BigSmoke

Smokes your problems, coughs fresh air.

Page 6 of 52

Epson XP-630 cartridges

Our printer is an Epson XP-630, courtesy of Marilisa’s parents who gifted it to us when we moved into our new place together. Suitable ink comes in the following multipacks:

  • C13T33374510 (24.4 ml),
  • C13T33574510 (47.0 ml),
  • C13T33374010 (24.4 ml), and
  • C13T33574010 (47.0 ml).

I ordered a supposedly compatible multipack (“Epson 33XL multipack zwart en kleur”) through www.inktweb.nl for our first cartridge replacement (which has been due since Marilisa’s trip to India about half a year ago).

The decade-old posts bug

I just noticed that none of my posts older than a decade could be listed:

The culprit was in the following function, where I had to add "century" and "10" to the lists of $periods and $lengths respectively.

function bigsmoke_ago($timestamp_gmt)                                                    
{                                                                                        
  $difference = current_time('timestamp', true) - $timestamp_gmt;                        
  $periods = array("second", "minute", "hour", "day", "week", "month", "year", "decade");
  $lengths = array("60","60","24","7","4.35","12","10");                                 
                                                                                         
  for($j = 0; $difference >= $lengths[$j]; $j++)                                         
    $difference /= $lengths[$j];                                                         
  $difference = round($difference);                                                      
                                                                                         
  if($difference != 1) $periods[$j].= "s";                                               
  $text = "$difference $periods[$j] ago";                                                
                                                                                         
  if ($j < 3) {                                                                          
    $current_day = date('j', current_time('timestamp', true));                           
    $arg_day = date('j', $timestamp_gmt);                                                
    $relative_day = ($current_day == $arg_day ? 'today' : 'yesterday');
                          
    $text = "$relative_day, $text";                                                      
  }                                                                                      
                                                                                         
  return $text;                                                                          
}

While add it, I also got rid of the useless Google ads.

Plus, I improved the link text replacement for posts without comments and commenting turned off.

The terrible state of my tech

It’s a bit pathethic how well I have been taking care of my own tech. ever since I started studying. What’s worse: this haven’t improved when I stopped my studies for other ventures. I think the reason for this is exceedingly simple: I don’t like to do work-like things I don’t write about; luckily, I love to structure my goals in writing, and this blog still hasn’t completely collapsed under my neglect.

If I love writing about stuff I do, have I simply not done anything in the past few years? Well, I’ve done things. I’ve even written about them too, in other places, mostly on paper. It’s just that, dispite working for a tech company for the last couple of years, I have done hardly a thing about ridding myself of my private technical debt. Or is it because of working at a tech company, where I’m hard at work fighting technical debts in Python/Django projects and documenting the progress in Redmine?

I won’t mention the reasons why I want to spend time on this weird, hodgy-podgy blog again. Let me just say that the main motivation is not guilt for having created a technical debt. And the actual reasons are better suited for other posts at another time.

Domain Problem Short-term fix Mid-term fix Long-term fix
blog.bigsmoke.us Spam ✔ 2017-07-18 Disable comments and ping/trackbacks on new posts.
2017-07-18 Disable comments and ping/trackbacks on old posts.
2017-07-19 Remove spam.
Security Upgrade WordPress svn:external Automatically upgrade WordPress
www.bigsmoke.us Non-responsive Make responsive
Outdated 2018-10-28 Reduce and update content
* Huge hosting costs Find sinkhole between my NFSN accounts 2019-01-26Move to cheapsolid VM host (TransIP? Tilaa)
blog.omega-research.org Security Move personal posts to blog.bigsmoke.us and replace with redirects
Replace blog with static rendering of blog
opschoot Wheezy fan Replace or re-attach fan.
Neglected backups Backup monitoring: opschoot should register itself when online and I should then be nagged if I don’t backup.
butler Legacy Move files somewhere else (public?)

Fixing the Firefox file dialogs in Linux Mint (17)

For a few months now, the file dialogs (open, save, etc) in Firefox on Linux Mint 17 KDE malfunctioned. Clicks didn’t go through and/or were interpreted as drags. I finally figured out that it was caused by the Oxygen KDE theme.

So, I installed mint-themes-gtk3 and chose Mint-X as my theme.

It is now fixed.

Fixing hanging and slow Windows Update on Windows 7

Windows 7 update service is slow to begin with, but trying it on a computer that has been off for a while is damn near impossible. This is a known issue, apparently.

You need KB3172605 to fix it.

Then supposedly, to make Windows Update faster, you can install KB2852386 to be able to remove old updates with the cleanup wizard. But, the option to remove unneeded Windows Update files never appeared for me.

Sources:

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2023 BigSmoke

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑