

Firefox web browser launched

I went to my favourite search engine, duckduckgo.com:

Search engine opened (in this case www.duckduckgo.com)

… and I searched for “libreoffice base templates”:

Searching for Base templates
Searching for Base templates

I chose the “Templates & Extensions” link, the second link above, at the LibreOffice.org site itself:

Templates at libreoffice.org

I clicked on the green “plus” sign to the right of “Boost your creativity with templates”:

Template link clicked

… which led to the following page:

Templates page

On the left, there are a number of filters under “Add tag filters:”, and clicked on “Base”, bringing up the following page:

Page with templates for Base

I chose the “MyRecipes” template for LibreOffice Base:

Page for a recipes database

I scrolled down to quickly assess the files, finding them eminently interesting for the task at hand:

Template description

The download button was clicked, and the file downloaded:

Template downloaded

The files program was opened, and the newly downloaded file was highlighted:

Downloads directory opened

The .zip file was double-clicked, creating a directory of the files (ok I accidentally created the directory three times!)

.zip archive opened

One of the directories was double-clicked and opened:

Archive consulted

The “ReadMe.txt” file was double-clicked and opened:

readme file consulted

The .odt file was opened as well:

Instructions and general description file checked

The “MyRecipes1.jpg” file was double-clicked, opening a screenshot:

Screenshot of database operating consulted

The FoodPix directory was opened, showing pictures of the recipes in the database:

Pictures included in the archive viewed

From the database’s main directory, the database was opened:

Database opened

After looking about, the “UpdateRecipes” option was selected:

One of the options selected

Which opened up one of the recipes:

One of the recipes in the database

The database author chose to have an active Pantry list with checkable items, no doubt based at least partly on their recipes; by having it dynamic, when asked to create purchasing lists, the database can exclude pantry items already on hand:

Pantry list

Said shopping lists can be generated from the “1MainMenuSwitchboard” option:

Main menu switchboard created by the author to navigate through their recipes and other functions they programmed

Given that the “switchboard” is based on macros, the Tools pull down menu was opened::

Tools menu opened

… and the “Options” option was clicked:

“Options” option clicked, opening an options window

The Security option was chosen:

Security option chosen

… and the “Macro Security” button was clicked. The security level was set to low, as per the author’s suggestion:

Macro security options changed

Back to the Switchboard:

Database main menu opened

The “Mark Recipe List” button was clicked, and I decided to mark three of the recipes:

Recipes chosen

In trying to close the window, a window asked if I wanted to save my changes, to which I clicked “yes”.

Window closed and changes saved

The “Grocery List for Marked Recipes” button was clicked:

Grocery list option chosen from main menu

… producing a grocery list based on the recipes, which was automatically opened in LibreOffice Writer:

Grocery list created for the selected recipes

The next chapter will look at graphics.

Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 6: Upgrading the Operating System

Previous Chapter: Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 5: Gnome Extensions, and Basic File Management

Note: Although it has been a while between posts and I had planned on another subject for what would have been this post, given the time lapse I decided to take advantage of a new version of Fedora that had been released to show how to easily upgrade the OS version, in this case, from version 39 to version 40. Note that many different versions of linux (Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, etc.) have similar functions and upgrade paths; since I began using the automatic upgrade tool in Fedora in about 2018, I have had good experiences.

Firstly, the “Activities” screen happened to open when I logged into the system, and I chose the software icon in the dock on the bottom (the white “shopping bag” with the red, black, and blue symbols):

Activities screen with dock on bottom

Which brought up the following screen, telling me that there were general updates, and that a new version of Fedora was available:

Software icon chosen

The system updates were first chosen and downloaded:

Updates downloaded

Once the updates were downloaded, the system was ready to be rebooted for installation:

Updates ready to be installed

The “Restart & Install” button was chosen to confirm the reboot:

Restart and install updates dialog box opened

The system rebooted:

System rebooted

… and updates were installed:

Upddates installing

Once the updates were installed, the system rebooted:

System rebooted after installation of updates

… leading to the login screen:

System login screen

… where I entered my password:

Password challenge

Once logged in, I clicked on the software icon again in the dock, and chose to download the upgrades for Fedora 40:

Software store opened again, and upgrade packages downloaded (2%)
Upgrade packages downloading (19%)
Upgrade packages downloading (32%)
Upgrade packages downloading (56%)

Once the upgrade packages were downloaded, the “Restart & Upgrade” button was pressed:

All packages downloaded, and Restart and Upgrade button pressed

… which required authentication, so my password was entered:

Authentication required for the major changes
Password entered

The system asked again if I wanted to restart and Install the upgrade:

Confirmation requested to restart and upgrade the system

The “Restart & Install Upgrade” button was pressed:

System rebooted
System rebooted
Updates installing (3%)
Updates installing (14%)
Updates installing (39%)
Updates installing (52%)
Updates installing (59%)
Updates installing (77%)
Updates installing (93%)
Updates installing (97%)

Once the upgrade was complete, the computer rebooted:

System rebooted after upgrades applied

The login screen came up again:

Login screen

And again I provided my password:

Password challenge
Password entered

Once logged in, new artwork for the new version came up, as well as a notification that the system had been upgraded to the new version (in this case, Fedora v.40):

New artwork for Fedora 40

Just to finish off some checks, the menu at the power button was opened, in order to open the settings screen, accessible from the little gear second from the left on top:

Menu for settings opened

The settings were opened:

Settings opened

I noticed that the name of my computer was curiously changed back to “Fedora” in the upgrade:

System renamed after curious change by upgrade

Then I chose the “System Details”, showing that the system had indeed been updated to version 40:

Confirmation that the system had been upgraded to Fedora 40

Next chapter: Using common pieces of desktop software

AI Generated Podcast About my Yoghurt Muffins Post

Note: I suggest that you read my recent post about making yoghurt muffins first for context before reading this post.

This past weekend, my brother decided to play around with the Google NotebookLM podcast generator, using my recent post about making yoghurt muffins as the podcast topic source material.

Here are the results: “Podcast 1“, the first one I listened to and chuckled at throughout (see below), and “Podcast 2“, which is longer than the first, and a slightly different approach (again, see below).

As a reference, according to Wikipedia (here’s my archive), NotebookLM is a tool by Google that has an “audio summary” feature has the “ability to condense complex documents into engaging podcasts”. As referenced in the article, some of the generated podcasts have indeed been making the rounds on at least the media local to me; the samples played on the radio had the “voices” of two artificial “hosts”, one male and one female, and appeared to greatly impress the real radio host. The real human host on the radio then proceeded to create their own samples with the tool using local news items as source material, resulting in stunningly … seemingly accurate (or at least faithful to the source material) content and banter between the two artificial “hosts”. The voices — and banter — of the artificial “hosts” that were created sounded so real that the “hosts” did not sound obviously artificial in almost any, let alone many, of the usual ways that usually betray the artificiality or synthetic nature of the voices. “They” seemed to bypass the Uncanny Valley (here’s my archive) as well, if only because they weren’t associated with artificially-created “speaking” faces or other cues that might suggest that “they” were artificial.

To wit: My brother came up with two podcasts: Podcast1, and Podcast2, based on the blog page about the yoghurt muffins: The first podcast was roughly what I would have expected, based on the samples I’d heard on the radio, in the form of “entertaining” banter from the artificial “hosts” about the overall post and subject, while the second podcast followed a play-by-play style review of the post and its pictures.

Especially while listening to the first, I was often incredulously guffawing at how “seriously” they seemed to be taking the subject, to the point of “their” calling me a perfectionist; despite, uhm, seriously having approached mounting the post with its pictures and processing the photos for presentation, as well as of course maintaining my recipe archive, and again of course being fairly serious on a hobby level about my cooking, for the overall cooking project I have always had a certain laid back, “enjoying the fun” pleasure to mounting the posts. Which, I must admit, intentionally include a lot of photos detailing usually every last step and even micro-step. I would estimate that the “hosts” got it better in the second podcast by calling me meticulous.

The end result of the two podcasts is so good that except for the knowledge that it’s totally AI generated, I would actually believe that the podcast was hosted by real people and put together by real people providing real feedback. As such, I have a few responses to some of the “comments” that the “hosts” made:

Shorter Podcast: (audio here)

  • I am flattered in a giggly kind of way that the “hosts” underlined the dirty oven window, which I myself had somewhat sheepishly admitted was the case in the original post;
  • The “hosts” seem to enthusiastically say it’s like a scientific document with no room for error; I would challenge anyone to compare the blog post against the recipe and say that the two are identical. 🙂
  • For the record: I did not lick the spoon. 🙂
  • The “hosts” spoke of how much care I took by freezing them … well, I will go into the “easy” column and say both that baking a half batch or a double batch is roughly as easy as a standard batch, and, that I often try to make recipes that are good for the freezer!
  • And finally … the “hosts”, in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, pretty much suggested that I make a blog post on making the morning coffee, which I may just do sometimes in the future which I actually have done. 🙂

Longer Podcast: (audio here)

  • The “hosts” asked what does “easy” mean in my claim that the muffins are easy to make, such as is it the number of ingredients, the technique, or the cleanup? “They” initially conclude “Let’s find out!” “They” then go on to point out the use of the paper liners, and the reuse of the measuring cup used to measure out the yoghurt to then measure out the oil without cleaning it in between, as examples of the “easy” part.
  • The “hosts” seem to insinuate at a couple of points that the amounts of sugar and oil used are “generous”, while of course continuing to state that the muffins’ crumb would no doubt be rather moist as a result; yet, when discussing the presence of the yoghurt, the “hosts” wondered whether the yoghurt muffins were just an alternative to the bran muffins I make for my mom, but ultimately seemed to decide that it was obviously a “health angle”. I perceived this as a lack of continuity in the “creation” of the podcast. And to be clear, having adopted this recipe was simply meant to be an alternative to the bran muffins I give to my mom, which is clearly stated at the beginning of the post; further, I am not trying to “match” the sweetness of bran muffins.
  • The “hosts” say that the kind of yoghurt I use is not identified, ie. firm yoghurt, stirred yoghurt, or greek yoghurt, etc.; “they” are correct that the tub does not say so, at least in the view in the picture. However, “they” do read into it by saying that this lack of information is part of the “easy” claim by letting people trying the recipe to use what they have on hand. Also, “they” did not pick up on the strawberry on the tub as an example of how the “relatively plain” was intentionally a loose interpretation.
  • The “hosts” say that the kind of oil I used was not identified; again, the photo of the jug plainly says “vegetable oil”, which should tell all bakers that it’s generic vegetable-based cooking oil.

Is this a fun tool? Sure. My brother and I have bandied about ideas — purely in the hypothetical — about using the tool to create large numbers of podcasts that could then be syndicated to AM radio stations for the overnight slot during which a lot of content is often recycled or of what we consider to be of dubious interest.

Making (Simple) (and Relatively) Plain Yoghurt Muffins — Photos

These easy to make muffins are fairly straightforward, tasty, and, despite being labeled as “plain”, the term is used somewhat loosely since the yoghurt used may be any kind of flavoured yoghurt, which will come across lightly but distinctly in the final product. As well, small amounts of fruits or other flavouring agents could be added without substantial changes.

I had originally researched the recipe to allow me to serve a different kind of muffin to my mom, in order to contrast the bran muffins she likes as well; as noted elsewhere, she enjoys the bran muffin recipe I found on the internet more than her own bran muffin recipe.

Note that this yoghurt muffin recipe lends itself well to half batches (one egg only), as well as easy and quick baking in countertop toaster-ovens.

Update 20241008: Using the Google NotebookLM podcast generator, two podcasts were produced about this post, and, I made a blog entry about the podcasts. Podcast1 Podcast2

Making the muffins:

First, the oven was pre-heated to 350F:

Oven preheated to 350F

A tray of muffin moulds, and correspondingly sized paper liners, were taken out:

Muffin moulds and paper liners taken out

The moulds were each lined with paper muffin liners:

Lining moulds with paper muffin liners
Lining moulds with paper muffin liners

The lined baking tray was put aside, and a mixing bowl, a spoon, and a fork were taken out:

Mixing bowl, spoon, and fork taken out

Flour and a measuring cup were taken out:

Flour and measuring cup taken out

The measuring cup was filled with flour:

Measuring cup filled with flour

The flour was transferred to the mixing bowl:

Flour transferred to mixing bowl
Flour transferred to mixing bowl
Flour transferred to mixing bowl

Sugar was taken out, and the measuring cup was taken out again:

Sugar and measuring cup taken out

Sugar was measured out:

Sugar measured out

The sugar was transferred to the mixing bowl with the flour:

Sugar transferred to mixing bowl with flour
Sugar transferred to mixing bowl with flour
Sugar transferred to mixing bowl with flour
Sugar transferred to mixing bowl with flour

Baking powder and measuring spoons were taken out:

Baking powder and measuring spoons taken out

Baking powder was measured out:

Baking powder measured out

The baking powder was added to the flour and sugar in the mixing bowl:

Baking powder added to flour and sugar
Baking powder added to flour and sugar
Baking powder added to flour and sugar

Salt and measuring spoons were taken out:

Salt and measuring spoons taken out

Salt was measured out:

Salt measured out

The salt added to the flour, sugar, and baking powder:

Salt added to the flour, sugar, and baking powder
Salt added to the flour, sugar, and baking powder

Using the fork, the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt were thoroughly mixed:

Flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt thoroughly mixed with fork
Flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt thoroughly mixed with fork

A tub of yoghurt and a measuring cup were taken out:

Yoghurt and measuring cup taken out

Yoghurt was measured out:

Yoghurt measured out

The yoghurt was transferred to the bowl with the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt:

Yoghurt transferred to bowl of flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt
Yoghurt transferred to bowl of flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt
Yoghurt transferred to bowl of flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt, with spoon added

Vegetable oil was taken out, and the measuring cup used for the yoghurt was reused, without needing to clean it since I’d only just used it moments before for the yoghurt :

Vegetable oil and measuring cup taken out

The vegetable oil was measured out:

Vegetable oil measured out

The vegetable oil was transferred to the bowl with the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and yoghurt:

Vegetable oil transferred to bowl

Eggs were taken out:

Eggs taken out
Eggs taken out
Eggs taken out

The eggs were cracked into the bowl with the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, yoghurt, and vegetable oil:

Eggs cracked into bowl
Eggs cracked into bowl
Eggs cracked into bowl

All the ingredients were mixed together with a spoon:

Ingredients mixed with spoon

… creating a thick paste dough:

Ingredients mixed with spoon

The muffin mould tray prepared earlier was taken out:

Prepared muffin mould tray taken out

The dough was spooned into the paper muffin moulds:

Muffin moulds filled with muffin dough
Muffin moulds filled with muffin dough

The filled muffin tray was placed in the preheated oven:

Filled muffin tray placed in oven

A timer was set to 21 minutes:

Timer set to 21 minutes

Looking through the oven window (which admittedly could use a cleaning!), the muffins began to rise:

Muffins baking and rising
Muffins baking and tops beginning to brown
Muffins baking and tops browning

While the muffins were baking, cooling racks were taken out:

Cooling racks taken out

After the timer ran out and the muffins had baked, the muffins were taken out of the oven, and the tray placed on a cutting board:

Baked muffins taken out of oven

The muffins were transferred from the muffin tray moulds to the cooling racks to cool down:

Freshly baked muffins transferred to the cooling racks

A yummy fresh muffin was served to my mom with another mini-muffin, with the paper linings removed:

Muffins served
Muffins served

… and the rest of the cooled muffins were placed in a sealable freezer bag, to be placed in the freezer:

Cooled muffins placed in a sealable freezer bag

Yummy!

Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 5: Gnome Extensions, and Basic File Management

Previous Chapter: Desktop Linux Unveiled : Chapter 4: Installing Linux

In this chapter, Gnome Extensions will be briefly discussed, and basic file transfers and manipulation will be highlighted.

Gnome Extensions

Gnome was designed to be extensible, or have its behaviour be changed with extensions. There are hundreds of extensions, most produced by volunteer programmers.

Launch Firefox from the dock at the bottom of the screen (the icon at the left). Firefox will launch, leading to the Fedora Project main page (a setting you may wish to keep, or change at a later time.)

In the navigation bar, enter the site https://extensions.gnome.org. (Some distributions may manage extensions locally; Fedora has opted to only do so partially.)

Click on the link “Click here to install browser extensions”, which will eventually allow for the installation of the Gnome Shell integration tool.

Click on “Add”:

I recommend that you click on “Allow this extension to run in Private Windows” and press “okay”.

As of when the following screenshot was taken, here is page one of the available extensions, along with a brief description:

To install an extension that interests you, click on the black switch that will be set to “Off”.

Click on “Install”:

Sometimes, an extension will be incompatible with the current version of Gnome, and the page will say as much:

When you have selected all the extensions which interest you, close Firefox:

Basic file manipulation:

Starting from the main screen, click on the activities bar in the upper left hand corner:

… leading to the activities screen, with the dock:

Click on the blue rectangle meant to resemble a filing cabinet, in the centre.

For convenience, I moved the window to the left, and it “snapped” to take up half the screen:

The activities screen was accessed again, to access the dock, and right-clicking on the file manager icon:

Choose “New Window”, in order to launch a second file manager window:

The size and location of the second window were adjusted in order to have a second window on the right:

Before moving on, I am going to point out that I personally like file listings with full information; however, files can be displayed with previews (the following shots were taken after the following operations were completed):

By hovering the pointer over a button with four blocks in it, you can toggle between lists and icons:

Clicking on the icon will change the filenames to icon size:

Hovering over the same square icon can revert to a list view.

At this point, you can insert a USB key with some files or a backup, or a CD/DVD drive, or a portable USB hard drive.

In this case, I decided to copy some files from the computer hosting my website, and some file backups. Clicking on “+ Other Locations” reveals, as per the window on the right, access to other computers accessible to your computer:

I entered into the address bar at the bottom of the window the address of my website, and telling the file manager to use the ssh protocol to securely access the location:

As part of the initial connection, my computer asked me to confirm if I wanted the connection, since it was the first time this instance was connecting to my website. Should you get such a challenge, click on “Log In Anyway”:

My website server presented an authentication challenge:

I entered my username and password, chose “Remember password until you logout”, and clicked on “Connect” (you may choose either of the two other options, at your discretion):

Once there, I navigated to a directory with some photos from a past birthday celebration for my grandmother:

Wishing to copy all the files on my server (on the right) over to the computer (on the left), the first file was selected by clicking on it …

… and then scrolling down to the bottom of the file list, and while pressing on the CTRL key, clicking on the last:

Instead of drag and drop, I right clicked my mouse over the right …

… which opened a contextual menu, in which I chose to create a folder, leading to the opening of a dialog:

A name for a new directory, in this case reflecting that it was from my grandmother’s birthday one year, was entered into the dialogue, and the directory was created:

The previously selected files on my server were transferred via “drag and drop” to the newly created directory:

A photo was selected, and a right click opened a contextual menu, offering a number of options. The first, “Open With Image Viewer”, was selected …

… opening the selected photo.

On the local machine, I clicked on “Home” …

… then on “Documents”, while on my server, I navigated to another directory where I chose a PDF document:

This time, I used a right-clicked contextual menu on my server side to chose “Copy To” to copy the document over to my local machine.

The file was then selected, and a contextual menu (right click) was opened, which offered “Open with Document Viewer”:

… opening up the document, in this case about how to make a backwoods washing machine:

Again on my server, I navigated to another directory, this time in my backups:

… and selected another file to transfer, in this case, a spreadsheet:

The spreadsheet was dragged and dropped onto the local machine:

Recognizing the file extension as that of an OpenDocument spreadsheet file, LibreOffice was launched:

… and the file was opened, in this case, for a table of prices for a number of items I sell at a flea market near my cottage:

Back to the file transfers, a video file in a directory with pictures and videos of my cat was selected …

… and dragged and dropped over to the local machine, and the file selected and right clicked, revealing a contextual menu, allowing for the opening of the video file:

The Gnome Videos player was opened; since the relevant codec had not been installed in the base install, Videos asked if it should attempt to install the codec, which it proposed might be available in the software repositories:

The “Find in Software” button was clicked, leading to the following window:

The required codec (“GStreamer Multimedia Codecs – H.264”) was chosen for installation; once installed, a video of my cat, playing with a feather toy, was shown:

Another file, another spreadsheet, was selected on my server …

… and dragged over to the new setup:

Using a right click contextual menu, the new selected file was opened:

… revealing my shopping plans for a large amount of soup I was going to cook for a community meal:

Another file, a text file, was selected on my server …

… and dragged over to the new setup:

Using a right click contextual menu, the new selected file was opened:

… and a text editor window opened up with the text file:

Many other things can be done with the file manager, including launching template documents in a click if templates have been placed in a templates directory.

Next Chapter:

Chapter 6: Upgrading the Operating System