Computers – Page 2 – The PolyBlog

Tadpole Tuesday: My website fixed itself

April 15 2025

Last week, I introduced TT — Tadpole Tuesday — where I blog about a current project that I’m working on. I started with some website stuff I was doing, namely putting quotes into shareable images and uploading those to the website. I had them in a different form, and I wanted to redo them to make them shareable. All good. But something odd happened on the way to the market, so to speak.

For a bit of background context, you need to know that my website is not a commercial enterprise, so it doesn’t have the complete set of bells and whistles that a whole business website might have. I have a small personal site, at a smaller price point, and a lot of manual management by me. It isn’t super sophisticated, I don’t have e-commerce options running on it, and it isn’t integrated with a warehouse for shipping products. It is a WordPress site running some plugins, and if I run TOO MANY plugins, the site stops loading everything. It runs out of memory, basically, while I’m working on it.

To load a webpage, one of two general options happens on hosted sites (full commercial or personal site).

On a personal site, my site sits somewhat dormant. It isn’t really DOING anything until someone asks it to do something. And technically, it doesn’t ask my site to do anything, it routes a request like load ThePolyBlog.ca home page; the internet routes that command to the hosting company I have my site with; the hosting company’s servers recognizes that it matches my site; and it sends a command to my personal sub-server area to “wake up and process this command”. Until it does that, my site is almost completely asleep.
By contrast, a full site runs constantly, like the hosting company’s servers do, looking to see if anyone is sending it a request, kind of like a dog jumping up and down saying, “Is it me? Is it me? Is it me? Is it me?”.

Think of it much like your own PC at home in hibernation mode vs. being “awake” and active. On your own PC, it is running much like my rented server space. It doesn’t do anything unless a timer goes off or someone taps the keyboard / loads a page.

Except for one little niggly detail. Timers would not work on my server.

I don’t have Chron for this

The timer on servers is generically called Chron. It is a traffic cop seeing which requests are coming in when, and processing them in order of their timestamp. And it has a timer. In theory, on just about every server known to exist, you can tell it that you want it to check mail, for instance, every 10 minutes. And every 10 minutes, it goes out and checks mail. Or once a day, it runs a backup. Or once every two days, it refreshes the cache. Or a whole host of regular things that require the timer to trigger them. Most run on their own, at least on most servers.

On my websites, the maintenance stuff for the servers doesn’t actually reside on my server, it sits on the hosting company’s servers. And their Chron works just fine. For my website, however, WordPress has to interface with the Chron timer, and well, they didn’t like each other very much. If the maintenance stuff didn’t run, this could be a problem, but the hosting company’s servers took care of that, leaving my server to just run whatever I want to run within WordPress. Except I don’t have anything that is time-based / schedule-based within WordPress. As I said, I don’t run anything commercial in it, so there’s no newsletter release, or content being pushed for sales notices, or carousels being updated with new ads.

Between 2005 and 2017, I was on various servers. And none of the Chrons would run reliably. In effect, my Chron went to sleep. Once something happened, like someone loading a page anywhere on the site, the server would wake up after the hosting server pinged it, it would sit up in bed, scramble to show whatever page was being requested, and then run Chron. So, if I had scheduled a post to go live at 9:00 a.m., it wouldn’t go live at 9:00 a.m. Chron was sleeping. However, if someone tried to load a page at 9:37 a.m., the server would wake up, show the page, and then run Chron, which would put the page/post live. The one that SHOULD have gone live while Chron was sleeping.

I worked with multiple support groups at different servers. For whatever reason, and it is not comforting to know this, some sites run Chron just fine and others are sleepy butts. Mine has always been a sleepy butt. I fought with it about 4 times, I think, over a 10-12 year period, but it was never a “must-have” for me. If it was, I could have upgraded my server package.

The only benefit that Chron could have given me was to allow scheduling of posts. So, again, if I was a larger enterprise with multiple posts per day and/or week, I could write them in advance (or other contributors could write them), and we could schedule them throughout the week. Jane’s post about corruption at City Hall could go live immediately while updating carousels and ads to go with it. Mike’s post about a cat family at the local park could go on Tuesday near the commute time. Blah blah blah. The comic strips for the week could be pre-loaded to post #272 on Monday at 8:00 a.m., 273 on Tuesday at 8:00 a.m., 274 on Wednesday at 8:00 a.m., and so on.

I don’t normally have that much content that I have to handle scheduling. Search engine optimization and blogging experts advice that if you want to grow your blog, you should post at a set interval, and monitor your take-up. If you know that people click through more if you publish in the afternoon, set your posts to go live in the afternoon; if they like mornings better, post in the morning; if Thursday and Friday are better than the weekend, then post by noon on Friday or wait until Monday for anything else. Have a schedule and stick to it.

Great advice, very logical. And my response has almost always been “meh”. While I would like to boost interaction so that I know SOMEONE is reading my stuff, I’m going to blog regardless. My past research shows that people click when they like, not when I want them to, and because all my sharing is through social media, it depends more heavily on when they read and what their algorithms do with my posts, than what time of day it got posted. Obviously, I don’t want to dump 100 posts in a single day. But since they are always delayed viewing anyway, I feel it is more about the type of posts I do in a single day than the content. For example, I feel like I can post at most one good medium to long post per day. Like this one. But a quote is a single image, and a joke will be a single image. I can add that to my daily feed without overwhelming the recipients. The question is how to queue that up properly.

Buffer is like the Chron I never had

I use Buffer as my social media manager. The way it works is you add a “channel” to Buffer, say your Facebook page; you go in and edit all the settings for that channel and how you want it to post to Facebook with extra words, the order of various fields, which image to use (a default image, a featured image, the first image in a post, etc.), and a number of other features and formats; AND you tell it the schedule to use. This goes back to the advice from blogging experts. For me, I said, “Okay, publish to the Facebook channel at 9:00 a.m. every morning”. That was the only time in the queue. If I wrote a post at midnight and pressed publish, WordPress would send that post to Buffer, Buffer would put it in the next slot (9:00 a.m. the next morning) and when the slot came up, Buffer’s Chron would send / post it to Facebook. In theory, I could write 20 posts over a weekend, tell it to post them, and they would be live on the website immediately. But Buffer would add them into the queue and send them out one per day for the next 20 days. It was the only time I really wanted Chron. Alternatively, I could write all the posts and save them as pending for now. Then, each day, I could open the next post, and say PUBLISH. It would go out in the next slot, likely 9:00 a.m. the next morning. If I missed a day, it didn’t go.

Except I hate having to run Chron manually. And Buffer is okay, but not exceptional. If, for example, I wrote 20 book reviews and had them all queued up, they would occupy the slots for the next 20 days. If I then wrote a great post about some news item, Buffer would add it to the queue in the 21st slot. If, instead, I wanted it to go out “immediately” or the next morning at least, it was not easy to bump it up in the queue. Oftentimes, I’d be manually moving stuff around, or adding an extra push one day.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Chron on a website isn’t a lot better. It can be challenging to move things around relative to each other. You can easily say, “Hey, send this one at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow”, but the previous one would also be scheduled to go at 9:00 the next morning, so it would go too. People get around this by embedding schedulers into their website. Adding Buffer’s functionality to the website. Except it requires Chron to run.

And the circle is complete. Buffer and WordPress work better together if both Chrons work; if only Buffer’s Chron works, it can handle most issues, but changes on the fly are sometimes more painful than I would like. I know, however, there ARE ways to go into the complex settings of Buffer and say, “Okay, here’s the schedule for the week…there’s a slot at 9:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. The 1:00 p.m. slot should use this complex FILTER and send a post IF and ONLY IF it has the category of QUOTES”, for example. It’s a bit more complicated than that, and it has never been worth my time to go in and figure it all out. I don’t have that many posts in a queue usually.

Part of that queue avoidance is tied to the issue of people who subscribe directly to the website. At first, I didn’t realize this was happening, although I should have. When I did a bunch of movement of posts between websites, I essentially imported 100 posts from PolyWogg and posted them to ThePolyBlog. These were posts that had already been shared, were all old, and so I didn’t think of them as “new”. But, of course, ThePolyBlog site saw them as new and TREATED them as newly published content. It sent all 100 posts to Buffer, overloading my queue. And it sent 100 posts out to those who were subscribed. So their inboxes got flooded. With old content. Whoops.

So, when I work on my site, I have to remember to turn off the post to subscribers function. And to remember to turn it BACK on afterwards. If I queue, say, 20 quotes to go out Monday to Friday over the next month, it will work fine for Buffer. But the people who are subscribed directly will get 20 posts immediately. WordPress makes them live immediately. Grrr…

Website, heal thyself

The funny thing that happened last week is that Chron seems to work now. WTF?

I don’t know how, I don’t know why, I don’t know when. But Chron is working on my site.

As I mentioned, I’m redoing 93 Quotes posts. Which basically means I copy them to a new post, add in the image version, and repost as a new post, before deleting the old post. If I process all 93 at once, my subscribers will get 93 emails in a day. If I want to avoid that, I can turn off the newsletter feature / share post option until I get them all updated, but then my subscribers don’t get that content. It’s efficient to do all 93 at once, a lot of repetitive steps, and in about two hours, I could blast through all of it. Or maybe an hour here and there, do it over a couple of days. But again, I have to avoid them going out to the subscribers too often. Buffer can handle my social media, I just wish they had a newsletter option (something I can check on for future, it would be great to move my subscribers OFF my website overhead).

Last weekend, I set up a quote post. I didn’t want to add it to the queue and publish immediately, so I saved it as pending. And then, just for fun, I told WordPress to publish it at 8:30 a.m. I wanted to see how it would handle the subscription feeds to individuals. I figured it would eventually get “flagged” when someone loaded the website, and even if it didn’t go at 8:30, well, it would go sometime that day. I would check at lunch, and if it hadn’t gone, I’d load the page and trigger it myself.

On Monday morning, my phone buzzed at 8:30 and then buzzed repeatedly at 9:00. I was getting dressed, and it buzzed twice which I ignored and then four times in under a minute. I thought someone was calling me, which is exceedingly rare, and I’m not even a huge texter. At 8:30, my Chron had run all on its own. Like it would on a bigger server. Somehow, WordPress and my server decided to get along and Chron ran on time. Maybe it’s been able to run for five years, which is the last time I tried to fix it. Maybe it just fixed itself last week. I have no idea. But it ran.

Which then meant it sent a full copy of my post to my main email address. Then it sent a short copy of the post to my secondary email address (sending it twice in two different forms lets me see what my subscribers are seeing, and I save it in email as a backup). Then Buffer entered the chat 30m later, and told me it had shared my post with a) FaceBook/Meta, b) Twitter/X, c) Blue Sky and d) Threads. Exactly on time. Because Chron ran on its own.

Holy snicker doodles.

Do I need this functionality? No. Do I want this functionality? Sure. Will I use this functionality? Absolutely.

The first case will be my quotes. I can set up all 93, queued to go live over various days, likely Monday, Wednesday and Friday at lunchtime. I’ll also queue up some jokes to go on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the same time. I’ve already modified Buffer to give me three send times a day — 9:00 a.m. that I’ll use for blog posts; 1:00 p.m. that I’ll use for shorter posts; and 5:00 p.m. that I’ll use for reviews. All I have to do is set my Chron / WordPress to push the content live about 30 minutes before the slot. Then, the slot will accept the post and share it on the schedule set with Buffer. It probably needs about 2 minutes’ lead time to accept it, but I’ll give Buffer more like an hour.

After all the times the website seemed to break almost on its own, I’ll take the win from it fixing itself on its own. Now I just have to post the content. And as a further test, I’m writing this post on Sunday to go out Tuesday for my Tadpole Tuesday series. Fingers crossed.

When a brand like OtterBox lets you down

November 30 2023

I often find brand loyalty a fickle mistress. You’ll see someone ranting about problems with company X (say Bell) while another raves about it. It’s particularly funny in the negative form, such as in online IT forums about Canadian mobile networks, where someone will rant and rant and rant about how terrible Rogers is, and then announce they’re switching to some new and wonderful cell startup with great offerings, without realizing that the new entry is using Rogers’ network.

Or they rant about how terrible Rogers is and they’re switching to Bell, posted right after the rant by someone who is fed up with Bell and switching to Rogers. On a good day, you can see them going from Rogers to Bell, Bell to Telus, Telus to Koodo (hah! same company and network), and Koodo back to Rogers.

You can see it more easily when someone is attached to a specific car company. The jokes, slings and arrows between truck owners are legendary. My favourite a few months ago was a guy talking about having a problem with his truck, and he had no idea where to even get a Chevy fixed. He then joked that if it had been a Ford, he obviously would have known where, because it would happen more often. And then he got everyone back on board by throwing Dodge owners under the bus, errr, truck.

But for most things? I don’t really care about a lot of brands on things. I like my iPhone, it serves me well, but I’ve owned Android before, and I miss certain aspects of it. If I wasn’t sharing stuff with Jacob and Andrea, and having a single OS being too useful, I’d probably still have my Android stuff. Yet there are a few things I normally swear by, and I don’t even care if they cost more. I just know they’re reliable and buy it.

You can’t go wrong buying OtterBox phone cases, right?

Otterbox makes some damn good cases for phones and tables. I would generally have no hesitation to recommend them. They’re solid, they don’t break down easily, good value for money, fit well, etc.

But they also have what most people say is a gold-plated warranty. It’s not quite “life-time”, but reasonably close for the products they sell. If you buy a phone case that is made by OtterBox, it comes with a seven-year warranty. Most people will upgrade their phone within seven years, so it is generally for the usual lifetime of the product it fits.

I’ve had OtterBox cases before and after 4-5 years, sure, they’re starting to get a little marred, but I’ve never outlasted one before I upgraded my phone.

For my iPhone, I got an iPhone XS Max back in January 2019. That’s almost five years, four years and ten months plus some days. At the four year mark, a little flap that covers the charging port for the phone broke off. Not surprising, really, it was a hinged flap, and an obvious weak spot. I don’t really need it, so I didn’t miss it much when it was gone. However, it also pulled the case together along the bottom of the phone, giving it a complete mold across the bottom. A structural side if you will.

About four months ago, I noticed that the silicone buttons over the phone’s buttons were getting a bit more mashed in. Not terrible, but not perfect. And then, two weeks ago, the little frame around those buttons cracked and split. It weakens the left side of the case, still totally functional, but it makes me less than confident of good protection if I drop the phone.

I needed a new case. And OtterBox has this gold-plated warranty, right? Everyone says so, right?

Not so fast, warranty claimer!

You go to the website for OtterBox US, it tells you if you’re from Quebec to go away as they have problems with Quebec regulations and laws right now (not uncommon for foreign shippers and not relevant to me).

At first glance, the claim process seems to be, hahaha, seamless.

You click on “Warranty”. It tells you that if you have a product of theirs, you can get a new one, as long as you pay shipping and handling. Seems fair.

It asks me if I bought it direct or online or elsewhere, with several options. I got it at Amazon.ca, so easy peasy. It asks other questions like phone or tablet, which type of case it was (with or without screen protection, folding, etc.), then it gets into more specific things for your phone.

Like make (Apple), Model (XS Max), etc. Eventually, it gets you down to the models that match.

Now here’s the weird part. OtterBox has about 8-10 big lines of cases…slim, chunky, with protectors, without, silicone, clear, blah blah blah. My model was a Commuter series, in Bespoke Way aka Blazer Blue. I can still get the model on Amazon.ca right now for just over $40 (it was only $35 originally) but not the same colour.

So, when I get to my model of phone, I should have dozens if not hundreds of choices, for multiple models and various colours. Yet the OtterBox only shows 2. Neither is my model of case.

One is a clear coloured case to slip over it, nothing like mine and about half the cost. The other one? Very similar, but it isn’t even for the XS Max. It is for another iPhone in the Series 11 model, which also has a 6.5″ footprint. Great that it shows it to me, because the cameras on the two phones are totally different. On the XS Max, it’s a small vertical 2 camera setup. The Series 11 format is a sideways triangle with an overall square footprint twice the size. So the S11 model WOULD fit my overall phone, just not very form fitting for the camera. Anyway.

So I look for other config options, nothing. I do it again to see if I missed anything. Nope, same result. Hmm. Oh, look, a line that says, “If you don’t find your model, click here!”. Right, missed that the first time. I click it and it takes me all the way back to the beginning and asks me if I want to claim a warranty.

I go sideways and try to reach customer service by email. Nada. They have a CHAT option, but after it asks me my name, and some basic Qs, it comes back and says, “Hey look, you’re on hold”. After 3 minutes, it says, “Sorry, we don’t have anyone to help you” and kicks you back to the contact page so you can call them.

But I don’t WANT to call them. That’s why I am on their website, so I don’t have to phone them. Grrrr.

A hidden door to nowhere

I decided, screw the model I had, I’d take the case they had available. Anything is better than nothing. I went through the hoops again, got all the way down to the models of cases “available”. I click on the XS Max one and it says, “Sorry, we have no stock of that”. Fine, I’ll take the S11 model. Nope, no stock of that either. I finally ended up getting to the contact page again, and tried a few things, nada. Searched Google for workarounds, perhaps an unpublished email address, nada.

Back on the OtterBox site, I noticed that there’s a link buried in the options to have MORE HELP WITH YOUR WARRANTY. Hallelujah!

There’s an option to contact them via form. Great! I give my name, model number, blah blah blah, not quite all of the same info, but most of it, and I dump the rest into the text box. Sounds great. I submit and I get a confirmation that my case has been opened. Yay progress!

Today I got an update from their CSR, Amanda. She will be glad to help me with their amazing warranty! Yay. All I have to do is call them at their non-toll-free number in Colorado.

Later today, while waiting for Jacob and Andrea at school, I called the number. Put on hold, of course. I lasted about 12 minutes before J and A were done, so I called back later from home. 32 minutes that time before I had to jump on another call.

Let’s recap, shall we?

It was a good case, and I got 4+ years out of it. At $35 to protect a ~$1500 phone, I probably got my money’s worth. But one of the reasons I buy OtterBox is not just the good case, but also because if it ends up having a problem, I can get a new one if it wears out. There were certainly a lot of other phone cases available for way less than $35 when I bought mine, after all.

But if you want to use the warranty, apparently you have to use it fast. Otherwise, they have no stock left of anything, you can’t actually choose a model of any sort, the website will put you in an endless loop so you can’t do anything, the only choice is to call them at your expense and sit on hold for a really long time with no guarantee anyone will even help you, and if you actually manage to submit something through the website, it just says, “Call me!”. And, of course, even if you do get all the way through, you still have to pay shipping and handling.

And I confess, I don’t have great experience with shipping and handling. In my experience with US companies that ship, they often have some sort of limited shipping account with FedEx or UPS that jacks the price so high, and in US dollars, you might as well just buy it outright in Canadian. I don’t know how many times I tried to buy some small astronomy gadget that was about $10 off a website and the shipping alone would have been $30.

I’ll try them maybe one more time by phone, but I’ll give them 10m at opening time and then I’ll bounce. I sent CSR Amanda back a somewhat grumpy message saying, “So why did I submit all my info online if all you do is say “call me” so we can start all over?”. Not the best method to get help, but at this point, do I really think I’ll get something worthwhile? Or just more frustrated?

In the meantime, I need another case. I found a highly reviewed one on Amazon for less than $20 that seems decent, will be here next week. I was already ordering some other stuff and I have Prime, I might as well go with free shipping. If it doesn’t work well, I can always set it aside for when I’m doing astrophotography (it’s a small slimline style that would work well for that) and buy one of the original Commuter series again. I suspect if I can get another 4+ years out of it, it’ll be time for a phone upgrade anyway. I mean, I know OtterBox is a little scummy, but it WAS a good case. Just disappointed I can’t get Blazer Blue again.

A little temporary website drama

September 21 2023

So a funny thing happened on the way to the forum…or some such quote.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been kicking up a little dust in the old website, uploading a whack of galleries from Flickr and embedding them on my website. I did one yesterday evening, which basically involves about 11 steps:

Sorting all the photos into the respective groupings like one person’s wedding or a picnic on the river;
Weeding out the duplicates, which for 2004 has been a nightmare, as I mentioned earlier, with 5-6 copies of photos in different resolutions and formats since I’ve uploaded them to other sites in the past, but all I want now is the best version of each photo to get it down to “one set”;
Filtering out the bad photos and curating the good ones;
Merging them into “monthly” folders or big “event” folders;
Letting my software do facial recognition on them;
Adding labels to each photo;
Uploading it all to Flickr, including videos if necessary;
Setting some variables on the Flickr albums, including cover photo;
Creating a new gallery on my website;
Updating the gallery index; and,
Moving the folder on my hard drive to the final structure where it gets auto-saved and backed up several different ways.

However, yesterday evening, I made a new gallery (step 9) on my website early evening and it all went fine. Things I had written the night before and updated in the morning were being “shared” automatically by my media tools; everything was working.

Then about 9:30 p.m., I did a new gallery, copying over an old one to a new template and then going in to change the links. I have done the same thing about 50 times in the last 3 weeks. Except I had noticed the night before that some of them weren’t showing right, spent about an hour fixing that glitch (a problem in a setting that was being ignored), and yet last night, when I went to save it, everything looked good. Until it wasn’t.

Glitchy

Since my restructuring of the site a few years ago after a huge meltdown, things have worked relatively smoothly on my site. Yeah, I’d like this tool to work faster, I’d like more power with that one, but I like keeping the cost down, too, as it is, after all, just a personal site. I’m not selling anything through it. Yet. (Dun dun dun! Stay tuned for the long future!)

So adding a new gallery is easy peasy. I add it in, I click save, and the website says “no”.

Well, technically, it threw an error saying my JSON wasn’t valid, but it meant it didn’t save. It has been working perfectly, nothing changed for the settings, everything looks fine on the front end, but it wouldn’t let me create new posts. Hmmm.

So, I’ve had an error like this before, forgot what it means, looked it up, oh, that’s right. My permalinks aren’t saving properly. Instead of a URL address being “ThePolyBlog.ca/?P=923” or “ThePolyBlog.ca/2023/09/20/Wedding_gallery”, I like my structure to look like “ThePolyBlog.ca/Alex_and_Jacobs_wedding”. In other words, the title of the page shows up in the URL itself, like prose. If I was running a shoe blog, I couldn’t use the title “New shoes” 10 or 12 times a month with that structure, but I vary my titles. So that is the default. When you get a JSON error, it usually means that, for some reason, WordPress has forgotten the structure of that setting.

The primary solution is to click on it, resave it, and all good. In the past, it has always worked. Did it this time? Nope, couldn’t save still. Huh. Tried a few different settings and discovered if I went to the vanilla format, it worked just fine. The “hard code default” would work, my set default would not. Huh? A little odd, but potentially a clue if I could figure out what it meant. Off to google my favourite WP help sites.

It could have also been a problem with my certificate, but it was working fine (if it wasn’t, my front end would have blown up — it was showing fine). Tried a few other things.

Then it hit me…wait, I have a backup that gets run nightly, dodo bird that I am. I reset it to the night before when it CLEARLY had been working fine, and voila! It still didn’t work. Time travel was not the answer, apparently. By reverting my site back a day, I had wiped out two posts, but I had copies of those in my email that I could repost once the problem was solved. But it had not worked, it still wouldn’t let me save.

The BIG solution to try is to deactivate just about everything. I really HATE doing it. Not because I don’t like the deactivation, it’s the part where you have to reactivate things slowly, one by one, until you find something that conflicts. But it’s the standard “self-solve” step — turn off all the bells and whistles to a plain site that works before adding each bell or whistle back in. Okay, all deactivated, and the theme switched to a basic theme. One of my reluctances here was that a couple of my plugins do NOT keep the data for their settings when they’re deactivated, so when you reactivate them, you have to go through all the settings again. Blech.

But with everything off, no bells, no whistles, the site … still didn’t work! WTF? That is NOT possible…is it? Apparently so. If you’ve eliminated all those pieces, one of the higher solutions was to see if a certain mandatory file still exists. WP needs it. I checked, and gone. WTF? How in hell did that file “disappear”? There’s nothing that I have done to get rid of it. Could the host have done something? No clue.

Anyway, I was manually putting each bell and whistle back in when a small lightbulb went off. Wait a minute…if the problem is with the structure, then all of my backup is perfectly fine. It SHOULD work, except for that other problem. It wasn’t my posts, or my plugins, or my theme. I could scrap the manual rebuild process and simply restore again from the backup with all the plugins and settings back to my version of normal. Which I did. Nothing would let me save, but all my plugins were back to normal.

I submitted a support ticket, asked a couple of questions, and left it.

During my lunch hour today, I also realized that I had restored from my backup from Sept 19th, two days ago, when I knew things were working. But I had also done a backup on Sept 20th at 9:00 p.m. or so, not too long before I found the new error. If there was nothing wrong with my settings, I might as well go with the full latest backup, one day later and with the two missing posts restored. Done. Earlier tonight, I reposted them.

I checked a bunch of other online settings at lunch, all looked normal. Tweaked a couple of things, went into my website, did a test NEW POST, and it saved just fine. Umm…that wasn’t working last night, I swear.

So. my website is back to normal, but I don’t think I fixed anything. And my support ticket is sitting there unopened. I won’t be surprised if someone already saw it, found something they did and fixed it, but hasn’t told me yet. It’s not great service, but it can happen. And in the end, everything is back where it should be. I think.

From the front-end, I didn’t think anyone would notice. But I missed something. I had posted a blog about my mental health, and it was one of the ones that got rolled back temporarily. So I had posted it, my social media app had shared it on FB and Twitter, and a few people read it. Then I rolled the website back and those posts disappeared temporarily — from the WEBSITE. I planned to republish them later, but I forgot that they were still showing as posts on FB, for example. People could see the post link, see a short preview so they knew it was “live”, etc. But after the initial roll-back, if they clicked on it, the links went nowhere. A friend flagged it on FB that the links weren’t working. Oh, right. So I temporarily deleted the links, eventually republished the posts and created new “updates” for FB and Twitter as a repost. But that was minor compared to the website glitch.

But this is the second of two new posts that I’ve written today. Plus, I reposted the other two posts that I deleted and restored during the backup, so I think it’s working again.

Just a glitch, I guess.

Nudging the website a bit

July 10 2023

I thought I was mostly caught up on all my website stuff, and more or less ready for posting various reviews to come. Recipes. Podcasts. Music in general. Books, TV and movies were already down.

So imagine my surprise when I went to do my updates for some of the other items, just to give myself a baseline for my goals and I realized that a bunch of things that were ON my website were not actually live. The music reviews were still in pending from my last migration. Podcasts sitting in draft.

I could live with that reality, sort of shrugged it off as “Oh, I guess I didn’t get to those before”. Okay, no big deal.

And then I realized that for my recipes, even though I had put a whopping TWO of them on the newly-configured site almost a year ago, I find of forgot to add any way to find them. No links in the menus. No sub-menus for recipes at all. If you searched the site, and knew what you were looking for, sure, they would have popped up. But it was a bit of a dodge to get there.

So I fixed the other six recipes that are on there AND put up multiple sub-menu options to aid in navigation.

Then I did the music ones. Plus some podcasts. And added all the sub-menu options for those too.

And just for fun, I did some book reviews this weekend too. Two fiction ones and one non-fiction. I have a somewhat large back-log of book reviews to do, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to get through them in an orderly fashion. I’ve decided they will be part of my writing goals, so I’ll try to do an “old” review of something in my “TO BE REVIEWED” pile every time I do a “NEWLY READ” review too. That means probably several years to get through the backlog, but I’m not in a rush. I’d just like to be a bit better organized.

Of course, I also had to organize my desktop files and make backups of all of this to various “mirror” sites and my own desktop plus cloud options.

I’m not done, but it was a busy weekend for updating my website. I *think* I have all the indices working the way they are supposed to, but only time will tell.

Onward!

Schrodinger’s computer purge (part 1 / 3)

January 15 2023

So, I’m a techno-wannabe-geek with elements of hoarding in my DNA. I find it hard to dispose of working computer parts, long after I’ve outgrown the need for them. Some “saves” are practical and some are not. And like Schrodinger’s cat, my computer purge is both real and theoretical at the same time.

A. Network cabling. Sure, I had too much coax at one point, leftovers from running connections to parts of the house that didn’t have a cable outlet. Back when I had cable feeds, that is. We long ago switched to internet streaming, and we had proper outlets installed when we moved in to add to where things needed to be.

What is left is Ethernet cabling. But when we moved in, and we had the basement renovated, I had the electrician run some extra ethernet cabling through the house. One went to the living room for the TV and gaming machines. I didn’t have an actual need for that when I did it, we still had cable, but it seemed like a good place for a connection. I considered one in the family room, but we didn’t think we would ever have a computer or TV in there, so it seemed overkill. Fast-forward to the pandemic and Jacob was doing his schooling from that room, an ethernet cable would have been nice. Wifi was good enough, but I eventually ran a cable from the office upstairs (our main internet hub) down to the playroom with that “lie flat” style Ethernet cable, so there IS a feed there now that Jacob uses for all his gaming. And he noticed the difference instantly.

But I knew there would be a need in the finished basement, so I had TWO lines run to the basement. I probably only needed one, but well, why not? At the time, the electrician grumbled and complained, thought I should only do wifi, and I was like, “Why would I settle?”. Particularly with some of the wifi challenges that can come up from interference, distance, etc. There is a whole sub-industry with ways to extend your wifi farther to weak areas of your house. Mostly obsolete at this point, but still, it seemed prudent to just do it.

Now that I’m in the basement for work full-time, it’s pretty sweet having the proper cabling already in place. I added some lie-flat CAT6, which left me with a bunch of old ethernet cable to dispose of, sitting in a box. Well, actually, two or three boxes, mixed in with other things.

After Andrea helped me sort all of the basement electronics into about 12 separate smaller boxes, I realized how much of that leftover cabling I still had. Oops. Out it is going, boxed into two boxes and currently waiting in the garage for me to make a run to the dump.

B. Keyboards and mice. You know when you upgrade your keyboard and mouse? Maybe get something a bit nicer, cleaner, sleeker? Well, I tend not to dump the old keyboard and mouse right away, just in case there’s a problem. And in my defence, there HAVE been several occasions where a keyboard or mouse died, and I went to the basement, grabbed a previously used option, and got everyone back in business in minutes, not hours or days. Not exactly saving lives, obviously, but it’s a nice backup to have.

A few of them are wireless. More than I thought, actually. Andrea likes having a wireless keyboard, while Jacob and I seem to prefer wired ones. His is a gaming keyboard, as is mine, but mine is just for size and tactile feedback. I don’t use any of the gaming features, really. While a keyboard is nice and big, the little wifi dongle that goes with it is not. Dun dun dun.

I was going through all my USB sticks, memory card readers, etc., and pulling out the dongles. I found most of them no problem. And was able to toss one of the keyboards. It had no recharging capability, batteries only, and Andrea said it died fast. So it goes to the e-waste pile. Another? Hmm. No dongle. Did you know that the wifi ones are all adjusted for frequency so that they don’t conflict with a neighbour? You don’t want an office full of wireless keyboards to be getting confused which keyboard is which, so they are paired tools…each keyboard and mouse use a specific dongle. I had thought they were all like Bluetooth connectors, it broadcast a general signal and received one through pairing, not through the frequency control. So I didn’t try to keep them together. And if I don’t have the right dongle, the keyboard and mouse are dead. Oops.

No problem, I would see how much a replacement was. Oh, you can’t get a replacement because the frequency is unique, you can’t get a general one and adjust it to match. The original dongle or you’re dead in the water. Oops.

So, I had to toss what I thought was a very nice Microsoft keyboard and mouse with no dongle. Then, as I’m weeding another box, I find a small bag of USB devices. Including three more dongles. Is it this one? Nope, that looks like it is for my old MyGica remote. Which is already dead and gone. Toss. Another one comes up as a Bluetooth device…oh, it’s generic, designed to be plugged into desktops that don’t have Bluetooth. I guess I should put that in the little save pile. A third, that must be it? Nope, it is a dongle-style USB drive, with a fairly large capacity, yet super compact.

Okay, let’s finally toss the non-working keyboard, the MS keyboard that I don’t have the dongle for, and a wired keyboard that is just worn out, into the garage. I threw in 2 wired mice, although those go in the “offer to the buy nothing group”. And I would recycle the wireless mouse that goes with the keyboard.

About 30 minutes later, after taking some of that stuff to the garage, I am going through smaller box 4 of 12 in the basement, and oh, look, another dongle. And it says Microsoft on it! Damn it. I go back to the garage, pull the keyboard and mouse back out, test it, yep, it matches just fine, everything works. Andrea needs a new wireless keyboard for when she goes back to work, but not immediately, she has one keyboard she’s working with for now from work. Score! I can give it to her, yay hoarding! She has a mouse she likes, so she just needs a keyboard. I gave her the MS ones to try, annnnnnd, no joy. She doesn’t like the feel of them at all.

So back to the conundrum. I don’t often use a wireless keyboard setup. I might when I get the TV hooked back up to my computer and I’m doing some streaming stuff. But when I did that before, I just used the laptop keyboard. But that’s a different kettle of fish to fry, and I’m not there yet. Will I want a wireless one? Perhaps. I’m trying to purge, but I also don’t want to purge something and turn around in 3 months and decide that a wireless keyboard setup is what would work well in the basement. Plus, it’s nice to have ONE backup. Okay, it can stay. I ditch another wired one that was a maybe.

C. Computers. I thought this one was going to be easy. I have four extra computers that I am not currently using. Wait, I know that sounds like a lot. Don’t freak out yet. Let me explain.

For active computers, I have my main desktop. I also have my MS Surface as my laptop. Everything synchs, everything works, all good.

But I also have an old desktop PC that was mine before I upgraded, and then Andrea’s before she got a laptop, and then Jacob’s before he got a laptop. It isn’t super powerful, but it runs fine, has no issues, and would work in a pinch if needed. Except we all have laptops, and if someone is in a pinch, my Surface could be handed over just as easily until we find a working permanent solution for someone.

So I should ditch the PC, right? Except in the basement, I want a computer hooked to the TV. Plus, I have a new 3D printer, and was thinking about putting a computer on that desk to do my modelling stuff. It’s not high-end modelling, so I don’t need a powerful computer, and if I’m streaming, I could go with something way less powerful even. It’s a viable solution for that space. If I want to go that route. And the two functions can be done by the same computer.

But I have three other computers to consider. First and foremost, I have my previous laptop. It’s an HP, runs well most of the time, and would work equally well as a streamer and with the printer. However, I’m having trouble with it connecting via wifi, so it likely would need to be connected through Ethernet (which is fine, I have a connection right there), and it also doesn’t want to charge at the moment, which I think is just which powerpack I have plugged in. But if it’s always sitting there, I don’t care if it charges. I used to stream from it before, I just found it a bit bulky and heavy for writing on long-term, hence the newer and faster and lighter Surface.

I also have an older Compaq laptop that went before the HP model, which I can easily purge. Once I find the power cable for it so I can power it up and wipe the memory. But it also works just fine, except for a weak wifi module, reminiscent of the era. I can offer it to someone through the buy nothing group, lots of hobbyists repurpose things like that, use it to run Linux, etc. It clearly “goes”, or at least I thought it should.

And then there’s my little NetBook. An ACER Aspire One. I bought it as part of an endless search for a small writing tablet/computer that could go anywhere, be used anywhere, and let me write anywhere. I wrote lots of stuff on it, but it always seemed a bit clunky. The MS Surface is NOT clunky, but it is a bigger screen overall. Nevertheless, I’ll never go back. So it too can be powered up, wiped and recycled / repurposed.

My goal was for all three laptops AND the PC to be in play for one of them to remain as a streamer and the rest to go. Except I’m having a hard time working out what combo that should be. And as I was playing with the options, I came across another idea.

There is a version of Linux that is very game-based. If you install it on a computer, the list of specs for hardware to run old games is pretty basic. Even the Aspire One can handle it. With many of the old 8-bit and 16-bit game available online through legitimate and nefarious means, it is viable to install Linux, connect a game controller, and turn the machine into a Retro Video Arcade. I had planned to make one through 3D printing and use a Raspberry Pi sitting in my closet. A small project I wanted to do, with some people having made really cool old Game Boy designs but running way more powerful insides and games. But as one project for the Aspire One mentioned, if you build it with a Pi, you also have to add a case, a video display, perhaps a keyboard, and a USB port. In effect, you have to add all the peripherals that are already built-in for the Aspire One, except an external controller. I could repurpose the Bluetooth dongle and even go BT for the controller. Or wired. Or wifi even.

I have a very specific idea in mind for one possibility as a gift for someone, and if I did it with all three of the dead laptops, it would give them new life. Well, sheep dip. The goal was PURGING, PolyWogg, not repurposing. I mentioned the gaming project to Jacob, and mentioned that if he was interested, we could do it together and see if we could get it working. I could just do it myself, if he’s not interested, I don’t think it will be that hard, but if he was interested, I could help him do it to get it running. To my surprise, considering all the other little game projects we have that we can do, he wants to do this one with me. As happy as I am about that, it sealed my fate. I can’t quite ditch those if I can repurpose two of them as gaming options and the other two are possible streamer options. I’ll eventually ditch 2 of the 4, maybe even all 4, within the year. But Jacob and I are going to give them the hobby treatment first. They’re relatively compact at least.

Sigh. I thought I was doing well, there were already 4 boxes of e-waste in my garage. Plus, 4 boxes of books and CDs, that’s a separate purge. And about 2 boxes of various computer gear upstairs, ready to leave the house. But those will go to the “buy nothing” group if anyone wants them. Some of them are actually worth a bit of milk money, but I’m happy to give them away for free if someone can get a bit of use of them still. Even though some will take them and just try to resell them, I suspect. Andrea’s already gotten rid of 3 or 4 things already, but there’s more to come. I’ll talk about some of that in part 2 later this week.

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