service posts

I have finally, effectively, fully said goodbye to Dreamhost after around 14 years. Continue reading post "#4018"

When I registered my domain "tobymackenzie.com" in 2009, Dreamhost offered the then free Google Apps to provide email for the domain. Already having a normal Gmail account and preferring the labels system over folders, I went with it. For 12 some years, it provided my email service for that domain. It changed names and eventually became "G Suite legacy free edition" after they started charging all new accounts. But this summer they are finally killing off the free version, requiring me to pay up or leave. I chose to leave, migrating over to my existing Fastmail account being used for other domains.

After three and a half years tethering for my home internet, I've given in and switched to "real" home internet: T-mobile Home Internet. Yes, it is cellular just like tethering, but it should allow for a lot more monthly transfer and may have bigger and better antennas and different handling at the tower. I finally gave in because the cost made sense and I feel it will give me more freedom and ease of doing things that require data.

I'm glad to have found that T Mobile seems to be extending their unlimited high speed data covid 19 deal until June 30th. Continue reading post "#2863"

My regular T-Mobile service came back after like 15 minutes. Continue reading post "#2759"

I've suddenly lost ability to connect to LTE on T-Mobile. Continue reading post "#2755"

We had a service of sorts today for my Uncle Joe, who died a couple months back. Continue reading post "#2409"

I've upgraded my site from Symfony version 3 to 4, without using Symfony Flex. I didn't upgrade so much for new features, but mainly to be up to date, especially with Symfony 5 not far off.

I went without phone / internet for about 19 hours when I attempted to upgrade my T-Mobile plan. Continue reading post "T-Mobile plan change debacle"

I've gone over both my data and minutes this month on my cell plan. Continue reading post "#2110"

Looks like I hit my 5GB data cap already, with maybe 9 days left. Continue reading post "#1730"

Erm, looks like Windows downloaded something like 1.5GB of updates automatically when I used my tablet for the first time in a long time. Gonna make it really hard to stay within my 5GB cap Continue reading post "#1715"

I paid for email service for the first time. Fastmail is getting rid of their 'Guest' (ie free) accounts. Continue reading post "Paid email"

I never set up home internet when I moved, and am considering staying that way. Continue reading post "#1447"

Gah. Apparently wordpress.com is discouraging 'https' for self-hosted blogs: Their redirection service does not allow any protocol but 'http'. I could swear it did when I first set it up, as I remember typing in my URL with 'https' and I thought I tested it with curl -I to make sure it works, but the docs have an explicit note saying:

Note: Site redirects will only point to a non-ssl ( http:// ) url.

I don't remember seeing it before, but the wayback machine suggests it was there since 2013, well before I switched to self-hosted.

As part of the service worker API, a cache interface has been provided to manag…

I started playing with service workers as a client side cache manager a bit tonight. I'm using this Smashing Magazine article as a guide. I've been reading a bit here and there about them, intrigued by their role in making web sites installable as apps and their ability to allow sites to function even while offline. However, my site's current lack of pages and other priorities plus the learning curve and things that have to be done to set them up kept me from playing with them until now.

Workers require HTTPS, unless, luckily, you are serving from localhost. I had to modify my local app install to use that instead of the more site-indicative name it was using. They also require placement at or above the path level they apply to, or theoretically a Service-Worker-Allowed header, though I was unable to get that working. I'm assuming this is for some security reason. Because my file is stored in a Symfony bundle and because I am serving multiple sites with the same application, I didn't want an actual file in my web root. I made a Symfony route and action that passes through the file, like:

Looks like it's been a good while since I've posted on this blog. My "professional" blog, which gets much more traffic, has been getting my focus, and I'm still not sure what will be happening with this blog.

Anyway, on with the post. I use Google Finance for my everyday checks on my stock portfolio and the market in general. I check for prices and news. It gives me a basic idea of my returns for each stock and for my overall portfolio, though it doesn't seem to match perfectly with my tracking in Quicken.

A while back they began tracking dividend payouts. They are not entirely accurate, which is probably why the numbers are off. They also are not applied to the returns of individual stocks, only the whole portfolio. Since Quicken can show me per-stock returns with dividends, this provides a nice comparison between market returns and overall returns.

So just today I looked at my portfolio after having not payed attention to it for several days or so, and suddenly my returns were way up (from around 60% overall to 80%). I was somewhat excited for a second, but confused because the overall market had not jumped that much, and as I looked through prices, none seemed that different from where they were.

I've been using Google's Webmaster Tools and more recently Yahoo's Site Explore…

I am researching services that will take online donations for nonprofits. There…