This is (almost*) the entire contents of the site, all articles and blog posts from newest to oldest, with preview excerpts.
- You can see just the articles: on the Articles category page (not to be confused with the /Latest news page, which is more conversational than a list of posts and may include personal news about me in addition to site news)
- Just the blog posts: on the dedicated Blog or nearly-identicalBlog Posts category page.
*Individual movie reviews won't get posted on this page. I write too many of them, it would drown everything else out.
Fixed the ssl certificate issues ChatGPT slyly introduced 4 months ago
October 13, 2026Noticed my local LetsEncrypt certificates were not renewing. Turns out in my little discussion with chatGPT about switching to cloudflared, it helpfully forgot to tell me that doing so would break my certbot renewals.
Got it fixed today, the entire troubleshooting session is archived in the folder "2026oct12 fix cert nonrenewal after conversion to cloudflared" in my saved files on my hard drive.
While I was at it, I added my rss aggregator's instance to cloudflared's config, so that's working again.
MacOS fails to expand .zip compressed archive with “Unable to expand” … “(Error 79 – Inappropriate file type or format.)”
October 8, 2026Did you save the file with Windows's "Send too > Compressed Folder" and copy it to Mac? Finder's Archive Utility can't open it because of the compression method.
- Compression method: All 94 files inside use Deflate64 (Def64N in unzip -v). Windows' built-in "Send to → Compressed folder" uses it, mainly for large files. Archive Utility doesn't support it, so double-clicking fails with a generic error.
The command-line unzip at /usr/bin/unzip handles Deflate64. Run this in your terminal to extract into a new folder, of course replacing "[archive_name]" with the name of the zip file:
mkdir ~/Documents/[archive_name]_extracted && unzip ~/Documents/[archive_name].zip -d ~/Documents/[archive_name]_extracted
Cerpegia Woodii “String of Hearts” plant care
October 8, 2026"I received a several-foot-long, moderately lush ceropegia in what looks like moss or detritus in a open glass jar. How do I care for it?" [Claude chat]
Ceropegia is a succulent vine, and the biggest thing to know is that a jar with moss or detritus and no drainage is a tricky setup for it. Here's how to handle it.
Check what you actually have first
Gently tip the plant out, or at least probe the base. What looks like moss may be sphagnum or a decorative top layer over soil. If it's a terrarium-style build with no drainage hole, it's very easy to overwater. The plant has small tubers along the stems and at the roots that store water, so it tolerates drying out far better than sogginess.
Light
Give it bright light, ideally several hours of bright indirect light,…
https://datatables.net/
September 30, 2026Javascript data table library... sorting, filtering, displaying and managing records.
Closed port 53 and Port 531 on my home router
September 28, 2026Closed port 53 and Port 531 on my home router.
This appears to have killed my subdomains, like my feed aggregator. Will deal with this later when I have time.
Firefox freezes – tried setting gfx.webrender.software to true
September 25, 2026Claude says that following a kernel panic, watchdog reported threads held by Firefox GPU helper, even thought I have hardware acceleration off. I tried its suggestion of toggling gfx.webrender.software to true in about:config.
"The watchdog reports at 13:51:55 and 13:52:30 have 11 and 12 WindowServer waits on Firefox GPU Helper [47166]. The stackshot in the panic file at 13:53:15 shows the same PID, so the chain was blocked for about 80 seconds or more before the panic.
- In those reports that GPU helper had been running about 266,000 s (roughly 3 days) and had a 2,294 MB footprint.
- The panic was probably not a single event. The GPU helper was already stuck, WindowServer was already hanging, and the watchdogs fired before the kernel finally panicked at the 45 s framebuffer timeout."
A Claude incident report was recorded.
How to clear it when restarting MacOS Tahoe brings up a ton of notifications and no “Clear All” button
September 17, 2026Today I restarted my Mac OS Tahoe machine and suddenly, when I logged back in, a million old Slack notifications came up. Hovering over them, I did not get the "Close All" button on top, and had to tediously click them closed, one by one.
Turned out, in System Preferences under the Apple Menu, in the Notifications page, if I select "Slack", "Notification Grouping" was set to "None". Setting this to "Automatic" caused all the old notifications to collapse into a small visual "stack" behind the topmost notification, and when I hovered over it, the "Close All" button appeared.
Hot Take Of The Day
August 25, 2026
Michael Kupietz, chief Kwit @michael · Follow
I hate labyrinths. It seems like I always have to go to the bathroom the minute I get to the center.
11:11 PM · July 28, 2026
1Reply Copy link
Server Changes Summary — July 24, 2026
July 24, 2026Context: Investigating a WordPress site freeze on michaelkupietz.com. Root cause identified as a burst of 504 timeouts when a bot/crawler hit ~20+ uncached taxonomy archive pages (/genre/*, /topic/*) in rapid succession around 11:42.
File: /etc/php/8.3/fpm/pool.d/17002707405366737.conf
Uncommented:
slowlog = /var/log/php-fpm-slow.log request_slowlog_timeout = 5sReloaded with systemctl reload php8.3-fpm.
Purpose: Logs a full PHP stack trace any time a request takes 5+ seconds, to help diagnose future slowdowns. Negligible performance/disk impact — only…
