Stuff about this site
I’ve changed the site theme, as the old theme doesn’t seem to work with PHP8.x and WordPress is whining about PHP7.4. I’ll tidy things up later, but as this is a security issue, this is what you’re getting for now.
The GeneralStats plugin seems to be fucked, too, so that’s disabled.
Another end of year summary post started early, edited at the time. It’s now 21 years of this rubbish!
As I’m starting this we’re approaching Christmas 2024, and I’m not feeling festive yet.
2024 has been another year I’ll be glad to see the back of overall, but let’s try to remain objective, eh?
So far (hurriedly crosses fingers and hopes to not need any edits) 2024 saw one human death, zero feline in extended family, one death of a greatly valued family friend (kind of sad to attend a funeral of a friend of your parents as the sole direct relative), and a couple of far-too-close calls.
Health issues persist, both for us and for family members and at least one very dear friend. You know who you are, should you read this. I suppose some of this is to be expected as we age, but it seems a disproportionate amount of friends and family are really quite ill.
It has been a stressful, tiring year for us both and for people around us, and I definitely haven’t been dealing with some of that as well as I could. Once again, I need to reflect and see that at least most of us are still here, we have a home, an income, and cats. There’s always cats.
My work, while sometimes very tedious, is overall, pretty good. If i could just eradicate Citrix from the planet, eh?
The country? It’s still fucked, but maybe a little less fucked. The Starmer government isn’t ideal, in many ways, but at least there’s a vague air of competence there (just about), and instead of a load of culture war bollocks, they’re actually governing, even if they could be so much better, by comparison, it’s sheer brilliance.
I’ve come to recognise that my warnings are not being heeded, so 2025? *sigh*. Just do whatever.
Song choice will be Tristania’s Requiem.
Now a second silence
Peace restored
If you lose the battle
Win the war
Now, the problem with making bold claims about “this site is secure” is that someone will happily come along and prove otherwise: the rather unwise claims from John McAfee about the “unhackable” BitFi Bitcoin Wallet, and its subsequent embarrassment by those all-round clever guys at Pen Test Partners shows that for sure, so I’m not going to make any such claims about this site, but what I will say is that if someone does hack it, at least they’ll be serving up malware over secure transport.
That nice chap Lee H-W has sorted new hosting: more space, better controls, and the glories of HTTPS now that Let’s Encrypt has made SSL certificates affordable (i.e: free). He even did all the work, which was nice, though some clever tools helped, and the move seems to have been pretty seamless. To be fair, it was seamless last time, but I had to do a bit of fiddling.
HTTPS is a good thing (TM), as browsers are increasingly flagging up plain HTTP as a security risk, and sending the logins over HTTP probably wasn’t ever a good idea.
A previous upgrade of PHP on the old hosting broke my Gallery, and I may not ever re-instate it, as these days Google or Amazon will host the GB of photos for nothing…
I finally got round to upgrading PHP (which was a 2-click operation) and upgrading WordPress on this and PubBlog to 5.2.2. Thankfully I didn’t get hacked in the time I was running a vulnerable version.
Comments are registered users only for a while, thanks to spammers. I’ll get a better filter installed…..
[edit]
I’ve chucked a few quid to Akismet and installed that. Spam Karma did me very well, considering it’s not been updated for years now. I’ve also updated WordPress to the latest.
This blog has just passed it’s thirteenth birthday, and we’re at the start of a new year, a year that’s to be honest, brought little to be happy about in many ways: the loss of many celebrities (and for once, the word celebrity is actually valid here), and, perhaps more importantly for some of us, the unexpected loss in November of Steph Clarke, who should be an inspiration to anyone wanting to do stuff in their community. I was lucky enough to meet her a few times, and her energy and commitment to help people was just unreal. A sad loss to the local community, both online and off. I usually use this post to say how strong the online community is (which is still true), so it’s sad to lose such a big part of it. There’s an ongoing drive to do something good, however small, in her memory- #stuffforsteph, which I’d urge anyone to take part in.
2016 has, generally, been pretty poor- personally, nothing major at all- but we’ve had the idiocy of Brexit, with the corresponding rise of hate crime, a quite spectacularly inept prime minister, and the election of a dangerous halfquarter-wit in the US. In the computing world, we saw the IP Bill pass into law, so someone besides me knows you’re reading this, and the Digital Economy Bill is on its way. The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.
Looking forward to 2017, I’d like to wish everyone a happy new year: let’s hope for a better one: as Brownhills Bob said online recently, we can at least hope that Trump might fall out of an aeroplane and hit Farage on the way down.
Hopefully, no-one noticed, but www.piglet-net.net has moved from a virtual server I shared with a few people to a more usual hosting arrangement. Thanks to Lee H-W for giving me loads of time to move.
The move was straightforward: back up the MySQL DBs, copy the files over, import the DBs, change a couple of config files, bodge /etc/hosts to check it, and switch DNS while the 2 sites were a mirror of each other.
With another year passing, I’ve now been blogging for 8 years. There’s a lot more people blogging in Walsall and the surrounding area now, and many of them have real content, instead of the random rants and ramblings I come out with. There’s been some newcomers quite recently, which is nice, as blogging is often seen as ‘old hat’ now….
Best wishes for 2012.
I’ve ugraded pigblog and pubblog to WordPress 3.3.
As a not total, but more pleasant contrast to todays Windoze fun, I’ve updated both blogs to WordPress 3.1.4.
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And now to 3.2.