Toby's Log

Site partially static

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I am pleased to say that most of the non-blog parts of my site are now served from static files. I have been working toward making a static version of my site for a while. I have created a PHP static web task that can crawl a site and turn the responses into an Apache friendly directory structure. Those pages now can be served extra fast, without going through PHP, and could be served on a free static host if I wanted. To go static, I not only had to write the code to build the static files, but also had to modify my site code to have the desired output when called from that context and modify my Apache configuration to respond correctly and add some headers that were being added by PHP before.

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Compact about:profiles in Firefox

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Firefox allows us to create multiple browser profiles to separate our activities, such as work, personal, finance, etc. It has an about:profiles page to manage and launch these. The page has not gotten much UX love and does not make very good use of space. On load, I can’t see the full second profile on my laptop (Macbook) screen. After living with this a long time, I decided to use userContent.css to customize the appearance so everything fits on one screen and I can quickly and easily find the two things I need most of the time: Each profile’s name, and the button to launch it with.

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Readable query output in MySQL CLI

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I tend to prefer a GUI like Sequel Pro for looking at database data, but since Sequel Pro doesn’t support MySQL 8+ and I haven’t settled on an alternative, I found myself needing to use the CLI. It also can just be faster to use for new or rarely accessed servers or whatever, and is nice and lightweight. However, it wraps query output by default, and with many or wide columns, it can become very hard to read and figure out which data is in which column. Recently, I went looking for something better, and found a StackOverflow question with a couple ways: outputting vertically, and using a pager with a nowrap option set.

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Another bird incident happened today. I was walking my brother’s dog, Duncan, when he came upon something. He lunged toward it. I saw a small bluebird flutter up, but it was having trouble fully flying, so it just got to the height of Duncan’s mouth and moved away from Duncan. As this was happening, I yelled something like “Duncan, leave it” and pulled on the leash. Duncan’s mouth was open, biting at the bird as I was pulling him, keeping him just inches away. The little bird flapped over to a spot on the road 10 feet away, and Duncan stared at it. It was chirping. As this was happening, two other birds up in a nearby tree started chirping at us, and then took turns diving at us. I pulled Duncan along and the two presumably parent birds eventually stopped diving us and went towards the little bird, chirping at it. When we came back, the little bird was no longer on the street and one or more bluebirds were up in the tree, chirping. So, presumably the little one was fine and managed to fly under the less stressful situation.

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Had a weird bird incident the other day. I was going around a turn on a residential street (by Stan Hywet), following the car ahead of me. Suddenly, something came flying from the side of the road among the bushes, fast like somebody threw something hard, and it hit the car ahead of me and bounced off. As it bounced back, I saw wings: It was a bird, probably a robin. We weren’t going fast since we just came around a curve, so less than 25mph, but the bird just bounced far, to the ground. It all happened super fast, and with how hard it hit, I assume it was dead.