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🫑 Delta Airbus A321

Posted March 18, 2024

So far this plane has stayed in one piece (and has free WiFi for all)


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The Collatz conjecture πŸ€”

Posted March 14, 2024

This story in Scientific American gets very technical very quickly, but the root scenario is [really] pretty simple:

Take a natural number. If it is odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1; if it is even, divide it by 2. Proceed in the same way with the result x: if x is odd, you calculate 3x + 1; otherwise calculate x/2. Repeat these instructions as many times as possible, and, according to the conjecture, you will always end up with the number 1.

Hard to believe with all the “smart” computing resources in the world, there is still an unsolved math problem. Also hard to believe I almost studied mathematics here.


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Plex Media Server?

Pic posted March 14, 2024

Thinking I might want to build something like this at home. Please let me know if you have any tips or tricks to share…

Music βœ… | Movies βœ… | TV βœ… | Photos βœ… | Backup βœ…

Carbon Copy Cloner βœ… | Backblaze B2 βœ…

Synology DiskStation DS1522+ 5-Bay NAS Enclosure?


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Arizona @ Wild 🚨🚨🚨🚨

Pic posted March 13, 2024

Wild win, 4-1 (and I checked out the IPTV)


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🫑 Microsoft default font change

Posted March 10, 2024

Thought I was losing my mind, but turns out Microsoft just decided to mess with us, changing the default Calibri font to something called Aptos (previously Bierstadt). Smooth move, Ex-Lax…


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Instagram–WordPress integration in 2024

Posted March 9, 2024

Now that my temporary five-minute ban from Instagram appears to be over, I started looking at ways to re-integrate those posts with this website. Back in the @kingsbury days, I used a plugin to do this, but saw a few recent stories that mentioned trying IFTTT automations.

I signed up for a free account and created an applet that would trigger when a new photo was uploaded to Instagram, then create a WordPress photo post. This worked, but the results were not really what I wanted. It created a post, but didn’t download the image to my local media library (it just linked to the Instagram image URL). It also seemed to grab smaller 640×640 images and not the larger originals.

So I went back to see what plugin I used before and was excited to see that Iain Poulson is still publishing and supporting his excellent Intagrate code. There is a free lite version and a paid pro version, but I was worried by his 2018 blog post about Meta messing with the API for image sizes.

Submitted a question to him about that, but also just reinstalled the lite version to test it out. It seems to work great so far, but image size varies from post to post. Thankfully, my new theme handles smaller images much better than the old one, so it may be a moot point. Excited to have this back in place…


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Already kicked off the Gram?

Pic posted March 8, 2024

Wish I would’ve snapped a screenshot, but Meta said my new account was suspended due to community standard violations. Hit the appeal button, entered a couple codes, then got this…


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🫑 March 2024 Apple Updates

Posted March 7, 2024

macOS Sonoma 14.4 βœ…, iOS 17.4 βœ…, iPadOS 17.4 βœ…, tvOS 17.4 βœ…, watchOS 10.4 βœ…


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Link: iJustine on the new M3 MacBook Airs

Linked March 7, 2024


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Had to bring in more gear

Pic posted March 7, 2024

First year I’ve missed The Tourney in a while, but the iPad setup will have to do this year


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Portland Trailblazers in the crib πŸ€

Pic posted March 4, 2024

The view from IT during pre-game is πŸ’―
Home team W, 119-114


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🫑 Apple Music algorithms

Posted March 4, 2024

Not sure how advanced the technology is behind Apple Music’s personal stations, but the David Kingsbury channel this morning played an Atmosphere song (which I hadn’t heard in a long time), followed by Quarterflash, a song from Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album, Steely Dan and Robert Palmer. Hmm…


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Yet another social media update πŸ€”

Posted March 3, 2024

Thanks to the social media manager in my office, I’m now back on the Gram. She has a goal to increase Instagram followers, so I registered @7minutemiles as a private account, followed @targetcentermn and started looking at the current state of that platform. As some of you may recall, I used to be @kingsbury for years and Colleen had her account stolen by a hacker (Meta support was not helpful).

It’s really amazing to me how much content is generated exclusively for Instagram, especially in the food world. Sports and entertainment is also still going strong and I’m slowly re-discovering golf, skiing and regional travel accounts (Meta appears to limit new accounts to 100 follows a day now). A few people have discovered my new account and sent follow requests, but I’m not sure how much I will publish there.

As Cory Doctorow wrote, now is the moment for POSSE – Post Own Site, Share Everywhere. IndieWeb has also written a lot about POSSE, which I had already started to try recently on both Bluesky and Mastodon. Need to think through this a little more, as I never liked when people would just post the same stuff everywhere.

Still really love the idea of people publishing their own sites and content – whether that is a small business website, a personal blog or something else. What I do here is neither free nor easy, but there are options out there for people if you look. The vast majority of people, however, will likely continue to use services like Instagram and TikTok as their only home to the content they create and publish.

As someone who basically dropped off all social media for a time to focus on my personal site, getting eyeballs on your content is infinitely harder, FOMO is strong and with comments disabled on my site, two-way communication is definitely hindered. And as Zeldman says, “go where the people are.

Still, people like Jason Kottke remain great examples of self-publishing ideas and implementation. I love reading his posts like this one on the latest kottke.org site redesign. My RSS reader follow list hasn’t changed much over the years, but there is still some great stuff that pops up in there from people like Teri Kanefield, Brian Krebs, Charles Edge, Tom Bricker, Mistletunes and Phil Roberts.

Back on the platforms, I got to explore Threads with the new Instagram account and didn’t see a lot of personal value there. The “For You” view was awful and the “Following” option showed that most activity on accounts I care about is remaining on the Instagram side.

I still enjoy reading content on Mastodon via Ivory, which remains the closest experience to what I had with Twitter and Tweetbot. Recently learned I can follow tags there and have been enjoying the “SKIING” tag a lot. Also like Bluesky, but wish I could use a Tapbots app for that service instead of the website.

Instagram on the web is much better than before, but I’ll probably get back to using the iOS app again once I have the full follow list in place. Still happy I hibernated my LinkedIn – it will be there if I need it in the future, but don’t miss it day to day…


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Grizzlies in the crib πŸ€

Pic posted February 28, 2024

What a nice looking backup shot clock – fantastic job by the crew
Another home team W, 110-101


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Link: Post-quantum cryptography and messaging 🀯

Linked February 22, 2024


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Fixing admin email on 7 Minute Miles

Posted February 19, 2024

Finally spent some time to remove a blog-related item that’s been on my personal to do list for a long, long time. WordPress websites have the ability to send out emails for various tasks, but the web server needs to support sending mail. I’ve been using a plugin from Noor Alam called Gmail SMTP that uses Google’s email infrastructure to send messages and that worked great when I was hosting 7minutemiles.com email using Google Apps for Domains. When that service was no longer free, I moved my email over to Apple and knew that broke the plugin and I would need to find another solution.

Fast forward two years (oops). Had an idea of signing up for a free general Gmail account and tying that address to the old plugin. Headed over to the gmail.com signup page and found that 7minutemiles@gmail.com was available, so I grabbed that. Next, I needed to go to the Google Developers Console and follow the instructions on the plugin howto page. That was mostly straightforward and I was able to get a green SMTP connected icon on the plugin settings page. The Test Email tab, however, gave me the following error:

There has been a critical error on this website. Please check your site admin email inbox for instructions.

Since admin emails were not being sent, there was nothing in the site admin email inbox. The comments on the howto page had a great suggestion, though – check the logs. Looking at /var/log/nginx/error.log, I saw this reference to curl:

2024/02/19 05:50:47 [error] 163214#163214: *464402 FastCGI sent in stderr: "PHP message: PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function curl_init() in /var/www/7minutemiles.com/wp-content/plugins/gmail-smtp/class.phpmaileroauthgoogle.php:179

Checking on my PHP config page, sure enough, curl was not installed. That was quickly fixed with this:

sudo apt install php8.2-curl

All is right in the Gmail SMTP world again: Google SMTP server + OAuth 2.0 protocol + TLS encryption…


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One tired doge

Pic posted February 19, 2024

I feel you, Hestia – late night of coding and troubleshooting


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Link: 24 years of WordPress to Ghost

Linked February 17, 2024


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MINI Cooper S Electric ⚑️

Pic posted February 16, 2024

My loaner today is 100% electric – drives very differently


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Pic posted February 15, 2024

Read that this storm doubled our snowfall for the season. Still waiting for our first bird buddy…


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Linked February 14, 2024


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He was the kind of old-school tech lawyer who didn’t need a LinkedIn profile and was also the kind of clean operator who you couldn’t find on a police blotter or a mug shot site…

— Martin Hench, Red Team Blues

Quote posted February 12, 2024


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Posted February 11, 2024

Haven’t posted there since November 25, 2023 (and I don’t read the feed as much as Mastodon), but with the service opening up to everyone now, decided to switch my Bluesky handle to my domain. Logged into my Route 53 DNS panel, added one new TXT record with an _atproto string and voilΓ ! You can find my Bluesky profile here – hoping the Tapbots people will integrate it with Ivory eventually…


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Posted February 11, 2024

Started a project this weekend to move all of my posted concert videos from YouTube here (and close the YouTube channel). Decided to use the 720p versions, which seem to upscale nicely on most screens. Also installed a new plugin called HTML5 Video Player that is supposed to be responsive and customizable.

Server is now at 90.7% of 77.48GB – might have to bump that up soon, as I’d like to add more old videos from my local storage…


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Posted February 8, 2024

macOS Sonoma 14.3.1 βœ…, iOS 17.3.1 βœ…, watchOS 10.3.1 βœ…, iPadOS 17.3.1 βœ…


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