Yes, I know. It’s been a long time since my last post, but I have a good reason. I have been busy, very very busy with a new 3D project.
Base on the fantastic work of David Given (https://cowlark.com) on FluxEngine I am in the process of developing a stand-alone device to read/write floppydisks (both 5,25 and 3,5 inch) to/from disk images. Please see David’s website on FluxEngine for more information on this part of the project.
You would say that the FluxEngine is the most difficult part made easy by David, and yes, that is true. What I am bringing to the party is the housing, fully 3D printed, the electronics to make it stand-alone, power supply, cooling etc. Interested? Please read on :)
A vulnerability has been discovered in Contact Form 7 that allows an attacker to upload malicious scripts. The publishers of Contact Form 7 have released an update to fix the vulnerability.
I recently replaced my trusty Synology RT1900ac with a “great, problem solving, multi-room Wi-Fi kit” from Asus, the Lyra MAP-AC2200. “The best of the best”. Yeah, … right.
Out with the old …
The problem with my apartment is that is about 60 years old, and some rooms are behind load-bearing walls. Not load-bearing for my ceiling, but load-bearing for the entire complex. Like 20cm thick reinforced concrete! Wi-Fi is problematic there. So this multi-room Wi-Fi set would solve that problem.
… in with the new.
Well it did; I got Wi-Fi, strong, fast, … for about 2 hours. Then a reboot of the closest Lyra node was needed. On top of that, incoming connections to the main node would no longer get through after about 4 days, so twice a week a full reboot of all nodes was needed, just to get a little Wi-Fi. After 6 months of this getting worse and worse, I was done. [Edit: turns out there is so much Wi-Fi signals here, the Lyra set gets confused … It’s a Wi-Fi jungle out here …]
In the end I had ping-spikes and drop-outs like crazy; sitting right next to the main node, pinging my ISP Modem through the Wi-Fi;
What the hell, Asus? You call this “superb Wi-Fi coverage”? This is a ping from Laptop -> 1 meter open air -> Asus Lyra Main Node -> 2 meters ethernet cable -> ISP Modem.
Playing online games was simply impossible. So I took out my RT1900ac again and settled with Wi-Fi being poor or even non-existent in some rooms.
A few days ago, however, I had enough of that too and I took a leap and bought the Synology RT2600ac + MR2200ac combo. The set-up of the RT2600ac was a breeze, but I had seen that before, as this works exactly like the RT1900ac. In fact; I downloaded a configuration backup on the RT1900ac, uploaded it to the RT2600ac and done. Unplugged the old, installed the new. All done.
The Synology RT2600ac Router
Well, almost; I still had the Mesh-node MR2200ac to set-up.
Yeah, I know. It’s been over a year since my last entry. I’m not the person to monetise online presence, I just post stuff about problems I faced and how I solved them. No biggie, right?
Local (by Flywheel) is great, but for a terminal type of person as I am, I find it way more convenient to SSH into a VM and use the WP-CLI to perform WordPress tasks. With a platform like Vagrant, one has the
vagrant ssh
command to shell into the virtual environment.
With Local, you can do this with the push of a button in Local, but as said, I like the terminal better.
lbf ssh
is waaaaay faster than going to the Local app, find the site, click the SSH button.
Working with the WordPress REST-API is HELL. There. I said it. It is powerful, it is secure, it is everything a developer needs, but for the love of [fill in your favorite deity here], WordPress, be consistent!
Using the REST-API requires authentication. Well, that’s not a problem. Just create a route to log-in and one to log-out. WordPress has functions to do that.
wp_signon()
and
wp_logout()
The first hurdle is getting the WordPress REST API to function. Oh, wait, you need a nonce ?! Well, thank you WordPress for this ‘security’-measure. For everything else in WordPress the authentication cookies you get when logging in to /wp-admin are enough, but for REST-API you need a nonce … the F why !?
So you have this very fast AJaX page loader (InstantClick) on your website, but you want to use Google Tag Manager and track your pageview with Analytics etc; here’s how you reset Tag Manager and re-load it after your AJaX page is loaded; Continue reading “Google Tag Manager restart after AJaX page-reload”
After careful (not) thought and with relative ease (again: not) I have migrated the SpaceChem solutions into this blog. As visitor, you should not notice other than a change of design (or rather: lack of design).
Does this change the solutions? NO :) They are still the same three-or-more-year-old solutions.
Nor does this migration give any guarantee on the functionality of the solutions after all this time.
It’s just something I had to do, getting rid of old, bad, ugly, baseline PHP code.
So you might think, “then why the hell are you bothering us with this?”. Well, good question. Got no answer. Consider this blog-post un-written :P
Enjoy your weekend all! (or your week, if you read this on a working-day, or your holidays, if the internet carrier pigeons have brought this message to you around a holiday, or maybe even your birthday! Is it your birthday today? It is? well happy birthday!)
[UPDATE] WPML has released a new version with a permanent fix, download version 3.8.4 from wpml.org.
BREAKING NEWS … Literally!
If you experience inexplicable 404s on your WordPress site after you updated to version 4.8.3, and you are using WPML (sitepress multilingual cms) version 3.8.0 or higher, you will need a fix. (Duh!)
The cause is WPML not properly using WPDB->prepare(); [UPDATE] is too late with adding/removing the filters on the query. The priority is now fixed from 10 to -1.
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