WordPress, tech crap, guns, and more stupid things with your host, @chairmanbrando!
I feel like I'm in one of those dreams where I'm impotent in so many ways and unable to stop or otherwise affect anything. I see some Bad Thing coming that no one else seems to, but despite my efforts I can't have any effect on its arrival. Which, yes, I guess this is just how life is as a lowly plebeian, a voiceless worker drone meant to prop up the hive with my labor, but you know what I mean. I hope.
Keep on readin' on Folks banking on AI running their businesses are some kind of insane⟶
"Forgotten" implies that I actually forgot about this thing, but that's not true. It's mostly that various situations have been compounding and conspiring to keep me from posting on a cadence this year like I had last year. See, what had happened was...
My aging work machine is a Mac Mini from 2018. Its hardware spec is fine if a bit sluggish these days. After a couple months of happenstance uptime, however, it was hard to ignore just how slow it had become. There were a handful of reasons for it, the likely principle of which was that the system and its 16 GB of memory had a 15 GB swap file. Constant swapping memory to disk and vice versa is a decidedly slow operation even if an SSD is in play.
Keep on readin' on "Fix" apps with memory leaks with crontab⟶
Certain sites don't want you inspecting their DOM or various source codes for certain reasons. You'll know you're on one if pressing F12 does nothing or if right-clicking and choosing the "Inspect" option kills the site in some way. The most recent one I came across would send the browser to about:blank if it ever detected the inspector being open.
Keep on readin' on Get around inspector blocks by copying the DOM to your clipboard⟶
And, my Lorde, do I hate it. People's inexplicable need for celebrity drama has created an ecosystem around videos about said drama. This isn't new, but it's gotten a lot worse since generative AI has become so accessible. Between fake celebrity news and right-wing misinformation hubs, I've had to tell YouTube to stop recommending me so many channels at this point.
Keep on readin' on YouTube is full of fake celebrity stories and gossip⟶
If you're like me, you're still on a years-old iPhone (12 Mini in my case!) that's getting slower and less good at holding a charge day by day. Short of keeping it in low-power mode all day, I found a way to shift away from 5G which (allegedly) uses more power for not that much of a benefit.
Keep on readin' on Save a little iPhone battery power with LTE⟶
Tab groups and vertical tabs are nice, and I'm glad to see Firefox finally get on board with features other browsers have had for a good while now. One thing that's been bugging me, however, is the combo of these two features ⸺ specifically, the tab group labels, into which you can write a group's name, don't stretch to the width of your sidebar.
Keep on readin' on Make Firefox's vertical tab group headings full sidebar width⟶
And by "gone awry" I of course mean "turned into malware". At the start of this year I wrote about how not knowing who's in charge of the code running in your browser extensions can lead to those extensions becoming malware behind your back. Well, recently one such elicit campaign turned over four million browsers into spyware.
Keep on readin' on An example of browser extensions gone awry⟶
Sometimes some search or meta query you're trying to do refuses to cooperate and and return results. If you thus find yourself poking around WP_Query's request property, which is a copy of the SQL statement executed to create your query object, you may have noticed some odd and space-inefficient syntax when using the LIKE operator.
Keep on readin' on Remove hashed placeholders when debugging WordPress SQL statements⟶
This isn't the default behavior for whatever reason, and it's something I've just silently dealt with for years. Because of this default functionality, instead of using [keys Cmd-N] I've always used the GUI buttons for creating new files while working on some project. I didn't think an alternative existed, but I've finally found that one does.
Keep on readin' on Make VS Code slot a new file in the current directory⟶