Author: Derrick

iPhone – The Prequel

Photo by Shritwod / CC-BY-SA

I have been a die-hard Android user since the Motorola Droid (OG Droid) came out in October 2007. The Apple iOS software world has always felt too restrictive for me, since I am forever a tinkerer.

My current phone is a Google Nexus 6 developed by Motorola, released in November 2014. Unfortunately, it’s showing its age. Google no longer sends OTA updates, so I rely on LineageOS to keep me safe and happy. Even with third-party software, the phone is plagued with problems. From incredibly slow encryption to poor CPU throttling when the battery gets low. The camera is also disgustingly slow, taking between 5-30 seconds to take and process a single picture, but at least the resulting images are beautiful.

Photo by android.com / CC-BY

There are saving graces though, such as the dual front-facing stereo speakers, amazing 6.0 inch 1440×2560 AMOLED screen, optical image stabilization, HDR, Qi wireless charging, and headphone jack 🙂

Unfortunately, it’s time to put my Nexus 6 aside and find a new phone. My wife has been using an iPhone for years now, after switching from Android (2014 Moto X). Today she got a new iPhone 8+, so we’ve come to an agreement that I need to at least try to use iOS for a while.

So tonight, after she migrated all of her apps and data to the new iPhone, I spent some time setting up all of my apps and accounts on her old iPhone 6s+. It’s already been a very alien experience, almost frightening–seeing how little I actually know about the software and hardware.

My plan is to use the iPhone for at least two weeks, and see how I feel about it. This also coincides closely with the release of the new Google Pixel 2 phones, which I will also be looking at. Last year I was very underwhelmed by the Google Pixel line, and felt that the hardware of the iPhone 7+ was much more advanced. If I’m able to thrive, or at least survive, in iOS then perhaps it’s time for me to truly look at switching platforms.

I’m hoping to write about this experience every day or two so that I force myself to look back at how my transition is going. I’m sure there will be many frustrations early on, but hopefully I’ll also have a good number of exciting moments when I get to experience some new and exciting software.

September 23, 2017

Logging Post Status Transitions in WordPress

Last week an interesting issue came up for a client. Somehow a few posts were moved from Published to Draft. Unfortunately, post status isn’t stored in revisions so it’s unlikely we’ll ever know who or how it happened. Luckily there’s a simple solution I found to log all post status transitions in post meta:

add_action( 'transition_post_status', 'log_post_transition', 10, 3 );
function log_post_transition( $new_status, $old_status, $post ) {
if ( 'post' === $post-&gt;post_type ) {
$current_user = wp_get_current_user();
add_post_meta( $post-&gt;ID, '_post_status_log', sprintf( '%s %d, %s-&gt;%s', current_time( 'mysql' ), $current_user-&gt;ID, $old_status, $new_status ), false );
}
}Code language: PHP (php)

September 20, 2017

Whistler

September 17, 2017
Validating WordPress attachments with WP-CLI

I recently worked on migrating a site to a different server and for one reason or another, some of the images did not come over properly. While I could have just re-downloaded and re-imported all of the media, it would have taken quite a while since the media library was well over 100Gb. Instead, I opted to use WP-CLI to help find what images were missing:
(more…)

June 12, 2017
Game Developer Barbie

Game Developer Barbie is coding what looks to be a mobile Java-based Candy Crush clone in a Windows XP IDE.

Sadly, that sounds pretty accurate.

October 15, 2016
This is why I Ad Block

An article served an ad that hijacked my browser and would not let me go back. I had to kill the Chrome App and started fresh.

August 27, 2016
Photography Woes

My morning routine usually involves me checking my RSS reader NewsBlur. One of the many, many sites I follow is the Greene County Daily World, my “local” newspaper.

I was surprised when I saw an article titled “Old Clifty Church in need of repair” that had an eerily familiar image.

Because it was mine.
(more…)

April 14, 2016
SUSINO Travel Bag

On March 25th I ordered a “Free Shipping SUSINO New Men’s Travel Bag For Storaging Electronic Parts Cosmetic Bag Casual Outdoor Storage Bag” from AliExpress. It was on sale for $6.75, normally $18.24.

To be honest, I wasn’t getting my hopes up about quality. Luckily, I was wrong. Already, I’m enjoying this bag. It’s taken all of the loose and under-fitting items that used to live loosely in the dark depths of my messenger bag and has given them a home.

Glancing at the pictures on my phone while ordering, I had assumed that the layout was a cross pattern of elastic, similar to the Grid-It! organizers. It was not. That’s fine though, because it works well with what it has. I was very happy with all that I could fit inside. I even had enough room left to fit in a couple new items.
(more…)

April 4, 2016
Renewing Let’s Encrypt SSL on SABnzbd+

Having a secure way to manage your usenet downloads of the hit movie Big Buck Bunny with SABnzbd+ is great, but one problem/feature of Let’s Encrypt is that the SSL certificates expire only after three months, requiring plenty of renewals. Luckily this can be easily scripted and forgotten.

The primary part of renewing the SSL certificates will be handled by a modified version of Erika Heidi‘s le-renew.sh script. Erika’s script does a few things we don’t need, such as restarting Apache, so I forked it on GitHub and made a few changes.
(more…)

January 23, 2016