Computers – Page 3 – The PolyBlog

An intermittent website gremlin

January 3 2023

I mentioned in my post about my plans for the year that things had gone sideways on me for my website earlier in the day. I’ve got an intermittent gremlin hiding in my website somewhere. And finding the little b****** is like a game of whack-a-mole because it can be almost anywhere. Fair warning, this one is mostly for people who are interested in solving website problems aka the technical bunch.

For context, my blog (and just about every other site out there) is really made up of thirteen basic components:

The hoster’s server hardware
Hardware settings for the overall server;
The hoster’s server software;
Settings for the server space I’m using;
The WordPress application software itself;
The settings for the core WordPress application software;
A theme for the website;
Configurations for the theme;
Multiple plugins for the back-end of the website;
Configurations for the back-end plugins;
Multiple plugins for the front-end of the website;
Configurations for the front-end plugins; and,
My posts, pages, media and comments aka the content.

Most of my time and energy is devoted to #13, the content.

Over the years, I have had as many as 45 front-end and back-end plugins running (#9, 11), adding features or tweaking the look and feel here and there. The theme itself (#7) has been relatively stable for almost ten years, I love the one I use, and I have the pro version that lets me tweak it in a hundred different ways. The first six elements are the infrastructure of the website, and I tend to leave them relatively stable, upgrading pieces when I need to, etc. General maintenance.

When I’ve had major meltdowns over the last ten years, it has been one of three things:

a. I didn’t like the distribution of content across the two websites;
b. Something changed in the server software that messed up my site; or,
c. There was a problem with the hardware.

At times that has been where the company’s systems were hacked, or some setting got changed in the system’s back-end where I can’t see it, and suddenly my site started running REALLY slow. I switched from two hosts because their support for #1-4 was inadequate. But I’ve had an ongoing gremlin of sorts for about five years, and I don’t know where exactly it lies.

When the gremlin appears, things start running slow

As I said, I used to run about 45-50 plugins. But the back-end of my website started running slowly, so I cut it back to about 35 and then 30. Each time, it felt like I was cutting off a limb. I had spent a fair amount of time on the choice and configuration of plugins (#9-12) and liked how everything worked except when it didn’t. I eliminated plugins where there were conflicts and used single bigger / better plugins that could replace several smaller plugins that didn’t play well with each other. A few tools? I just dropped them.

Now here’s the twist in the tale. I don’t care about the speed of the front-end too much. That speed affects a lot of rankings in search engines and is part and parcel of search engine optimization, but most people coming to my site are doing so simply for MY stuff, aka either friends or family or people wanting to know about HR for the government. I’m not going to suddenly go viral because my website ranks higher in a search engine; I’m too niche for that type of concern. My REAL concern is the speed of the back-end.

Here’s what happens for any editing process. I open up an edit window, and the post appears. Then, some of the “configurable settings” for THAT post start to appear — like a featured image, categories, tags, and a few other key pieces that I need to set. Each of those uses up a bit of memory to load on the server. The amount of memory I have available on the server (not storage space, but RAM, basically) is controlled back at the #1-4 stage. As the post loads, it uses up that memory. Those are the basics.

About five years ago, I could run 45 plugins with no problem. I could even edit 10-12 single posts at a time if I wanted to do so (and sometimes, when I was tweaking the format, that made life WAY easier). Then the site started to slow down on the back end, often because of the size of the security plugins. It shouldn’t really affect the BACK-END, but it does for some reason. I cut it to 30, and it was all good again. I’m down to about 25 now. But anything I cut now is really painful to remove. Yet about a week ago, it started to run really slow in the background again.

My post loads, no problem. But whereas the image, categories and tags load within 3-4s if I’m running 0 plugins, with about 15 plugins running, it is about 8-10s for the rest of the pieces/settings to load. Slow load is still manageable at that rate, as I can work on other pieces while those elements load. Except at 25-30 plugins? Some of the edit windows NEVER finish loading. I can sit and wait and wait and wait.

I loaded THIS post, copied over from a previous one and edited it, and I’ve been working on it for almost 20 minutes of writing time. My Featured Image has loaded, while the categories, tags, and reusable images have not. I’ve installed a cache, can save the file, reopen it, and some of the rest or maybe even all of it, will load because it’s cached. (I just tested it, 40s to get my Featured Image to load, a reusable block timed out, and nothing for categories and tags yet. Closing and reopening? Everything loaded in 5s). This is NOT a resource-intensive site; it should NOT take those first times to load, no matter what is running.

Hacking the diagnostic loop

When you try to resolve this type of problem, the first two pieces of advice are (a) changing to the default theme and (b) removing all plugins.

I’ve done that so often (out the wazoo!) that I can eliminate the theme as the cause. It doesn’t matter right now whether I have the default theme or my premium theme installed, it still takes the same amount of time to load on the back-end (I can get a small performance bump on the front-end). I spent a huge amount of time this week testing out some other popular lightweight themes to see if I could get a huge performance improvement and truly eliminate my theme as the cause. I tried approximately 25 different themes, with the same result across the board. If I get above 15-20 plugins, it slows down. Unfortunately, none of those themes works as well for me as my current model. And for what it’s worth, my PolyWogg site has almost the same config WITHOUT the same slowdowns. It happens from time to time, but like I said, it’s intermittent, and NOT as frequent on the PolyWogg site as this ThePolyBlog site.

Now, everyone on the ‘net who knows anything about WordPress will say, “A-ha! it’s a plugin problem!”. Except it’s not. I’ve done the scientific method of loading them one at a time. It makes no difference. And so those with more experience will say, “A-ha! it’s a plugin conflict problem!”.

In other words, it is not one plugin causing the slowdown, it is two of them interacting with each other that is causing the problem. If you are into math and you want to test two plugins, the purest form of those tests would be N plugins * N-1, divided by two. Sort of like scheduling a tournament of 30 plugins in a hockey tournament where they all have to play each other once, which would be 30 teams * 29 opponents divided by 2 teams in each game = 435 games. Yikes.

It’s a nightmare to do that, obviously. I can’t test 435 combinations of 30 plugins, or even 300, if there were only 25. So you can hack the combo pattern. Instead of testing Plugin 1 against Plugin 2, there are a series of variables you can make fixed. For example, of the plugins currently running, I can triage the list into “musts”, “needs”, and “likes”. I have 34 currently installed, but rarely all active.

	MUST HAVE	HIGHLY WANT	NICE TO HAVE
FRONT-END	AddToAny Share Buttons Display Posts Display Posts – Date View Flexible Table Block Weaver Xtreme Plus Weaver Xtreme Theme Support	Photonic Gallery & Lightbox wpDiscuz Yet Another Related Posts Plugin	Simple Lightbox Stackable – Gutenberg Blocks
BACK-END	Akismet Anti-Spam LiteSpeed Cache ManageWP – Worker Media Library Assistant OG — Better Share on Social Media Really Simple SSL WP to Buffer Pro Wordfence Security Yoast Duplicate Post	Advanced Editor Tools Health Check & Troubleshooting Nested Pages Redirection MailPoet MailPoet Premium WPForms Lite WP Mail SMTP	Dashboard Wordcount Simple Blog Stats Broken Link Checker Media Replace Press This WordPress Importer

Obviously, I can install the MUST HAVEs, which are 15 plugins and test those. Since I have to have all of them for my current functionality, I might as well test with that WHOLE group running, minus the Caching program (not much of a test if the Cache is running). With those running, everything loads in about 9 seconds. Not bad, right? Not awesome, admittedly, but it loads fast ENOUGH that I can be working on other things while those are lazy loading, so to speak. So those 15 “work”.

Then, I can try adding them either in bundles (3-4 each time) and see if anything happens OR perhaps some of the “bigger” ones in the back-end first.

For Bundle 1, I focused on the WPForms, WP Mail and MailPoet as they all work together. As I added each one of them, the site got slower and slower but not immeasurably with each one. Some added a second or two, some added no increase. I continued with other bundles of three or four at a time, seeing what they did to my load time, and as I added more and more plugins, creeping up into the high teens and early 20s, the site started to hit what I consider my magic threshold. Anything above 21 right now was bogging it down. Hello gremlin, my old friend, you’ve come to annoy me again.

Technical support has entered the chat

Oh, I know what you’re thinking. Can’t you get tech support to help? But here’s the rub. Tech support is good for #1-4 (the server setup). Occasionally, they’ll help you diagnose something where it is a WordPress configuration issue (#6). But after that? The rest of that is YOUR website and YOUR problem. And since it is almost impossible to find WHY it would be doing this, particularly as it is intermittent, it would seem like a plugin or theme problem.

I’ve also come to suspect that the gremlin has friends, of sorts. Or perhaps grandchildren.

About four years ago, the problem turned out to be a security plugin that was doing something funky on my site. I think it was mis-interacting with other plugins, but it was going into an infinite loop. It had done that before on another hoster’s servers, and they couldn’t tell me what was going on, they claimed it was my site causing the slowdown but not how. That was the last straw with them, so I shifted to a new host. Everything was fine so I thought that was the proof that it was the previous host. Except then it happened on my new server. So much so that the host contacted me and asked, “WTF you running over there? It’s slowing down the WHOLE shared server!”.

But I got lucky…one of their Level 2 supports looked, quickly realized the security plugin had created an infinite loop of calls, and disabled it for me (with my permission). Everything went back to normal. I checked online and this was a known gremlin for that security plugin. One of the biggest and most popular ones would occasionally futz itself and mess up a config file. You can disable it, uninstall it and reinstall from scratch to fix it — or just use one of the other security plugins. I was running a huge overhead plugin called JetPack which divides the WordPress community in two — those who love it and developers who HATE it. It’s really intrusive. Well, the security plugin was conflicting with it, as was two other smaller plugins to a lesser extent, and I changed security plugins and eventually dumped JetPack anyway. Unfortunately, without JetPack, I have all this other mail stuff to run just so I can get email versions of my posts when I post and allows people to get my posts as newsletter feeds. Not that I have that many people doing that, most get it from Reddit, FaceBook or Twitter. Or referrals from friends.

Anyway. Where was I?

Oh yeah, killing gremlins. Another time it was a legacy of a hack. Another time it was a misbehaving plugin that has since been patched, but I don’t let it run all the time, just when I want some specific stats.

But, as I said earlier, the dang site was bogged down so I reached out to Tech Support earlier noting that I was overloading the Physical Resources AND my IO process limit. Did they see anything that was amiss?

Often I end up using Tech Support as a catalyst for brainstorming. Since they don’t know my site inside and out, I ask questions and they give me crappy answers at Level 1, I eventually get up to L2, and then their responses often trigger something in me.

This time, while I was chatting with them, I got the standard popup in my file manager asking me if I wanted to upgrade to the next level of website performance. I didn’t, it’s almost double the price. I talked to them about it about 8m ago when it started going slower for awhile, and I would love to do it for a month to see if it would make a difference, but alas, they don’t have a trial option to do that and I’m already on a really good discounted plan. If I give it up, it’s gone. I can return to my current lower setting, but at more money than I’m paying now. There’s no simple way to test it to see if it works. And honestly, the improvements will only help me in this area, if at all. There are lots of other “perks” to the higher package but are not anything I need or want or will ever use. Sigh.

So we go around and around, ask a few questions, when I notice something amiss.

My comparison of the three models of plans that are suitable to my situation show that they have three levels of resource availability. The first is 512M, the second is 1G, and the third is 2G. For I/O processes, 2MB, 4MB, and 8MB versions per second. I’m on the middle tier, so 1G and 4MB / second. Except, wait a minute…as I’m going through the allocation process for memory, the piece that is being overloaded right now, my internal server dashboard is showing me 512MB and 2MB/s. The lowest plan settings. I double-check, and then triple-check with a comparison to PolyWogg.ca. The other site? My main site for HR that works? It’s set properly. This one is not.

FFS, is that REALLY it? I ask, they go into conniptions and embarrassment and make the switch / upgrade overnight. Today, everything is loading in 10s.

I should be mad, right?

So, it looks like most of the problem has been a misconfigured server on their end. Instead of being on the higher plan, they’ve had me on the lower plan for some time. I’ll write to the billing people, just for sh**s and giggles, but honestly, I’m not sure I can be that mad at them.

First and foremost, the error has almost NO effect on my website for the user. It’s a wee bit slower than it should have been, but not noticeable as I don’t have that many viewers. I don’t pay for the higher tier for front-end performance, I pay for the backend.

Second, I know how it happened. Way back when they got hacked, they had to create what they called LifeBoat servers. They suffered a massive attack from a former employee, something very hard to defend against if not impossible (the person had access in the building to the servers!), and they could have been dead in the water. They managed to find a way to make things work again, and while frustrating, they created lifeboats to get us up and running as fast as possible. They have customers that are WAY more important than me, but they got me going pretty quickly, all things considered. And when it was “over”, they moved lifeboats back into the main hubs. Which I’m pretty sure is when I got downgraded to the lower-tier plan for space. It shouldn’t have happened, but it’s understandable how it did.

That’s hard to generate anger around…little front-end effect and an understandable reason. Plus, I’ve seen that information in my dashboard for some time. I just didn’t realize what it meant. As I said, I’ll ask for a retroactive credit of some sort, or they’ll extend my expiry date by a month or two or three, but I’m glad that part is fixed.

Oh, right. I left out the important part. There ARE two plugins messing up my load time on the back-end.

I already knew one before I started was a likely culprit. Stackable. It’s a plugin that lets you add a whole laundry list of really good extra style blocks. Back in the dark ages before the Pandemic, I tested a bunch of “block” plugins, and Stackable won by a country mile. I bought the lifetime premium membership option. But, well, it is designed to add things to the back-end editor. Of course, it slows things down. That’s what it does when it adds that functionality. I’ve reached out to them, and they’re working on a speed improvement, but for now, I just have to pare back what I use.

The second one was another likely suspect. I was pretty sure my Mail bundle was screwing things up. I have MailPoet that formats my email newsletters (emails of my posts), WP Mail SMTP that lets me send mail as an authorized sender less likely to be caught in spam filters, and a WP Forms plugin that lets me add a nice contact form to my site. Do I need all of them? Meh. It’s more professional to have them than not. And it means I don’t have to run JetPack. What I should do is find a simple integrated plugin that does all three in a lightweight fashion and pay for a lifetime subscription. But that’s a problem for another day. In the meantime, I put up with MailPoet, as it is the one that slows things down.

I’ve stripped the two suspects down to their skivvies, and the site is loading. Maybe that’s all I can ask for now. Other than my rebate from my hoster.

For now, it’s resolved, if not solved.

Planning for my new hobby

April 24 2022

I probably don’t need yet another hobby, but I’ve become fascinated with 3D printing in the last year, and some of the things I can do. Some of them are an extension of not being very handy with power tools or woodworking options. I need something that is more “design and print” then “design and build”.

Over the last few months, I’ve waffled. Do I wait until life returns to normal after Andrea’s chemo? Except life is never “normal”. There’s always “something” that would suggest waiting. I am forcing myself to at least finish cleaning up the basement before bringing another project downstairs, and I’m slowly working on it.

But in my spare time, I’ve been trying to figure out what the 3D printer hobby will look like, even as simple as which printer to get.

On the plus side, there’s a good local place with well-reviewed support options. Some people just order kits online, which doesn’t really interest me, and there’s some irony in there. Starting on a DIY hobby where I don’t want to do the initial setup myself. Hmm.

Nevertheless, I visited them a few months ago, decided on the most likely printer to choose. They are cheaper than I expected, expecting to pay around $800, but I’ll likely get out for under $500. Not including supplies of course.

But the part that is messing with my squirrel-brain is NOT the actual 3D printing. It’s how to do multiple colours.

You know what they say about assumptions

When I started looking at this, I saw lots of multiple colour prints. Marvin the Martian, chess boards, Disney characters, etc. I am curious to do a Jiminy Cricket as a throw-back to my youth and to compare it to a statue I have in ceramic that a friend painted for me almost 30 years ago. And under the general info I had, and what I saw, I assumed that a 3D printer kind of worked like a colour inkjet printer. You put in multiple colours of filament, and out came a multiple colour print.

Nope. Almost all hobby printers are monochromatic. They print in one colour at a time. Technically, they say that it has a “single extruder” to paint the print with filament. But it means the equivalent of one ink cartridge at a time.

Now, here’s the fun part. If you WANT multiple colours, there are generally five ways to do it. Are you ready for them? I wasn’t.

A. Upgrade to a multi-extruder printer

That seemed obvious to me, a simple upgrade. If you have a monochrome paper printer, and you want colour, you get a different printer that can print colour. But hold on there. A multi-extruder printer is not as simple as choosing one with multiple heads nor simply changing heads to combine things. No, that would be too easy. Some have two, some have four, some have eight, but each time you go up, the printers get more complicated, more expensive, and often have more things to go wrong…all of which means your user experience gets complicated. Oh. Well, sheepdip. I do NOT want to over complicate my user experience. I was looking for simple.

B. Change filament during the print

This is the obvious approach. While it’s not QUITE the same, it’s kind of like printing a page in a normal printer, and when you want to switch from black ink to red ink, the printer pauses, you switch the cartridge, and it prints the next part, and then tells you when it’s ready to go back to black so you can switch the cartridge again.

Of course, 3D printers don’t really have cartridges, they have filament going into them. And you have to tell the printer when you want it to switch filaments — basically coding the print job so it pauses, beeps at you, has you change the filament being fed into it, waits until you tell it to to continue, does the next segment, and bob’s your uncle, it beeps to tell you to go back to the old one again.

That’s a bit annoying, but manageable, and it keeps everything linear, right? Except it’s not like paper, because you’re printing in three dimensions, a thin layer at a time. So, think of it like say a cube with 20 layers of black at the bottom, and then 20 layers with one half white and one half red, and then 20 more layers there are black again. In an ideal scenario, I would do layers 1-20 of black (which is true, it would do that). Then I would like to switch colours and do layers 21-40 of white (the back half of the cube), switch colours, and then layers 21-40 of red (the front half of the cube), switch back to black, and then do layers 41-60 of black again. It can’t do that.

It can do the first twenty layers (1-20) in black, just normal. But on layer 21, where the back half is white and the front half is red, it would need a colour change from black to white (still the same) AND then a colour change from white to red to do the front half of the layer. Then it would do layer 22. It can’t do 21-40 of one colour and then 21-40 of another, it has to do layer 21 x 2 colours, layer 22 x 2 colours, etc. With the colour change for every layer up to 40. So you CAN do it. But if you were doing something multi colour — perhaps a Simple Simon video game layout where you would have four different colours on the same layer, plus a form colour, that would be at least 5 filament changes for each micro-layer (where a microlayer might be only a couple of mm thick).

In other words, no, I can’t do really complicated prints directly in multiple colours. Don’t even get me started on the idea of a chessboard. 64 squares of two colours? Plus several layers of thickness? Yikes.

C. Use different materials

This is a lot more complicated, and in some ways is not much different than the multi-extruder option. But instead of using the same type of filament all the way through, you can use different materials of different colours within the print. If I thought colour changes were hard, printers that can do multi-material prints are way more complicated than I’m ready to handle.

D. Make it in pieces

If I go back to the chessboard idea, most people make the 64 squares of two colours in two separate sets of squares — one in one colour and one in another — and then “assemble” them together. So kind of like assembling 64x2x2 square lego bricks side by side on a pegboard. It’s a bit more complicated than that of course, with some people doing it with glue, others using overlapping tabs like models, others making a frame for it to sit snugly in, or others creating ways for the pieces to snap together. Of course, there are ways to attach parts together using external fasteners too, or some people actually put lego-like snaps on the bottom of prints so they can attach to other things. Literally snapping together.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about this one yet. When I was young, I had no interest in models that you put together with glue. I didn’t mind “snap together” options, but gluing? That was way too fiddly for my thick, uncoordinated fingers. These parts won’t be that small, but there is an aspect there that makes me pause. On the other hand, model glue was enough of a deterrent all on its own, and most people use bond or epoxy now from the dollar store.

E. Paint it

Okay, so this is the one that is driving me around the bend. I am not a painter. I have done a few ceramic things, not enough to develop any skill at it, and what I make tends to look like it was painted by a semi-talented four-year-old who was in a hurry. 3D printing can make some amazing models. But if I then have to paint them? Hell, I might as well just buy them.

Yet everyone says the same thing, “Just paint ’em, it’s easy”. And there are some tools available now that weren’t before. Very tiny hobby brushes are common place now, sure. But most people say to use paint pens. I didn’t even know there were such things, but apparently Michael’s has four different kinds! First, they have professional quality, that they keep in a locked cabinet, which come in a wide variety of palettes and nib sizes. Second, they have more hobbyist quality, with three sizes of nibs — basically fine/small, medium, broad/large. Both the professional ones and the hobbyist ones come in acrylic or oil paints. And there are some decent collections on Amazon too, of course.

I have watched a few videos, it looks easy enough, but it will obviously take practice to get any skill. And I say “will” instead of “would”, because it pretty much is the main option open to me. I’m going to have to learn to paint stuff. Some people buy a small air brush, others use spray paint for larger models. I saw some real cool stuff done with a small spraycan on a model to get a really good even coat to make a Disney like character. It’s DOABLE. I just hope that I like doing it enough to actually make it worthwhile.

Taking the plunge

I’m taking the plunge on May 6. Fingers crossed that it works. While I can’t really wrap my around the five options above completely, I’m going with the same printer I originally chose. I considered going with a smaller one — smaller investment in case it doesn’t work out. I considered an alternate one with multi-extruders, but the reviews are not kind for a bunch of complications. And I considered going up in level of machine, none of which anyone else recommends. So I’m going with the Gantry Pro.

My overall rallying thought, and why I have put time into trying to pre-load my brain with the right parameters, is that 3D printing has a lot in common with astronomy and photography. The best gear is the gear you will actually use.

But I’m having to let go of the options a little bit. On the plus side, the worst-case scenario is that I try it and it doesn’t really work for me. So, as a result, I might end up selling the printer within a year.

I’m okay with that. At least I’m trying something new. And I’m hoping Jacob is interested too. We’ll see.

When Apple misunderstands the assignment

April 17 2022

I’m not an Apple fanboy by any stretch of the imagination. I run PCs, not MACs, and I used to have an Android phone and tablet. I switched to an iPhone for three reasons. First, I wanted to do some astrophotography through my telescope, and the best app to do that with is only on iOS (NightCap, for those who are interested). Second, Andrea and Jacob were moving into the world of such tools, and since I provide tech support to them, I wanted things to work as seamlessly as possible without being complicated…which is definitely an Apple selling point since they lock everything down within an inch of its life.

But the third reason, and it isn’t me being a fanboy, just admiring when something is done well, their phones and tablets are slick as anything. There’s a reason why they have such huge market share, they just work. Relatively well too, with a lot of time and effort put into how consumers interact. They may not be able to customize anything for you, but if you want it in the base colours they have, great.

So it surprised me when I had an issue with the way they did something recently that shouldn’t happen in a relatively well-run company.

Let’s start with the simple scenario — we have Apple Music as the family subscription. Andrea, Jacob and I are all on the plan, we all get unlimited Apple Music play. Which I use extensively for music at times. On top of that, I have iCloud (as does Andrea) for backups, AND I also use Apple Arcade. It adds a few dollars a month, under $20 in total with Apple Music family.

But we also have VMedia, Netflix, Prime and Disney+. I sometimes add on specialty channels like BBC Canada to watch a specific show I want for a month or two, or in this case, I decided to add Apple+ TV.

Which SEEMED like a relatively simple idea. I browsed on the TV, it gave me an option to bundle the four services together — Music, TV, iCloud and Arcade — all in Famly mode, and while it would individually run $22+, you save a few bucks bundling, it comes out to $20 or so. Great. Easy peasy lemon squeezy, I click, it does its bit, it synchs everything, adds it to my service, sends me a confirmation, and I watch Slow Horses, a new show on Apple + TV with Gary Oldman as a grouchy old spy running some screwups in MI5.

Then, the next morning, I get a confirmation from Apple saying, “Thanks for subscribing, here’s your bill for the first month”. $20. Wait a minute. I already PAID to May 12 for Family Music. Now I’m paying for Apple TV to overlap that for $20 INCLUDING Music / iCloud / Arcade. If I had just got Apple Music, it would have been only $5.99. Nothing in the email indicates that there’s anything existing already on my account for the same time frame. In fact, when I go to the subscription services, it has bundled everything (as it should have), and it is showing, yes indeed, I’m paying $20 to get to May 15th or so.

WTH?

So I go in, go to the subscription, ask to cancel the charge and that the reason is “it didn’t work the way I thought it would” (a wonderfully lovely way that would also capture every user error option too), and I look for where I can type in my explanation of double billing. Nada. Okay, it must be on the next screen? Nope, it submits it with no option to explain. Frak.

On to the help chat. Daniel was very helpful, but could do nothing. He explained that although I received nothing ANYWHERE that would have told me this, I would have (supposedly) received another email later this month that refunded the prorated portion for the other services. Uh huh. I mean, it makes SENSE, sort of, but why wouldn’t the original click buttons tell me that OR the confirmation email OR the invoice? A simple note to say, “Oh, btw, there’s a good chance this looks like we double-billed you, but well, we didn’t, not really, stay tuned.”

Sooooo, I ask Daniel to cancel my refund request. Oh, no, he can’t do that, he doesn’t have that power. Which means the solution is:

a. I wait for the refund to come through;

b. I go back in, resubscribe to the bundled option (Apple One Family) because it not only took OUT Apple One Family, it also didn’t put the others BACK because my initial subscription/bundle would have cancelled them being separate and the refund didn’t undo that; and,

c. Wait for a future email with my refunded difference.

Umm, okay.

I waited. This morning, I got the refund notification. Great, go back in, yep, all the other subscriptions are “gone” (without any refund notification for those, btw), and I choose Apple One Family. And it tells me THIS time, oh, btw, there’s a free month with it. Well, great, then I don’t care if they refund me. Perfect, let’s do it.

Click, click, click.

Confirmation. All good.

Three hours later? I get a receipt from Apple. They charged me for the full month again anyway. Sigh.

I saved the chat log from the help desk exchange. It VERY clearly says I will get another refund. I don’t care HOW they do it. I just want to pay only once. Why is Apple making that difficult? They are, generally speaking, WAY better at these interfaces and exchanges than this would appear.

So why are they screwing up this simple combo that likely applies to just about EVERY customer they have?

Feeling shallow on the lighter side of life

April 1 2022

While my blog of late has been dealing with lots of more serious matters than normal, I am still trying to keep it “light” with some ME time. I’ve mentioned before that I play various games on my phone, and of late, that’s mainly one of 9:

a. Traffic Puzzle is still a popular choice for me, although I lost a bit of interest when I cracked the 2000+ board mark, and actually caught up to where their new content ran out. I actually had to wait for new boards to be released. I’m at 2453 now, and I think they’re likely somewhere around 2600, but I’m not actively trying to catch up. I do a board or two every few days. Somewhere there was a run on free rewards, and I now have so many, I could literally play nothing but powerups for about four boards (I wouldn’t, but I could).

b. Penguin Isle was something I thought was cute, with a base to develop with lots of little penguins running around. The downside is that while it is cute, there’s not much to do, and once you get past a certain level, the delays between levels is HUGE. I only play once a day anymore, if that, but it could be weeks to the next level up. Not a lot of “fun”, just grinding.

c. I have three games I use for quick distractions — Super Yatzy has six dice instead of five, and some extra things to aim for; Euchre is similar for duration, although it is either too easy (the opposition is on the highest level, but they frequently don’t lead trump to clear stray trumps from taking aces) or it is ridiculously hard (they make it every hand, including with 3 low cards and no bowers, but their partner has both, cuz that’s not suspicious); and Farkle, another dice game, although not super exciting by yourself.

d. I was really excited previously about Lily’s Garden and Penny & Flo, but after I got through some speed story, it has become agonizingly slow with very little happening. It feels more like a soap opera than the adventure book it was resembling.

So where does that leave me these days? Well, I tried out a new game called Trainstations 2. And I am relatively obsessed with it. Most of the “actions” you can do is either picking up freight or delivering it, or generating stuff in factories, and as I’ve advanced, some of the activities take about an hour to complete. Apparently, this is a great source of frustration to other players, but I have no issues at all. I’m happy to play for 5 minutes or so, send trains off to do their thing, and come back a few hours later. Jacob is playing too, but I’ll play through the day, take a break here or there or at lunch, while he only usually plays for a bit after school. It isn’t particularly challenging, relatively mindless, but it is diverting.

But while all of those games are relatively innocuous, it is NOT the one that is making me feel shallow.

Instead, that honour goes to…drumroll please…the Microsoft Solitaire Collection.

Every day, the MS team releases five new “daily challenges” ranging individually from easy to medium to hard to expert for five different solitaire games.

Klondike is the classic solitaire that everyone knows and loves or hates. Easy and medium are way too easy, even hard is usually relatively straightforward. But often the hard or expert ones will come down to a choice of two cards to play, and if you play one, you win, while if you go with the other one, it likely ends in a stalemate. So you back up and go to the other one. I rarely if ever miss a Klondike game in the daily challenge, but there are hundreds of extra games available in the collection for you to “practice”, so to speak.

The second game is Spider solitaire. On easy and medium, it is one colour/suit; on hard and expert, it is two colours/suits. I have played Spider solitaire for years, and it is one of my favourite e-versions to play. Once in a rare while, I can get stuck, but it doesn’t usually take me much to get “unstuck”. I had one a few days ago, and it was really challenging right up until the last draw from the pile, I think I had cleared about two rows out of ten before I ran out of draws, and still managed to solve the deck.

The fourth game (yes I skipped #3) is Pyramid solitaire, and it isn’t a challenge for me on ANY level. I can do them with my eyes closed. There are only a couple of things that can mess me up, and if I miss something, I almost always know why and how to fix it on a replay. Most of the time, I only get in trouble if I’m trying to go too fast and not really paying attention. Some people hate pyramid, but there’s symmetry in it for me and I find it highly relaxing.

Similarly for game #5, TriPeaks. It’s a BIT trickier at times, some of the expert ones can bite me in the butt, but I can usually go a slightly different direction earlier in the round, and make a difference to the end.

So where does that leave me to be “challenged”? Game #3 — FreeCell. I have consistently sucked at FreeCell for years. There was just something about it that I’d play, and without fail, I’d get stuck. Now, the MS collection has the advantage that it ONLY posts challenges that are actually solvable, unlike some other games that just give you a random deal (no different than dealing paper versions yourself), so you KNOW with this version that it CAN be solved. You just missed something.

I’ve played MS Solitaire on and off for about three years. It comes with Windows, you can play direct from the browser or install the app, but it wasn’t until probably January that I realized they have an app version. Of course they do, duh. And it is totally synchable with your MS account so I can play on laptop or desktop or phone, and it is completely synched. I pretty much ONLY play on my phone now, but still, I COULD play on other devices.

In previous years or months, with five puzzles a day and about 30 days per month, that gives about 150 puzzles for the month if you want to get perfect. And now it is time for the really shallow part.

About 3 years ago, I would regularly get about 120/150 in a month. I didn’t play consistently every day on my desktop, but if you miss a day, you can go back and fill in the gaps. I regularly would end up playing about 10d in the month, so every one of those days, I had to play 3d worth of games. Last year, I played a couple of months consistently in a row, and I bumped my score up to almost 140 / 150. There were always a handful I couldn’t get that were almost all FreeCells, and then perhaps a wonky Klondike one or something.

But when I started playing in January on the phone, I played a bunch of these other collections too. It levels you up with your gameplay, and I’ve raised myself up to about level 50-70 for all of them, which is nothing compared to the hard core fans who are well above 1000 in their game levels. I’m shallow, but I’m not crazy. At least not in that way. Maybe.

I missed under 10 in January. In February, I tried REALLY hard, and I missed about four or so. There is a FB group — I mean, why not? — and someone posts SOLUTIONS there for really hard ones. So I checked them out, looked at the solutions to get a perfect month, but it isn’t really a perfect month if I had to cheat, right? But here’s the funny thing. When I looked at the solutions for the FreeCell ones, I picked up a few tricks that I likely wouldn’t have figured out on my own.

The game play is VERY different from the other four games, and there’s actually a bunch of gameplay theorists out there who study optimization techniques tied to FreeCell. I noticed in the solutions that often they will run a suit to the stack quite high, something you would almost never do in Klondike for example, at least not without it likely messing you up. Equally, even when there are obvious lines of advancement sometimes, it’s better to try and get really long runs in one or two columns, leaving the others with room to move. Again, that often bites you in the behind in Klondike and a few others. Plus, Pyramid and Tripeaks, and even Spider to some extent, require a general symmetry to most of the solutions. FreeCell embraces asymmetry for many of the solutions. And I’m learning.

For March, I only missed ONE game all month, an Expert FreeCell early in the month. I almost wish I hadn’t looked up the solution, as I think I could probably get it now.

And I am ridiculously tickled pink by my performance. Seriously, it’s SOLITAIRE. Why do I care? I have no idea.

But it is a bit of brainpower applied to permutation and combinations theory, and as I said, I’m learning. If I get a perfect month in April, what will I get out of it? Almost nothing. It pops up with a little “ta da” sound, and it says, “Congrats, you got perfect this month!”. No ticker tape parade, no prize in the game. In fact, there are a LOT of cheaters in the games … they show the leaderboards, and it is not uncommon for the scores to say that the person who came in first overall for the day managed to solve the five games in 3 minutes. It is literally not possible, they could barely click that fast, let alone solve it, and there have been some with solutions down to barely a minute. Apparently, they are coders who create bots that play for them…they treat it as a coding challenge to look at the cards, choose an optimal strategy, and let the AI play for them.

I don’t know what they get out of that, as they aren’t tweaking the AI every day, they’re just letting it run every day for giggles I guess. But who am I to judge? My mood is controlled way too much by whether or not I got all five of the day’s challenges on the first try.

I really am quite shallow.

Reading “Make: Getting started with 3D Printing” (Chapter 1: Introduction)

February 6 2022

I’m reading an ebook called “Make: Getting started with 3D Printing” (Second Edition, by Liza Wallach Kloski and Nick Kloski) as part of my learning about 3D printers ahead of buying one later this year.

The foreword served as a general introduction (Reading “Make: Getting started with 3D Printing” (foreword)), so I was a little surprised that Chapter 1 had the same title. It is, however, an incredibly short chapter that wants to argue that 3D printing is the corner store of a third industrial revolution after steam-powered machines and assembly lines. The obvious benefits are that 3D printers are incredibly amenable to having scalable workforces (start small, and build…literally) as you produce one unit, multiple units or in large quantities and with the opportunity for customization that traditional assembly lines can’t accommodate. It also might work well with the recent push for “work anywhere” i.e., no location restrictions on where the “factory” has to be in order to run. The book was written before the current big pushes, but there are some obvious synergies.

Personally, I’m not sold on viewing it as a third revolution, although it would be a part of it. For me, it is the digital world that is the third revolution, the move to digital products and away from physical ones, or the multi-faceted nature of the modern “factory”.

What I do like however is a really great quote:

…3D printing gives power to the individual. Essentially, it is a factory on your desk; you can model an idea and 3D print the object the same day. You can manifest your concepts into a physical form which was only once available through expensive, exclusive, and time-consuming industrial prototyping. You don’t need permission from a board of directors, or even orders from customers, to produce new products. You just need your imagination and a pool of plastic.
(p.4)

An interesting thought, and it is entirely true. It is ideal for the startup or small-scale entrepreneur. Will it generate a “revolution”? I think not.

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