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.
Happy Hauntings, Or Not
October 31, 2026I was an imaginative kid. I've always been an explorer by nature, tantalized by the idea that there was more yet to discover, fascinated by wondering what might lie outside our current view.
For that reason, I had all the fascinations you'd expect of a kid with those proclivities growing up in the 1970s, the era of "Star Trek", "In Search Of", Doug Henning on Broadway, and "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind". I also grew up reading Ray Bradbury, Dr. Strange comic books, and more than my share of stories about ghosts and monsters, most especially in "The World's Most Intriguing True Mysteries" by Rupert Furneaux, a book I acquired so young, probably second or third grade, that I cannot possibly recall how it came into my possession. I wasn't content to squint at grainy footage of Bigfoot that turned up occasionally on black and white TV specials, and…
uBlock Origin rule to hide posts of images that are mostly text (like tweets) from your Facebook feed
October 26, 2026! 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…
Kupietz’s Tweet Quote Screenshot Maxim & Corollary
October 26, 2026"The likelihood of someone sharing a screenshot of a tweet on another social media platform is in direct proportion to how repugnant it is."
This gives direct rise to the Corollary:
"If someone posts an a screenshot of a tweet on another social media platform, it will be something I wish I hadn't seen."
This stems from the long-term empirical observation, on several other social media platforms, that people only repost screenshots of things from Twitter I that would rather not have known about.
If “Screen Unknown Senders” stops working for Messages in iOS26
October 16, 2026This 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.
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.
