Is your Honeywell thermostat stuck on “Batt Lo”? I was recently wondering why it was so cold in my house, so I went to check the thermostat. Lo and behold, the display was showing nothing. The heat did turn on if I moved the sliding switch, but the thermostat was not programmable. After examining the… Continue reading Reset your Honeywell thermostat Batt Lo
Upgrading Passenger on Ubuntu
I decided to upgrade the Passenger application server today on servers with Ubuntu 18.04. I ran the following in our staging environment first and after testing the app, all was well. The standard upgrade process using APT (and other package managers) for Passenger on Ubuntu and other distros is here. For some reason (due to… Continue reading Upgrading Passenger on Ubuntu
setup a redirect for ads.txt in nginx
ads.txt is the file that is used by ad providers to determine what ads should be served on what sites. It is a form of verification and helps to prevent fraud. If you run your own ad waterfall, or use a third party ad provider you may have to frequently update your ads.txt file in… Continue reading setup a redirect for ads.txt in nginx
Fix your macOS Big Sur mail.app
Why is macOS Big Sur mail.app so awful? Why can’t I find that message I know is there using search? One of the things I’ve always loved about macOS has been the spotlight search functionality. A quick command-space, a few strokes of the keyboard, hit return, and voila an app launched or a file found.… Continue reading Fix your macOS Big Sur mail.app
Tips for upgrading firmware on your Sony Alpha on macOS
I recently checked for a firmware update for my Sony Alpha a6000 (ICLE-6000) camera. It’s been a great small travel worthy camera for me and despite being on the market so long, Sony still sells it. My camera was still on the v3.20 firmware which was released 7-26-2016, so I wanted to update it to… Continue reading Tips for upgrading firmware on your Sony Alpha on macOS
blocking bad bots in nginx from xmlrpc.php
After upgrading from PHP 7.2 to 7.4.x, I was taking a look at my graphs in new relic for my wordpress blog and found a high number of E_WARNINGs for //xmlrpc.php. It’s a result of bots hitting a non-existent URL at //xmlrpc.php – note the extra slash in there. The default nginx behavior is to… Continue reading blocking bad bots in nginx from xmlrpc.php