Catalina (10.15 arrives on my MacBook Air)

I wasn’t going to do a write-up of my latest phone, but kid two was like, “when are you going to do the post on your new phone?” Can’t let the kid down, so here goes…

My overall satisfaction with the iPhone Upgrade Program continues. The entire upgrade process was as simple as deciding which model, color and capacity I wanted, filing out a pre-approval form in the Apple Store app and placing the pre-order when that window opened at 7am on September 13th. Then it was just a matter of stalking the UPS tracking site until it got dropped off in our package concierge. A few days later, I received a shipping box to send the old one back. Unfortunately, when I removed my GelaSkin sticker, I found a big crack on the back case. When Apple gets it back, my AppleCare will kick in, but I’ll likely have to pay $99 before they retire the old loan. A new GelaSkin sticker is on the way, but those aren’t shipping until next month.

At this point in the evolution of the iPhone, the three things that are most important to me in terms of improvement are the camera, battery life and storage capacity. Everything else is pretty much perfect now (email, social media, web browsing, music and movie playback), but I can always use a better camera, longer battery life and, since I’m still old school about not streaming most types of media, storage space. The midnight green 512GB iPhone Pro 11 that I selected checks all of those boxes.

You can get way more detail in Nilay Patel’s review at the Verge, where he calls my model “the best camera you can get on a phone.” I also love reading Matthew Panzarino’s iPhone reviews, which he writes from the point of view of Disney park visitors. With the simultaneous rollout of iOS 13, I haven’t had a lot of time to play with all the new features, but the camera has been impressive so far. The new third “extra wide angle” lens will offer a great deal of new shooting options and Night Mode seems to work as advertised. I don’t do a lot of video, but what I have shot so far is impressive. Battery life is much improved over my old XS and it’s nice to have extra storage space, as I was under 10% free space before.

It still amazes me that we continue to have platform wars with just about every form of technology ever invented. I’ve played that game before, but seriously, use whatever works best for you. I live in the Apple ecosystem and yes, it is a walled garden and yes, it’s expensive. But I love my Apple Watch, AirPods, iMac and MacBook Air – they work great together and I don’t see any advantage on the Android/Windows side that would get me to make the significant investment in time and money to switch.

Vive la différence, no?

All the field lights were completely off when I took this…

John Avenson bringing the heat

Review: The iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 do Disneyland after dark

https://stitcher.io/blog/php-in-2019

Technically five, I think

Nerd humor, amirite?

People have said a lot of thing about the Masters over the years, but the ability to follow Tiger Woods and Sergio Garcia for their entire first round in HD on my AppleTV with no commercials, announcers that don’t scream and silence the majority of the broadcast (aside from the birds chirping) is about as good as sports TV gets, in my opinion. Add in a work-from-home snow day blizzard outside (with wife and daughter safely inside) + hot pizza from across the street + new levels in Two Dots = my favorite day in weeks.

The Automattic Creed

Either the Google API is down or my last-updated-in-six-years charting plugin is dead…

UPDATE: Looks like both the plugin and the API are dead.

UPDATE 2: The API seems to be back (on a new server).

http://www.startribune.com/gov-tim-walz-faces-troubled-it-agency/504650992/

https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/

• My wife and daughters, who are so kind and whip-smart
• Everyone who has supported my recovery
• Driving on my own
• The Saint Dinette cheeseburger
• Our Lowertown loft
• The choo-choo
• Progressive jackpots
• Kingdom Hearts 3
• Code (that works)
• Live music
• A well-struck golf shot
• Sunshine (on my shoulders)

The flip side of that other mini-post…

I thought I felt a little déjà vu

https://howhttps.works/

https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/ces-85ca9f07c08a

Like the surface charge space, though

I’d rather retire from using computers than use Windows 10. What a mess…

Thanks for sticker #1, SK

Hello again, Brenthaven

Going from a 6 to a X will be a shock for her

Best iOS game ever, no?

They just don’t come off

This site has always been a tool for me to stay sharp on new web technologies and lately it’s been a great way to test my cognitive skills since the little incident in October. I’ve had three things on my web development to-do list for a long time: 1) use Let’s Encrypt to add TLS/SSL security, 2) make my WordPress theme mobile-friendly and 3) create some dedicated data entry screens for golf scores, runs and bike rides. During my recovery at home, I decided to tackle item #1…

Since I still had Homebrew installed on this server, I was able to get Certbot installed early on in the process and had a valid certificate ready and waiting. I haven’t tried automating the renewal process yet, but can manually renew the certificate with no problem (had to do this once already, in fact). For whatever reason, I had trouble finding examples online of people with similar setups and had several false starts in getting Apache configured correctly to use the certificate for this domain. This post got me most of the way there, but had more of a focus on Mac OS X Server and not plain old Mac OS X client. A few other helpful links here, here and here. And this thread on the Let’s Encrypt site helped me figure out what can/should go in the httpd-vhosts.conf file versus what should go in the httpd-ssl.conf file.

Combined with the Really Simple SSL WordPress plugin, I was able to get a green “B” rating on the Qualys SSL test site. After adding a SSLCertificateChainFile line to my VirtualHost config, I got the top A+ rating and just needed to figure out why my main page was still showing a “not fully secure” message in Chrome. After upgrading the Really Simple SSL plugin to the pro version, I was able to run a full scan, correct a few issues it found, enable HSTS and make cookies more secure. Now all pages in Chrome have the coveted padlock (with no warnings) and I still had the A+ rating. All was right and good in the world.

Then I looked at some old posts…

Almost everything looked fine, but posts and pages that had emoji in them were now messed up (hearts seem to display OK, but everything else was either a question mark or some other image). Emoji support in WordPress started back in version 4.2 and I remember having issues back then too. For this site, it was due to the MySQL tables on the backend not being configured correctly. I verified that the database was using utf8mb4_unicode_ci collation on the posts field and also discovered that phpMyAdmin wasn’t having any issue displaying the emojis (it runs under the same domain and those pages were getting a padlock from the Let’s Encrypt certificate, so this has to be a WordPress issue). I thought maybe this had something to do with the newest emoji release, which WordPress contributor Brandon Kraft writes about here. After I tried matching his page source code for things like charset=”UTF-8″, I still couldn’t get these emojis to display (which they did when the site was not secure).

After Google failed to turn up much for WordPress, SSL and broken emoji, I contacted Really Simple SSL pro support. Their first question was if this happened to new posts in addition to the old ones (yes), then asked if I had looked at all the character encoding angles (like this post). My wp-config.php file didn’t have DB_CHARSET or DB_COLLATE lines, so I tried various combinations of adding that back in and commenting it out, with no success. Made sure to check caches and different browsers too. They hadn’t seen this before, so I’m guessing it’s something with my custom theme and combination of various plugins that is causing the issue. If I paste the same emojis into a test post on a different domain on the same server that hasn’t had SSL added (and with the same version of MySQL and WordPress), the emojis display fine. Huh.

Standard WordPress troubleshooting would have you disable all your plugins and I have tried to go back and disable Really Simple SSL (I don’t want to turn them all off). I also started researching how WordPress implemented emoji display and found some core javascript code that gets inserted automatically (it’s a section that starts with window._wpemojiSettings and references a baseUrl of “https:\/\/s.w.org\/images\/core\/emoji\/11\/72×72\/”). I thought maybe this was the issue, as I can’t seem to access that s.w.org domain using https, but when I compared the page source from my site to the javascript on Brandon Kraft’s page, it was exactly the same (and emojis appear fine on his site).

So in the grand scheme of things, I’d much rather have the A+ security rating and not worry about displaying emoji in posts. It does bug me, though, that I can’t find anyone else online with a similar problem and that I haven’t been able to successfully troubleshoot this issue. If you have any ideas, please contact me via email here.

Nights like tonight are when I remember just how stressful it can be to have servers remotely hosted 1,300 miles away. As I’ve written many times, this site runs on a Mac mini located in Las Vegas in a data center run by the fine folks at Mac Stadium. While trying to fix my SSL/WordPress/emoji issue (which I’ll write about later), I managed to almost completely lock up the server. I could ping it, but the Screen Sharing session dropped and SSH was unresponsive at first. Eventually I was able to login via SSH and issue a quick “sudo shutdown -r now” command before getting kicked out again. About ten minutes later, I was able to get in via Screen Sharing. Since I had a couple of security updates to install that required a restart, I decided to just continue the unexpected web server downtime and run those installers too. This ended up taking nearly an extra hour, so I apologize if you were trying to load the site and got nothing.

Now back to researching just how WordPress core supports and displays the latest emoji characters…

The key to teen happiness

http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/davidkingsbury

…how many times does it get compressed or down-sampled?

https://blog.halide.cam/iphone-xs-why-its-a-whole-new-camera-ddf9780d714c

415,978 temp files for one program seems like a lot, no?

You smashed one ring yesterday!

macOS Mojave 10.14 is all about Dark Mode

Apple is now officially as bad as Microsoft when it comes to time remaining bars for OS updates

No, Apple, I really *don’t* want a passcode on these iPads – please stopping asking me three times

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-infinite-loop-oral-history/

If it’s Apple update day, that must mean WordPress 5.0 will drop any minute

Silver 256GB Xs

Come on, Tim, wow us

Everyone in my family wants a new phone. With the upcoming Apple event next week, I need to come up with a plan that doesn’t involve taking out a mortgage. I really preferred the days when your phone was subsidized by your plan, even if you were still paying hundreds of dollars overall. Now I have an expensive service plan *and* an expensive monthly payment for my iPhone.

As I’ve expressed before, I’m not a fan of my latest phone, the X. Everyone else seems to love theirs, so maybe I just have a lemon. About the only thing I really like is the camera, which, while still not a replacement for a real camera, is often “good enough.” After a huge increase lately in junk calls, I could do without the phone part, to be honest. If they released a modern iPod touch with a reasonable data-only plan, I could probably get away with that.

Haven’t switched carriers in a while either – no real complaints with AT&T (or T-mobile when I had that), but maybe it’s time to shop around. Also curious to see what happens with the Apple Watch, iPad, Air and Mac mini (if anything). It’s seems about time for Apple to release some lust-worthy stuff again – it’s been a while, no?

What the heck, Google? The new Chrome update has come crazy UI going on…

Decided to try something this week that I’ve been thinking about for a few months. I stopped visiting Facebook regularly a while ago, as I become tired of all the BS there (even after I massively limited who and what I was viewing). Twitter had been my favorite of the social networks, but lately my more political friends (both to the right and left of me) have made that platform as bad as Facebook (if not worse – thanks for nothing, @jack). No major beefs with Instagram, aside from the fact that Facebook owns them.

So what’s the plan? Well, I don’t want to close those accounts, as I’ve “owned” the kingsbury handle on all three for years. The main reason I’ve kept the Facebook account open is all of the other services that use it for authentication and tracking of progress/levels in various games. You can close your Facebook account and still prevent others from taking it over, but anytime you use one of those other services, it reactivates your profile automatically. Not sure what the rules are for Twitter and Instagram, but I imagine they would eventually allow someone else to take over those handles at some point if I closed them.

For now, I’m keeping the accounts open, but removing the apps from my phone. I closed Tweetbot on all of my computers and will try to go a few weeks without checking the timeline. I spent a few hours going through the layout of my phone apps, deleting a bunch I never use, eliminating folders and grouping apps by pages (primary, secondary, content and media, work and games). I have a great fear of missing out, but I feel like I need to compartmentalize these groupings and look for “cleaner” sources of information. I really just want to know about sports, food, concerts and unbiased business, technology and (I guess) political news. I’ll have to make a concerted effort to reach out to family and friends in others ways to stay up to date with their lives…just like the old days.

I will post more original content here, including short tweet-like status updates. I know the “audience” won’t be as big as the other networks, but I own the content, the platform and the server. You won’t be served ads or tracked (at least not beyond the generic web server log stuff) and I’ve done what I wish more sites would do – turn off comments. My email and phone number are on every single page of this site, so please feel free to reach out directly if you feel the need. And watch for TLS, video and mobile-friendly enhancements coming soon.

Thanks for reading!

For the longest time, I’ve had this image of a video game in my mind that I thought was a metaphor for life. It was a racing game that used forced perspective, with the road stretching to the horizon and an endless supply of other cars coming at you that you needed to avoid and pass. I got really good at the game, basically being able to play non-stop, never losing and only quitting when I got bored. Pass, pass, pass…run up the score.

Today I thought I’d research this game, always thinking it was Enduro by Activision. I never had an Atari 2600, though, so if this is the game, I must’ve played it at a friend’s house (I seem to recall using the “paddle” controllers for it). I had a number of Intellivision driving games (Auto Racing, Bump ‘n’ Jump, Triple Action), but none of them fit the look and feel model I’m thinking about…

Everybody needs a quick recharge

Not as easy as I’d like, but I’ll keep trying…

This site has been my personal domain for a long time. This week, I learned there is a relatively recent movement afoot in higher education to let students pick a domain name and learn about the technologies and processes involved to maintain and create a digital identity that they own and take with them after graduation. Here are sample programs from BYU, Michigan State and Bryn Mawr.

As I’ve written before, this site runs on a Mac mini server at a data center in Las Vegas. I manage all aspects of it, which has pros and cons. It feels great to control what tools I use, choose the look and feel and know that I’m not at the mercy of some big corporation who might suddenly decide to terminate the service and/or account (although I’m still subject to the terms and conditions of the colocation contract). I also love that I can experiment with new technologies and stay current with coding, automation and design.

Given the political, technical and security/privacy news lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the digital content I create, both on this site and on social media. 7minutemiles currently has automation in place to create posts from Twitter and Instagram, but that is always subject to changing APIs that can break at any time. I’ve thought about throwing in the towel on both of those services (from an automation standpoint), but the question becomes one of reach versus reliability and social media wins that battle hands down.

For now, I’ll work on adding https via Let’s Encrypt, modifying my theme to be more responsive and mobile-friendly and designing some custom data entry screens for runs, rides, golf scores and events. Once I’m back in good graces with Google’s search algorithms, maybe then I’ll look at going dark on those other services…

https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/mail-server-guide/

Some room for improvement, no?

Last week I attended my second Cisco Live! conference in Orlando (last year was my first in Vegas; next year will be San Diego). It blows my mind how much it must cost to host 25,000 people in a facility like the Orange County Convention Center – setup, food twice a day, video production for keynotes and sessions, utilities, staffing, etc. And then there was the customer appreciation event Wednesday night at Universal Studios, which not only included exclusive access to the original park for four hours, but also had free food and drinks everywhere and big name concerts from Leon Bridges, Cake and Sam Hunt. No wonder my annual maintenance bill never goes down…

Speaking of bills, I needed to do this trip on the cheap, so I stayed with my brother and his wife and leaned on them for ground transportation (along with some 25% off Lyft rides). He took me to Animal Kingdom on Sunday night after I arrived so I could check out the new(ish) Avatar stuff. Na’vi River Journey has the cool Audio-Animatronics Shaman of Songs, while Flight of Passage lived up to the nearly two hour wait. We had dinner at the excellent Satu’li Canteen, which really elevates the whole theme park food quality experience, in my opinion.

My conference pass this time was a new intermediate “Imagine” badge, so I didn’t get access to all of the sessions (or a T-shirt or backpack). It did get me into all of the keynotes and Innovation Showcase presentations, though, along with the “World of Solutions” trade show, the party at Universal and free food for breakfast and lunch each day. I found most of the sessions to be useful and not just a week-long sales pitch to buy new stuff (like you get at some conferences). I learned about a lot of new technology trends, including improved security techniques, software-defined networking and container-based development, along with the evolution of the Cisco platforms and products we’ve deployed at the stadium (which thankfully I don’t need to replace right away).

After the conference wrapped up, I had a little extra time to kill before flying home (I wish the standby rules for Delta were more customer friendly). I spent some more time checking out all the changes at Disney Springs, where I had had dinner earlier in the week with my brother at Art Smith’s wonderful Homecomin’ restaurant. World of Disney was half-closed for remodeling, but I still managed to find some things for people. It was interesting to see retail additions like UNIQLO and the dining scene continues to impress with the likes of Morimoto Asia, Jock Lindsey’s Hanger Bar and The Boathouse (in addition to all of the old favorites). Also caught Deadpool 2 at the AMC and made a quick trip to Tampa to check out the very impressive Seminole Hard Rock Tampa complex.

See you in San Diego?

Lots of interesting presentations @ Cisco Live!

Cisco Live! 2018, Orlando

Just a short post to document an issue I needed to troubleshoot the past few weeks on my web server in Vegas (Go Knights Go!). I’ve been running Homebrew versions of MySQL for some time now with no issues, but recently was receiving quite a few “Can’t connect to MySQL server” errors on all of my virtually hosted WordPress sites. It was particularly difficult to troubleshoot at first because it wasn’t an all or nothing situation – some database calls would go through, while others would not. All I knew was that the old “brew services restart mysql” command would clear things up for a few hours before the flakiness would return.

When I first started looking at the web server logs, I found a lot of error messages like this:

WordPress database error Table 'wp_termmeta' doesn't exist

There were a ton of these – guessing this was relating to the earlier database corruption issues I had related to InnoDB. Turns out that table really didn’t exist and I found this post that had the required SQL to properly recreate it. I wasn’t really sure if any of the themes or plugins that were looking for this table would actually re-populate the table with data (it doesn’t appear so), but the error messages in the logs have gone away (and everything seems a little faster now). Unfortunately, this did not have any impact on the MySQL connection issue.

Going back to the web server log, I found a number of mysqli errors:

PHP Warning: mysqli_connect(): MySQL server has gone away
PHP Warning: mysqli_connect(): Error while reading greeting packet.

These made me think it was on the database side and not an issue with Apache or PHP. I had tried messing a little with the my.cnf file, but it didn’t seem like any of the changes were having any impact. When I started looking for Homebrew MySQL tips, I first decided to reinstall MySQL while keeping the data directory in place (brew reinstall mysql). That seemed to work fine, keeping users and permissions in place while just recompiling the latest MySQL. All of the virtual sites came back up, but the can’t connect errors reappeared later in the day.

Next up, I was fully prepared to follow these instructions to blow away every sign of MySQL and reinstall from scratch (dumping all of the tables first using the awesome Sequel Pro). While looking at the /usr/local/var/mysql directory, I realized that Homebrew MySQL stores a local.err log in that same directory, which I hadn’t looked at (since Console doesn’t include it by default). This log was chock full of lines like this:

[Warning] File Descriptor 1024 exceeded FD_SETSIZE=1024

That lead me to this excellent post by Derek Jones that had me change a number of lines in the my.cnf file (specifically interactive_timeout = 300 and wait_timeout = 300). Some of the comments in this thread were also useful. I restarted the database server yet again and so far it’s been up and running for 24 hours straight (fingers crossed).

So to summarize troubleshooting 101: read all your logs, Google the errors and be thankful for those that blazed a path before you (and took the time to document it online).

How did Microsoft ever get this big?

Fans use 16.31 TB of Wi-Fi data during Super Bowl 52 at U.S. Bank Stadium

He’s the secret weapon

https://www.today.com/video/this-year-s-super-bowl-stadium-flexes-its-high-tech-muscles-1153401411949

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/super-bowl-52-how-the-nfl-and-us-bank-stadium-are-ready-to-make-digital-history/

Donkey Kong Country sure seemed prettier back then

Took a bit to install, but I already like it a thousand times better than the old model

As an Apple Upgrade Program subscriber, there really wasn’t much of a reason for me to not get an iPhone X last week. My iPhone 7 Plus was nearly as expensive last year, so the monthly payments were about the same. Apple really made the trade-in and pre-order process easy this time, so the only issue I had was not noticing the pre-order time was Pacific and not Central (which meant an alarm for 2am instead of midnight).

There are reviews all over the place (this Ben Lovejoy one for 9to5Mac is similar to my experience, although I wouldn’t say I love it as much as him), so I’ll just send you to Apple’s round-up page here for full-blown reviews. For my site, let’s just blow through a few bullet points:

• I love the size compared to the Plus – the old phone was just too big for my hand (but I want the extra pixels).
• Never really had a bad iPhone screen – this one is beautiful too.
• Swipe up for home took about an hour to learn and now I hardly ever make the mistake of pressing that area of the screen trying to get home.
• Face ID was easy to set up and works at about the same success rate I had with Touch ID, but it’s usually slower (sometimes a lot slower). I do like the private lock-screen notifications (until you get verified) and it’s nice you can just click on a notification and go right to that app once it sees your face.
• Haven’t had a chance to take the new camera to a concert yet to test low-light conditions, but other shots have looked great. I’ve never been a big user of the “selfie” front-facing camera, so I haven’t really used the new portrait mode or other TrueDepth camera features yet.
• Animojis: tried a couple to annoy my daughters, then accidentally sent one to a group chat. Karma says just stop now.
• Yeah, this is an expensive phone. Unfortunately it is what it is (for all manufacturer flagship models, not just Apple).
• I’ve always been a “no case” fan, but it scares me to think of dropping a $1K phone (even with the AppleCare+ that comes with the upgrade program). I don’t want something super bulky, as I usually carry my phone in my front pocket. Hoping Minnesota-based Twig Case Co. comes out with a line for the X soon (they were reportedly sighted at the Uptown store on release day).
• I don’t have a wireless charger yet, so I haven’t tried that feature. Will probably wait for the Apple AirPower thing, as it would be nice to set the phone and my watch on the nightstand (plus Colleen likes her AirPods, so maybe I’ll get those eventually too). Also curious to know if it works with a case.
• Restoring from my iTunes backup was pretty smooth – just had issues with songs, ringtones and playlists not coming back. Since then, I’ve decided to subscribe to 2TB of iCloud storage for backups, so next time I’ll just use that.
• Most of my favorite apps have already updated and optimized for the X, which basically just means designing for “the notch” that everyone was so concerned about (including myself). Turns out I hardly notice it now and guess that will just continue to grow as app developers get used to optimizing for it.
• Not sure if I’ve been impacted by the supposed cold weather screen issue, but I do occasionally have issues in Two Dots with actions happening that I didn’t intend.
• Unrelated to the hardware, the “I” bug in iOS 11.1 was a pain in the butt – a situation that made an already bad auto-correct situation worse (which A ⍰ didn’t think was possible).

MyPrecious became MyPreciousX and I’m happy…

Christmas in October

It’s been a long time since I wrote a longer post here, which actually wasn’t caused by being busy. I’ve been battling technical issues with my web server for months, which is a co-located Mac mini in Las Vegas (now at MacStadium since their merger with Brian Stucki’s excellent Macminicolo). I created my own perfect storm by trying to remotely upgrade the OS (which was two versions behind) *and* moving it from the old Macminicolo data center to the new MacStadium data center across town. Somewhere along the way, I also ended up corrupting my database backups and discovered my old backup processes weren’t working the way I thought. Thankfully I didn’t lose any data, but it wasn’t the best example of being a good sysadmin.

With work being work, I haven’t had time to focus on fixing these issues, so it’s been little bits and pieces here and there to finally get back to a semi-functioning site. I messed with moving to AWS for a little while, but decided to just rebuild my mini server from scratch. I use Homebrew versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP for the core stack, which I’m now familiar with enough to mostly breeze through those configs. I learned that over the years, my MySQL data got split into MyISAM and InnoDB islands, which caused some major problems with restoring the InnoDB side. Then I found out that I had MySQL collation setting issues, which created a bunch of weird characters (and a loss of emoji support).

This site uses a number of WordPress plugins to help automate things and several of those plugins stopped working due to the issues mentioned above. I needed to blow away both WordFence (security) and Intagrate (Instagram integration), reconfiguring both from square one. I’ve also had some general response issues with the server, which was mostly fixed with an ARP patch from MacStadium. I still need to go through the web server error logs to clean up a few other performance issues, but those are a little harder to research and isolate (wordpress termmeta doesn’t exist, anyone?).

So now that I can reliably post from the mobile app and have Twitter and Instagram integration working again, it’s almost time to get back to my enhancement wish list:

• Recreate my Coda web development environment on the new iMac
• Add Backblaze support to the server
• Rewrite and test my database backup scripts
• Move to https with Let’s Encrypt (this should help)
• Create data entry screens for golf scores and runs
• Make my default theme more mobile-friendly
• Add a video post type
• Make my header photos retina-ready
• Update the about and biography sections
• Bring back more of the old photo gallery pictures

As always – thanks for visiting!

Stupid time sucks…

Nikon D850 Review

Seriously, WTF takes this so long? Every. Single. Time.

What’s the right line to walk?