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Workshop » Works In Progress » Writing Works in Progress » The Five-Ingredient Cookbook

Prefab Cole Slaw Kit, Improved

So, I buy these "cole slaw kits" in the supermarket for a couple of bucks. They're basically a bag full sliced cabbage & a little grated carrot, and include a generous plastic squeeze packet of cheap, chemical-y, over-sweetened Italian dressing. It's enough for 2-3 side dishes, or one decent bowl for one person which can sub for a meal if you're not that famished.

Here's how I fix it:

1. Dump the slaw mix in a bowl. The stuff I buy mostly fills a 16oz soup bowl.
2. Squeeze in 1/2-3/4 of the included "dressing", to taste. I prefer less rather than more.
3. Put in a generous dollop, a pretty big forkful or two, of mayonnaise.
4. Give it a couple of decent tablespoons of vinegar. I use white but red might work. Try to err on the side of not overpowering it... you don't…

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Linux » Packages » Apache

Server Changes Summary — July 24, 2026

1. Claude.ai changes:

Context: 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.

1. Enabled PHP-FPM slow request logging

File: /etc/php/8.3/fpm/pool.d/17002707405366737.conf
Uncommented:

slowlog = /var/log/php-fpm-slow.log request_slowlog_timeout = 5s

Reloaded 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…

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Applications » FileMaker Pro

FileMaker’s consistency check is not thorough, files can still be corrupt

https://help.claris.com/en/pro-help/content/file-consistency.html - Information that FileMaker's consistency checks are not as reliable as the Recovery function—they don't check as much. (Bear in mind that the recovery doesn't even tell you everything on the front end, you have to read the recovery log to get full info.)

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Applications » Web Browsers » CSS

Make #named-anchors open under sticky header

:target {scroll-margin-top: 120px; /* match your sticky header height, to make named anchors always appear under it */ }

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Troubleshooting log » Cloudflare or DNS

Added subdomain to cloudflare tunnel

Turns out LLMs know me by an old subdomain I forgot to add to cloudflare's tunnel config. Just added it. See saved chat under filename "Arts Kupietz 404 Issue" in local admin folder.

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Linux » Packages » awk

Splitting a markdown document sections into separate documents with awk in Bash

[code]awk ' /^## / { if (file) close(file) title = substr($0, 4) gsub(/[^a-zA-Z0-9 _-]/, "", title) gsub(/ /, "_", title) file = title ".md" } file { print > file } ' input.md[/code]

First, cd into the same folder as the file (here called input.md. Then the above will generate titled .md documents from every section that starts with ##.

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Code & Algo Works In Progress
Posted inReference Info Posted in genresWork-In-ProgressFileMaker ProGeek StuffGrody Technical Details

Separation model drawbacks

This is a work-in-progress inspired by a recent conversation.

In the "separation model" in FileMaker, where data tables live in separate files from an "interface file" containing visual layouts that display the data to the user, used to be widely recommended as a development convention. However, many developers have found that it has significant drawbacks. This is a scratchpad list of those drawbacks as I encounter them.

1. Duplicate relationship graphs

In practice, relationships depend on context, and this is provided by table occurrences that layouts are built on. You may need a portal on a layout... that means the relationship must be in the interface file. But you may have a calculated field in the parent record that counts, summarizes, or otherwise performs an aggregate operation on the related records. That means the relationship must be in the data file. Neither of these is unusual at all. So you…

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Troubleshooting log » Cloudflare or DNS

Converted to cloudflare tunnel from ddclient

Today Comcast (boo! hiss!) did some work in my neighborhood and knocked my server offline. I had a long, painful chat session with ChatGPT which ended with me eventually getting set up with cloudflare tunnels instead of using ddclient to update my IP address. The whole chat and terminal session are saved locally in my hard drive in the backups/admin > troubleshooting logs folder in case I ever need to recreate what happened.

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Linux » Packages » Apache

Quickly check status/error code of all hosted domains

To quickly check to http return code for a bunch of your hosted domains, enter this in bash:

[code]for host in \ domain.com www.domain.com \ domain2.info www.domain2.info \ domain3.com www.domain3.com do code=$(curl -k -sS -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code} %{redirect_url}' "https://$host/") printf "%-26s %s\n" "$host" "$code" done[/code]
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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » iOS

Stop Siri Dictation from automatically adding incorrect punctuation everywhere.

On my iPhone, I had Siri dication suddenly start inserting bogus commas everywhere when I never said "comma". You can turn this off by going to settings > general > keyboard > dictation and turning off the auto-punctuation switch.

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » MacOS » Networking

Airdropping photos from iOS to MacOS always stuck on “waiting”

If your phone and Mac appear to be able to see each other over Airdrop, but every time you try to send photos from your phone to your Mac the phone sits on "waiting" and the photos never transfer, try picking "Force quit..." from the Apple icon menu in the upper left of your window on the Mac, select "Finder", hit the "Relaunch" button, wait a moment for the Finder to restart, and try transferring again.

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Blog Posts

How to remove your email and phone number from voter registration (San Francisco county only)

May 15, 2026

The county handles voter registration. San Francisco residents can remove info such as your phone number and email address with the form on https://sfelections.org/tools/regupdate/regupd.php. You can check your CA voter registration status at https://voterstatus.sos.ca.gov/

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Annoyances
Posted inReference Info Posted in genresKvetchingPoison PenTechnology

Obsidian Annoyances

Here's a CSS customization feature. Have fun getting it to work!

Have to leave the app to customize CSS. Why can't you save snippets in the app?? Overall, it feels like they intentionally make it as difficult and roundabout as possible to use.

And of course I followed the instructions, created the snippet in the secondary text editor Obsidian makes you keep around if you want to do things like this, quit the app, reopened it, and... it didn't work. Because, of course it didn't work. Why would following the instructions WORK, when it's so much more of a waste of time if it doesn't? I'm so glad they made this so complicated. This is so much harder than if they just had a place in the preferences to enter custom CSS, and, who doesn't love things to be as hard as possible?

Edit: After googling, I found

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Writing Works in Progress
Posted inWriting Posted in genresWork-In-ProgressKvetchingPoison PenTechnologyUI Design

Mike’s Rules Of Design

This is a scratchpad for jotting down the various design rules I use, mostly as I run across violations.

1. No making people read hieroglyphics for core functionality

Somewhere along the way, a lot of people picked up on Steve Jobs's worst idea and ran with it: User interfaces should emphasize looking like something that would look "cool" in a movie, rather than focus on usability. Icons, which were originally meant as a visual cue to help you quickly distinguish functions without having to read text, became monochrome, uniform, abstract, unhelpfully difficult to distinguish from each other, and descriptive text went away so you couldn't know at a glance what they did, leading to millions of man-hours wasted mousing over 20 buttons in a row trying to figure out which one was the "import" button. As a design language, icons went from unique and identifiable to the visual equivalent of…

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Applications » Web Browsers » Plugins » uBlock Origin
Posted inIT Grimoire Posted in genresGeek StuffGrody Technical Details

A uBlock Origin custom rule to hide “Related Videos” (and more) on YouTube

If you're like me, you loathe and despise the toxic mental ordure that YouTube often plasters up and down the right side of each video page, such as POLITICAL DEMAGOGUERY in MIXED CAPS to PIQUE your OUTRAGE enough to KEEP YOU WATCHING YOUTUBE instead of doing something PRODUCTIVE! [insert thumbnail of someone looking amazed here.]

At a certain point, I started to notice that there was more likely to be things I didn't even want to know existed in that section than anything I actually wanted to see. So, I added a simple rule to the uBlock Origin browser plugin that hides that section of the page:

[code]!https://www.youtube.com www.youtube.com###related[/code]

And that's it. That's all you need to add. No more "related videos" section.

While I was at it, I added a rule to block the "suggested videos" thumbnails that appear at the end of videos, by…

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Linux » Packages » Apache

Detect SYN flood slowing down server with netstat

If the web server is slow, detect a SYN flood by netstat -ant | grep :443 | grep SYN_RECV to show the IP addresses leaving it hanging. Hint: If you're behind a reverse proxy, and that shows IP addresses that aren't the proxy's, then your IP is being hit directly. To find out how many IPs are hanging, do netstat -ant | grep :443 | grep SYN_RECV | wc -l. If you do it a few times and the number is increasing, you may be under attack. If it's over 100, that's suspicious, but manageable and the server can usually handle it, especially if you have SYN cookies activated. If it's over 1000, you're under attack.

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Linux » Packages » SQL

Automatic SQL tuning recommendations with mysqltuner.pl

Run this on the server for sql tuneup recommendations to my.cnf.

[code]wget http://mysqltuner.pl/ -O mysqltuner.pl perl mysqltuner.pl[/code]
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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Applications » Web Browsers » Plugins » uBlock Origin

Hide comments from blocked users on Reddit with uBlock Origin

Reddit collapses comments from blocked users so you have to click to read them, but does not hide them.

Add this custom rule to uBlock origin to completely hide comments from blocked users.

! https://www.reddit.com - hide blocked user
www.reddit.com##shreddit-comment.relative:has(.text-neutral-content-weak:has-text(Blocked User))

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » MacOS » Apps

Things That Don’t Get Firefox To Start Loading Pages Again When It Decides It Doesn’t Want To

Firefox as of v 148 (actually a bit earlier than that, but that's what I'm on right now) frequently decides not to load pages anymore. You enter a URL or click on a link and get the status message "Waiting for [URL]..." and you can wait as long as you care to.

When this begins, your only choice is to restart Firefox.

Here is a list of "solutions" to the problem from around the web, which I have tried and found do not fix the problem:
• Turning off DNS-over-HTTPS in Firefox Settings
• Flushing MacOS's DNS cache.
• Going to about:networking and clearing Firefox's DNS cache
• Going into about:config and changing network.dns.disableIPv6 from false to true
• Opening in "troubleshooting mode" or disabling all extensions
• Turning VPN off
• Turning VPN on

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Troubleshooting log

Playlist shortcodes not working in Chrome because Lightspeed cache is set to defer jquery

Long story short, I got a message from a user that audio playlists were working in Firefox but not Chrome. The Chrome console had an error that "jQuery" wasn't defined, but typing jQuery into console did show a function definition. Turns out, in Lightspeed Cache's JS Delayed Includes, I had entered the word jquery by itself on a line, with a note to myself that something was causing a browser flash if I didn't do that. But removing this made the playlist shortcodes work on Chrome again. Ergo: don't defer jQuery.

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » MacOS » Apps

iOS Shortcut to dictate your shopping list into Reminders.app

I uses this shortcut to dictate my shopping list into the iOS Reminders "Shopping" list. It breaks spoken lists on the word "and" to create separate shopping list items.

So I might run the shortcut, say the phrase "pickles and hot dogs and mustard", and it will add "pickles", "hot dogs", and "mustard" as separate checkbox items to the Shopping list in Reminders. It's handy for rattling off my shopping list as I'm staring into my fridge.

Obviously you need a list called "Shopping" set up in your Reminders app.

This shortcut executes the following steps:

  1. Dictate text - listens for spoken input. Make sure set to '''stop listening after pause'''.
  2. Split Dictated Text by Custom and - splits the text into a list with "and" as the delimiter
  3. Repeat with each item in Split Text - begins the loop that adds…
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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » MacOS » Networking

SSH into local mac, error “WARNING- REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!”

SSHing into a local MacOS machine at address "macbook.local", I suddenly got this:

[code]@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY! Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)! It is also possible that a host key has just been changed. The fingerprint for the ED25519 key sent by the remote host is SHA256:oKCEu3pDdq7xBhSPZwOzR2q0eWTvfphtvn3D4Bjz8v4. Please contact your system administrator. Add correct host key in /Users/username/.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message. Offending ECDSA key in /Users/username/.ssh/known_hosts:147 Host key for macbook.local has changed and you have requested strict checking. Host key verification failed.[/code]

The solution was to run ssh-keygen -R macbook.local then try the ssh again. Then it asked me whether or not to accept the key, instead of rejecting it:

[code]$ ssh username@macbook.local The authenticity of host 'macbook.local (fe80::1890:fd32:c304:69cd%en0)' can't be established. ED25519 key fingerprint is SHA256:oKCEu3pDdq7xBhSPZwOzR2q0eWTvfphtvn3D4Bjz8v4.…
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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » MacOS » Apps

Xbar/BitBar gives “Couldn’t Posix Spawn” for script.

Apple's quarantine system can cause this. Try

[code]chmod +x com.apple.quarantine /path/to/script.sh xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/script.sh[/code]

In my experience only the xattr is needed but the chmod might help and couldn't hurt.

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Web » Performance/SEO

If CSS animations cause a layout shift during rendering, even if they’re on compositable attributes

If CSS animations cause a layout shift even if they're on compositable ettributes, look for clip paths, overflow:hidden, or css filters on them or their ancestors.

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » Trading Education Notes » Explainers, Definitions, & Terminology

Put Options or Collar Can Reset Your Short-Term Capital Gains Holding Period For Stocks To Zero, Or Worse

It's a bit complicated, but under IRS Title 26, most* positions which combine normal stocks and options on that stock which hedge or lower the risk of losses are considered a "straddle" for tax purposes.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.1092(c)-1:

(a) In general. Section 1092(c) defines a straddle as offsetting positions with respect to personal property. Under section 1092(d)(3)(B)(i)(I), stock is personal property if the stock is part of a straddle that involves an option on that stock or substantially identical stock or securities.

Stocks or options held longer than 12 months may be subject to lower long-term capital gains tax rates. However, if certain option positions are purchased on a later date than the stock, but within the initial 12-month period, this resets the stock's short-term holding period to begin again from zero on the day after the option positions are closed.

So if you hold a stock for…

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Linux » Packages » PHP

Enable PHP 8.4 in Apache on Debian

According to the installer, to enable PHP 8.4 FPM in Apache2 do:
a2enmod proxy_fcgi setenvif
a2enconf php8.4-fpm

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private » Programming Hacks Used In This Site

War And Precedence: Plugin positioning of unpositioned elements that aren’t yet positioned by later-loading stylesheets: A CSS Odyssey

So, I had a crazy problem. You'll notice that there's various draggable elements on this site... such as the "Kupietools" plugin tabs seen at left, the occasional "the site is being worked on right now" notices that pop up, etc. You can drag them around with your mouse.

This is done with a plugin (also available as a standalone javascript module, a few versions behind the plugin as I write this) that retrofits code onto various HTML elements by giving the plugin the classnames it needs to make interactive.

I was doing some optimization on the site loading to speed things up, such as getting WordPress to load a lot of CSS file late so as not to interfere with initial page load stats. (This is a whole art, beyond the scope of this article.)
Suddenly…

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Web » Email setup)

Resolving cloudflare error “The number of lookups on your SPF record exceed the allowed limit of 10. This will result in emails failing SPF authentication”

I got the error "The number of lookups on your SPF record exceed the allowed limit of 10. This will result in emails failing SPF authentication" in my Cloudflare DNS dashboard.

My spx record for, say, kupietz.com was "v=spf1 include:_spf.myEmailHost.com include:kupietz.com ~all"

Turns out, the problem is, every include can get parsed to be multiple servers. the include:kupietz.com apparently causes a recursive loop, creating more than 10 lookups. I updated it to "v=spf1 ip4:[my server's external IP address] include:_spf.google.com ~all", removing the recursive lookup, and adding my server's IP so it can send me administrative notices.

Also today my ISP changed my IP address unexpectedly... all DNS updated.

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Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Linux » Packages » rsync & rsnapshot

How to backup a WordPress site via SSH

To make a complete local backup of a remote WordPress install over SSH, you need to perform two distinct steps:

  1. Download the files (using rsync).
  2. Export and download the database (using mysqldump piped through ssh).

Here is the step-by-step guide.

Prerequisites
  • SSH Access: You need the username, host (IP or domain), and password (or SSH key) for the remote server.
  • WordPress Path: You need to know where WordPress is installed (e.g., /var/www/html or /home/user/public_html).
  • Database Credentials: You will need the database name, user, and password. (I will show you how to find these below).
Step 1: Find Database Credentials (Optional)

If you don't know your database login details, run this command to read them from your remote wp-config.php file: ssh user@remote-server.com "cat /path/to/wordpress/wp-config.php" | grep 'DB_'

Note the DB_NAME, DB_USER, and DB_PASSWORD for Step 2.

Step 2: Download the Database (SQL Dump)…
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