After examining the thermostat, I realized that it actually takes 2 AA batteries. Go figure, I don’t recall every changing them. After removing the dead and leaky batteries, I replaced them. The display lit up but it still showed “Batt Lo” and would not let me set the schedule. After cleaning the contacts on the leads and trying various batteries I still couldn’t get it to clear. In order to get it to get rid of Batt Lo, try this:

1. Set system switch to OFF.
2. Located and remove the battery cover (If it’s like my Honeywell T8112D1005 use a coin on the bottom of the left-side panel.)
3. Insert both new batteries backwards (+ to – and – to +).
4. Wait 5 seconds. (Steps 3 and 4 are what clears the Batt Lo condition. Alternatively, you can reset the circuit breaker that your thermostat is attached to, but I found this to be easier.)
5. Flip the batteries and install them the correct way (+ to + and – to -)
6. Set system switch to HEAT or COOL
7. Re-program and set the schedule.
8. Enjoy your heat – or cold.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

For some reason (due to repo move?), in our production environment the same result produced the following errors:

Ign:10 https://oss-binaries.phusionpassenger.com/apt/passenger bionic InRelease                           
Get:11 https://oss-binaries.phusionpassenger.com/apt/passenger bionic Release [8200 B]
Get:12 https://oss-binaries.phusionpassenger.com/apt/passenger bionic Release.gpg [833 B]
Reading package lists... Done                                  
E: Repository 'https://oss-binaries.phusionpassenger.com/apt/passenger bionic Release' changed its 'Origin' value from 'packagecloud.io/phusion/passenger' to '. bionic'
E: Repository 'https://oss-binaries.phusionpassenger.com/apt/passenger bionic Release' changed its 'Label' value from 'passenger' to '. bionic'
N: Repository 'https://oss-binaries.phusionpassenger.com/apt/passenger bionic Release' changed its 'Version' value from '1' to ''
N: This must be accepted explicitly before updates for this repository can be applied. See apt-secure(8) manpage for details.

In order to resolve this, you can do the following:

sudo apt-get --allow-releaseinfo-change update
sudo apt-get update

Huzzah, enjoy the latest release of your Passenger 6.0.9 install. For more detailed info, you can refer to the following issue in the Passenger github. Off to drink my coffee.

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 order to keep up to date with the latest providers. Keeping ads.txt up to date ensures that you are paid for the most up to date list of advertisers and networks.

I have just updated this file manually when a new file is released. On our blog we have a Mediavine plugin from our ad provider that does this automatically, so when it changed I would just update it on our main www site. The IAB ads.txt 1.02 standard allows you a single redirect, so now that our ad provider Mediavine supports this standard I thought I would finally automate it and stop adding it to our source code checkins on our main www site. In nginx, it’s a simple redirect or rewrite.

You can add this location directive to your nginx server block config:

location /ads.txt {            
return 301 https://adstxt.mediavine.com/sites/{YOUR-SITENAME}/ads.txt;
}

Alternatively, you could add a rewrite rule:

rewrite ^/ads.txt$ https://adstxt.mediavine.com/sites/{YOUR-SITENAME}/ads.txt permanent;

Test the redirect by loading yourdomainname/ads.txt in a browser. Huzzah, yay for redirects.

If you’re not editing your web config directly, you could also use cpanel, your wordpress redirections plugin, rankmath redirections, or other admin tool.

If you want a list of more comprehensive steps to check that your ads.txt is working correctly, check out google’s admanager post.

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. However, in recent times spotlight has seemed to get funky or unresponsive, especially when using search within mail.app.

The most annoying spotlight failures are in mail.app. I use mail.app as my main email client to pull my various gmail accounts together in one inbox. So, today I am looking for an email, I type from:person name fwd sell and it comes up with ZERO results. I try various incarnations and cannot find a stupid email from less than 2 months ago. I mention this to my wife and she tells me she just searches in gmail on the web. We use mail.app with google gmail. I’ve never used it with iCloud, maybe it’s better, same walled garden ecosystem and all y’know.

But, it SHOULD work! I give up, I type the exact same search criteria in gmail on the web and it comes up as the first result. I used to have a lot of faith in the quality of Apple software releases, but the last few release of macOS and iOS have had some annoying bugs. I still prefer the UI to desktop Linux or Windows, but…

Ok so you want solutions not complaining, so here are a few tips to maintain your mail.app and keep it minty fresh:

• Practice good email hygiene.
  • Delete those old emails, empty those spam folders, and remove old attachments to reduce your total mailbox size.
• Rebuild your mailboxes
  • Rebuilding your mailboxes re-downloads your email from what is stored on the mail servers.
  • Launch mail.app, select your mailbox on the left pane list and then select Mailbox > Rebuild
• Reindex your mailboxes
  • Reindexing your mailboxes
  • Make sure mail.app is closed
  • In the Finder, press Command-Shift-L to open the Library folder and then navigate to Mail > V8 (or whichever version you are using) > MailData, then delete the following files (NOTE: I suggest backing them up first):
    • Envelope Index
    • Envelope Index-shm
    • Envelope Index-wal
  • Relaunch mail.app, click ‘Continue’, and let it import, reindex, and build new envelope index files. Be patient, it could take awhile, especially if you have 375,000 emails like I do.

Happy emailing.

Of course, if you look for the the v3.21 download for macOS, it says that Big Sur is not supported. As luck has it, I’ve recently upgraded to Big Sur, so I went to an old macOS 10.15 laptop to do the upgrade (though I could have used a PC as well). So even with all that and following the Sony instructions, it’s not straightforward. You put your left foot in, you switch the camera on, you put your right foot in, then you shake it all about. A bit of hokey pokey is involved. My firmware update failed to complete several times, but I’m finally on v3.21. Most of the following should apply to any Sony Alpha firmware update on macOS.

Here are a few of my extra tips to get you there sooner:

Whew, pop your SD card in and enjoy your new camera firmware. Do a funky dance. Happy auto focusing.

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 merge double slashes, which normally is fine.

In this case, I added a location block with //xmlrpc.php to block it but I noticed it was not working (hitting that particular URI still returned with a 405 Method Not Allowed instead of a 403 Forbidden). It turns out that I needed to add ‘merge_slashes off;’ and then it worked. Voila, lots of spurious errors removed from my logs (and from hitting PHP). Note that most of the xmlrpc functionality has been supplanted by the newer WordPress REST API, so you likely do not need it enabled.

merge_slashes off;
location = //xmlrpc.php {
    deny all;
}

If you want to use a plug-in, you could search for ‘Disable XML-RPC’ in the WordPress plug-ins repository or install WordFence. Buh-bye bad bots.