Subfolders
Latest "Workshop" Articles
Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Applications » Web Browsers » Websites » Facebook

uBlock Origin rule to hide posts of images that are mostly text (like tweets) from your Facebook feed

! works as of Oct 26, 2026 https://www.facebook.com
www.facebook.com##.html-div:has(img[alt="May be an image of text"])

This was designed as a solution for my Maxim Of Tweet Screenshots. Set up as a custom rule in uBlock Origin, this will hide posts containing images that are mostly text, such as tweet screenshots, from your facebook feed. It does get a lot of false positive, like blocking images of text-heavy book covers, concert announcement images, printed pages from inside books or magazines, but it's a small price to pay. I find blocking all tweet screenshots from my Facebook feed contributes materially to my peace of mind.

If you wish, to test it, you can add style so it hilights instead of hides: ! works as of Oct 26, 2026 https://www.facebook.com
www.facebook.com##.html-div:has(img[alt="May be an image of text"]):style(outline: 3px solid red !important; background-color: rgba(255, 0, 0, 0.2) !important;)

Then run it that…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=34736  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » iOS

If “Screen Unknown Senders” stops working for Messages in iOS26

This happened to me on my iPhone SE 3 running iOS 26, and I found a simple fix at https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1nlbq4r/comment/nlqahws/: turn off "Screen Unknown Senders", shut down the phone completely, restart the phone, turn "Screen Unknown Senders" back on.

This actually worked for me. Even previous SMSes from unknown senders that had not been filtered out of my main SMS list (and which had triggered annoying notifications, so that someone I didn't know could interrupt my Friday night to address me by name and ask me to reply indicating my support for a racist politician) suddenly disappeared from the main list and moved to the unknown senders list.

So, appears to work.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=34721  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Troubleshooting log » Cloudflare or DNS

Fixed the ssl certificate issues ChatGPT slyly introduced 4 months ago

Noticed 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.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=34694  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Cross-Platform Issues

MacOS fails to expand .zip compressed archive with “Unable to expand” … “(Error 79 – Inappropriate file type or format.)”

Did 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

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=34663  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » Hearth & Home

Cerpegia Woodii “String of Hearts” plant care

"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,…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=34659  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Troubleshooting log » Cloudflare or DNS

Closed port 53 and Port 531 on my home router

Closed 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.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=34637  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Workshop » Works In Progress » Writing Works in Progress » The Five-Ingredient Cookbook

Air Fryer Chicken Strips Success

1. Slice three boneless, skinless chicken breasts lengthwise into 1/4"-1/2" (1.27–2.34 cm) wide strips.

2. Put in a large bowl with lots of extra-fine garlic powder and chili powder, and a fair bit of coconut flour. Toss until strips are coated.

3. Sprinkle with soy sauce. Toss some more. Sprinkle some more soy sauce. Toss some more. Don't overdo the soy sauce, but, use a bit.

4. Lay out in air fryer. For this quantity, I had to do two layers: one on the bottom of the air fryer, put in an old foldable/expandable metal vegetable colander over that, and put in another layer of chicken strips. Be sure to leave some space between the chicken strips, typical air fryer stuff. I had to drape some of the top layer over the edges of the colander.

5. Air fry 12 minutes at…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=34600  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Applications » Web Browsers » Firefox

Firefox freezes – tried setting gfx.webrender.software to true

Claude 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.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=34592  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » MacOS

How to clear it when restarting MacOS Tahoe brings up a ton of notifications and no “Clear All” button

Today 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.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=34551  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
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…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=34520  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
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…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=34410  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
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.)

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=34403  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
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 */ }

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=34258  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
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.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=34148  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
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 ##.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=34146  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
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…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=34047  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
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.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=34037  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
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]
| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=34030  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
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.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=33955  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
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.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=33921  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
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/

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=33917  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
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

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=33867  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
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…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=33856  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
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…

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=33302  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
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.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=33261  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
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]
| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=32920  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
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))

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=32726  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
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

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=32719  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off
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.

| Permanent URL: https://michaelkupietz.com?p=32675  |  Share this  |  Embed link  |  Webmentions are: off