Shouting in an empty room since 2015
I was recently forced to sign up for something called Tailscale in order to access a client’s server. I’d never heard of this shit before and was already grumpy they wouldn’t just give me a regular SSH login. But whatever, this will only be the 9,012,348th thing I’ve had to sign up for to use … Continue reading Tailscale login is retarded
Putting an expiration date on SOFTWARE is one of the most insidious, and stupid, things the tech world has imposed on us. They’ve sold us the idea it has to do with security. Let’s be honest — it’s not that. It’s about money. For-profit software companies want you to buy their products over and over … Continue reading Unpopular Take: Software “End of Life” is Bullshit. Stop it.
A developer friend recently asked me, “Which AI coding tools are you using?” “None”, I answered. “What about you?” He proceeded to list off several tools, culminating with this astonishing admission: “I almost never write code myself anymore. Everything is done by AI. My job is just checking the answers.” My friend is a very … Continue reading Adventures in AI Coding, Episode 1: Claude vs Gemini
Recently I went to renew one of the many SSL certificates I manage, and they hit me with a message saying the new cert would only be valid for 200 days, instead of the usual 1 year. WTF? Is this some stupid scheme to get more money out of me? No, apparently it’s a real … Continue reading SSL Certificates are Getting Cut Down to 47 days — Who Makes These Fucking Decisions?
I was a GoDaddy customer for 15+ years. Today, I moved my last site away from their platform. Way back when, GoDaddy was a great place to register domain names inexpensively. I had several with them. Later I would also use their shared web hosting for myself and various clients. GoDaddy always had a “bro”-ish … Continue reading GoDaddy is a Horrible, Scammy Company
TagDiv, the company which makes the popular WordPress themes Newspaper and Newsmag, embedded malicious code in their products. This code acts as a “kill switch”, allowing them to take down your entire website! As first reported by Foo Conner at Jekko, this same problem happened to me recently with one of my websites. They took … Continue reading TagDiv Embedded Malicious Code in Popular WordPress…
WordPress has gone off the rails. A big part of my business for the last 10+ years has been building sites using, and developing plugins for, WordPress. I’ve tried and used other CMS’s from time to time, but when I’m in a hurry to develop a site quickly (which is practically always) I turn to … Continue reading WordPress is Dead. Blocks Killed It
This week I encountered my first case of disc rot. When new, these Imation-brand discs were a gray/silver color. As you can see now it has yellowed throughout, and has begun bronzing along the right side. Here is a scan of the bottom side. I’ve increased the brightness so you can see the writing from … Continue reading Optical Media Archival Field Notes – Beware of Imation CD-R’s From the Early…
For years now I’ve been telling myself I’m going to stop using Google Chrome. Besides the obvious reason — Google tracking everything I do — Chrome just has a way of pissing me off over and over again. Continual BS updates, unnecessary fucking around with the UI, removing features without my consent, etc etc. Nevertheless, … Continue reading The Quest for the Perfect Browser (ongoing)
Google Chrome always fucks with me at the least opportune moments. Always when I’m in a hurry, trying to log in and do something quickly — BOOM — Chrome has updated (without my permission) and something is broken. This week, Chrome decided to disable all my extensions because of something called “Manifest v2 support” that … Continue reading How to get around Google Chrome dropping Manifest v2…