The web host I've used since the inception of this site will be dropping support for Python (and by extension Django) based applications at the end of March. As such, I'm wondering what alternatives exist. Is anyone familiar with a host that supports Python / Django applications? I'd appreciate any suggestions.

A little over a month ago, I ordered an UpLift Desk for my office. All three packages were shipped via FedEx, and it was a colossal headache. The top arrived damaged, so I had the company send me another, which they graciously did. That one also arrived slightly damaged, though not as badly as the first. I decided to use the second top, just to avoid having to deal with another support ticket (the desk, by the way, is terrific).

The FedEx tracking updates, while packages are en route, appear to be updated only once daily. Compare this to UPS or Amazon, who update their tracking information immediately. FedEx's estimations for when the packages would arrive were also all incorrect (only one of the three packages ended up arriving the day it was forecast).

Nearly a week ago, my wife's phone broke. We ordered a replacement direct from Google, and guess who it's shipping through? We ordered it December 22, and it was scheduled to be delivered December 26, by the end of the day. The last tracking update was December 23; nothing further appeared until this morning. Today's update shows that the package is in Charlotte, NC, but with this caveat: Delivery exception: Damaged, handling per shipper instructions.

I guess at least they're honest. It's not clear to me, however, what happens next. Will FedEx deliver the damaged package as is? Will it get returned to the shipper, only to have a new one shipped again? I contacted Google about it, but my support ticket is still being processed (apparently the Google support folks don't even know what happens).

FedEx has miles to go to catch up to their competition. I've never had these kind of issues with UPS or Amazon shipping. It amazes me that a company with this kind of service remains in business.

Is it just me, or has Gmail's spam filtering gotten worse? In the past month or so, I've had more false positives end up in the spam folder than I've ever had while using their service. Emails from all sorts of valid places:

• My online pharmacy orders
• Electronic receipts from The Home Depot
• Bug reports on GitHub / GitLab
• Notifications from NewsBlur, my RSS feed reader of choice

Every time one of these false positives occurs, I click the "Not Spam" button, but it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. Has anyone else seen anything similar? It's really rather frustrating.

Back in November of 2019, I wrote about some deformable LED lights that I picked up on Amazon for our garage. This weekend, one of them died, after only about 21 months of occasional use. I have since picked up a newer variant that claims to have a 5-year warranty. The happy part is that I got a pack of 2 of these for much cheaper than I paid for one previously.

It's disappointing to me that I didn't even get 2 years out of those bulbs, despite their having a "2-year warranty." Lots of Amazon reviews for the old model point out that the warranty is bogus; no one is available at this "company" to take your information and replace the product. Given how many clones of these there are, I'm guessing they're all pretty much bogus Chinese listings. I am unable to find any UL-listed variants of these lights, which is also disappointing. I have read about some of these melting, especially the ones with plastic bodies. Both of the ones I own have aluminum bodies, which should help with temperature control, but I'd feel a lot better if the bulbs were certified in some way.

Ultimately, I'd love to install some of the consistently-well-reviewed Barrina LED fixtures in my garage, but that would involve some rewiring work that I'm not real keen on doing.

Three months ago, I gave a quick review of the Logitech M585 Wireless Mouse. In the past couple of weeks, I've started having trouble with this mouse, so I can no longer recommend it. When my laptop first starts up, the mouse has trouble staying connected (I connect via their Unifying USB receiver). The connection drops out repeatedly causing the mouse to stutter. I tried switching to Bluetooth connectivity mode, but that experience was even worse! The lag when operating over Bluetooth was comically bad.

This connection issue persists for the first 10 minutes or so of my laptop usage. After that, things magically start working again. Rebooting doesn't seem to trigger the problem, interestingly enough. It only seems to appear on a cold boot.

To top matters off, I've already had a battery die on me with this mouse, and I've only owned it for about 7 months. The second battery I installed is also nearly dead, according to the Logitech software. I could go for a couple of years on a single battery using my previous Logitech mouse, so this is a real disappointment. Many Logitech mouse models have poor reviews at Amazon, indicating to me that they've clearly dropped the ball on their quality control.

I've ordered a Kensington wired mouse to replace this one, figuring that going back to a wired model will obviate these types of problems. Hopefully a different brand will provide me with an improved experience. I'll report back once I've received the new mouse (it should be here this weekend) and put it through its paces.

As I write this we're in the middle of another gasoline shortage here in North Carolina. Our governor stupidly declared a state of emergency which, while technically required to change the rules for gasoline transportation, has caused people to panic and hoard gasoline. I have to imagine there's a better mechanism that we as a society could come up with for changing the rules that doesn't involve the word "emergency."

All this, of course, is thanks to the fact that the United States is the land the car built. Back when we visited Switzerland, one of the joys of travelling there was the ability to get around using only public transportation. You could go virtually everywhere by taking a train, bus, boat, or other random forms of transit. I'd love it if we had the same opportunities here, but it'll never happen.

I watch a lot of YouTube, and I do so across a couple of different platforms: via computers and via my phone. Watching on my phone through the YouTube app has, in recent months, become nearly unbearable. Ads roll constantly on nearly every video, with no easy way to avoid them. On my various laptop computers, I have the luxury of using uBlock Origin, which keeps those ads at bay. Not so on my mobile device.

I get that Google wants to monetize their platform (and that hosting videos is expensive), but the ads are now worse than commercial television! I guess the increase in ad frequency is intended to drive people towards signing up for YouTube premium. I'm too much of a cheapskate to spring for that service, especially given that it's $12 a month, which is 33% more than a basic Netflix account costs.

Are there ad-free ways of watching YouTube on mobile?

The longer I spend with WordPress, the more I loathe it. This site has been steadily chugging along since 2004 (16 years as of this writing!) with the Powered by WordPress brand stamped on each page. In that amount of time, WordPress has become an unwieldy behemoth of a platform. It's honestly feeling more and more like Microsoft FrontPage to me (remember FrontPage?). Everyone should apparently design websites in the WYSIWYG editing style. As hopefully everyone knows, however, that never seems to end well.

Apart from having to update the core software every few weeks to plug the latest security holes, I find the plugin support to be hit or miss. All the higher quality plugins tend to be paid pieces of software, some even requiring monthly subscription fees. Free plugins generally fall into two camps:

1. They're outdated and unsupported
2. They're poorly designed/documented

Lots of the functionality I'm interested in — image galleries, Markdown support, spam mitigation, bulk post management, the list goes on — isn't available natively. If it is, the implementation is generally half-baked. Keeping this site running has become a chore as WordPress has gotten larger.

Thankfully, this is where being a professional web developer pays off.

I'm in the process of designing a brand new, custom platform to power this site. It will be powered by Django, and will have every feature I care about baked in. I've been hacking on it solidly for the past two weeks, and I estimate another week or so before it's able to launch. Along with it will come a small visual refresh. I'm excited about these changes, and I look forward to sharing them soon.

In the past few weeks, I've received a couple of calls each day from CVS Pharmacy. I'm not sure what has changed on their end to cause these calls to start, but it has gotten annoying enough that I did some searching on how to disable them. Here's how to do it:

1. Call 1-800-SHOP-CVS (1-800-746-7287)
2. Say "More choices" (you may have to say this twice to get to the right menu; I did)
3. Say "Calls"
4. The system will confirm your phone number
5. Say "Stop"
6. Say "Correct"

One of our local news stations recently deployed an anti-adblock package (Admiral) on their website. It detects the presence of adblock software on the client, and prevents access until you white-list the website. The ads shown by this particular website have previously included malicious ones that attempt to deploy malware. As such, I refuse to white-list their site, having had bad experiences in the past.

While searching for tactics to sidestep this, I stumbled upon two Reddit threads (thread 1 and thread 2), both of which gave me enough information to figure out what was going on. The second thread above points to a repo of domain names used by this third-party solution for serving their adblock detection software. There are enough similarities in the domain names they use that make it pretty easy to pick out patterns. A typical pattern they employ is:

• <adjective><noun>.com

This is similar to how default Docker containers are named. An example is unequalbrake.com, which also happens to be the domain serving the aforementioned news website instance.

Adding this domain (or list of domains) to your adblock filter list should block the adblock blocker.

My wife and I have had three floor lamps, all purchased at different times, fail in the same exact way (the third failed tonight). In each case, the crappy concrete base falls apart and the lamp separates from it. Here are some photos:

We will now institute a "no floor lamp" policy in our household, seeing as these things are so poorly manufactured. Has anyone else had this experience?

By default, Firefox ships with the Use hardware acceleration when enabled option turned on. Unfortunately, Firefox has a number of font rendering bugs under the hardware acceleration umbrella (the following are a select few):

• Line spacing problem with D2D enabled(use hardware acceleration when available)
• Text using hardware acceleration looks inferior to and considerably different from text with acceleration disabled and on other browsers
• Increased line heights with DirectWrite (unlike in IE9)

As a result of these bugs, I've run with hardware acceleration disabled on my personal systems for quite some time. This, however, has resulted in an unforeseen consequence with my web development. The apps and pages I've developed look great in every browser, except stock Firefox! I only recently ran into this issue when I re-enabled hardware acceleration on my work laptop (in the process of creating a new profile). To my horror, several sites I had developed looked pretty terrible, my photo site being one among them.

I have since rolled out an updated stylesheet to my photo site, fixing the problems that showed up in stock Firefox. It should (hopefully) still look alright in all other browser variants (if you spot a bug, let me know). It's worth knowing, however, that enabling hardware acceleration in Firefox is a worthwhile thing to do if you develop things for the web. The underlying bugs in the rendering engine may bring out underlying flaws in your design.

Update (Sep. 26, 2016): See my updated post on how I think new user's should approach Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow has always been a better-than-average resource for finding answers to programming questions. In particular, I have found a number of helpful answers to really obscure questions on the site, many of which helped me get past a road block either at work or in my hobby programming. As such, I decided I'd join the site to see if I could help out. Never before has a website given me a worse first impression.

In an effort to keep the community as clean and orderly as possible, new users have very little rights from the get-go. On paper, this is a pretty nice idea. In practice, it makes it difficult for new users to gain any traction. I read through a number of questions today and had several comments for the original poster. Unfortunately, I couldn't make my comments, since new users cannot post comments on articles they themselves didn't write (you have to gain "reputation" in order to gain that privilege). Posting my comment as an "answer" to the original question seemed like bad form, so I didn't do that.

Looking elsewhere around the site, I found a few questions I felt I could answer. As soon as I went to answer said questions, someone else (in some cases, a number of other people) had jumped in and beaten me to the punch. I never had a chance to provide a helpful answer. Not only do you have to be very knowledgeable about a subject, you've also got to be very fast in providing said answer. I eventually did provide an answer for a question, then realized that my approach wouldn't work. Before I could take action and modify the answer, my submission had already been modded down by several people, several of whom left snarky remarks. What a warm welcome for a new user! I subsequently deleted my answer.

I later searched the Meta Stack Overflow site, looking for advice for new users. It turns out I'm not the only one who thinks that it's very easy for new users to get dumped on. Take a look at the questions revolving around new users on the site, and note how a number of them revolve around how hard it is for new users to improve. Documentation for how best to contribute as a new user is sorely needed.

The folks who manage these websites need to examine the barrier of entry for new users. I fully understand the need for keeping spammers and trolls out, but someone needs to develop a tutorial (or better yet, a set of tutorials) for how to properly use the website. New users do occasionally need hand holding, especially with websites as complicated as Stack Overflow. I think the community as a whole would benefit, and it would certainly help people like me who have been quickly overwhelmed by what the site offers.

My desktop computer at home has been giving me some occasional graphical problems ever since I updated to Windows 7. I have the latest and greatest drivers for my graphics card, but every so often I get graphical trash on screen that, usually, corrects itself. Tonight, it seems to have died for good. I can't get the system to boot reliably, even after trying to reseat the card. To add to my woes, I've also been having the occasional "double-beep" at startup, indicating that I have a memory problem. This has been an issue ever since I switched to the abit motherboard I'm currently using.

Anyways, I'm going to bite the bullet and buy a bunch of new hardware to fix all of this. New motherboard, CPU, memory, graphics card; the whole shebang.

If you have recommendations as to what to buy these days, I'd sure appreciate it. I'll be putting in some orders ASAP, so the sooner you can recommend something, the better.

I've recently had a perfect storm of email woes here at this site. Last month, my email servers changed at DreamHost (for reasons I still don't fully understand), breaking all of my approved SSL certificates (not to mention my SMTP settings). Around the same time, I updated to Thunderbird 3.0 from 2.x. The new interface is bizarre, and I've only had problems from day one of the upgrade. As such, I am now actively working towards moving all of Born Geek's email (including this website) to GMail.

Unfortunately, someone is apparently squatting on my domain over at Google Apps. I attempted to reset the account password there, but no secondary email address is on record, making things much more difficult for me. I have started a manual password reset process (via proving to Google that I do indeed own the domain), and hope to have things up and running by this weekend.

Long story short, any direct emails sent to me through the contact form at this website may not be answered for a while. Please bear with me during this painful process.

It is being reporting that Firefox will replace menus with an Office-style ribbon interface. Personally, I couldn't be more against this. I'm no fan of the Office ribbon (it takes up way too much screen real estate and looks clunky), and I fail to see how this interface will make things better for the user. Mozilla is known for screwing around with the GUI, however, so I won't be surprised when something like this shows up. I can't imagine how this change will affect many extensions out there, like Googlebar Lite, that add UI elements.

What do you think about the Office ribbon interface? And what do you think of this decision? Thankfully for me, someone will undoubtedly come out with a theme to fix this stupid design decision. Consider me signed up for it already!

A recent newspaper review for the new computer animated movie 9 warned that the movie isn't necessarily kid-friendly, and that young children will most likely be scared from the post apocalyptic setting. Shouldn't the PG-13 rating indicate that kids under 13 probably shouldn't be watching it anyway? Why does the reviewer jump to the conclusion that, because it's animated, the movie is for kids? It frustrates me that Americans think animation belongs solely to children. The medium should be taken way more seriously than it is. Foreign films like Princess Mononoke (another PG-13 film) are proof that animation can be used successfully for adult topics. Someone out there needs to buck the current trend and develop an animated movie purely for adults; maybe something that's rated R. Though I can only imagine all the angry parents complaining that the movie was "too adult" for their kids.

Why can't Americans just grow up?

If you use WordPress, I advise against upgrading to version 2.8. I attempted to do so to this site this evening (via Subversion), and everything appeared to go smoothly. Unfortunately, upon logging in to my admin panel, I noted that everything was broken. The external site still performed as expected, but I couldn't get around in the admin area.

Zero steps forward, twenty steps back.

Maybe others will have better luck than I did. I have since reverted back to 2.7.1 for the time being, though my database may now be corrupt. If you notice anything funky around this site, please, please, please let me know.

A recent trend among websites for games that have a "M for Mature" (or similar) rating is the use of age gates. These gates require the user to enter their birth date before they can view information on the subject in question. Usually, the user is presented with three pull down menus: one for the month, one for the day, and one for the year. From a legal perspective, I can understand why companies want to use this feature. But who are these gates really keeping out? Every kid should know that by providing an old enough date, they can gain access to the site. After all, this isn't rocket science.

Every time I visit a website with one of these gates, I enter the most ridiculous date possible by selecting the oldest year offered (usually 1900). Maybe if enough people enter ridiculous dates every time, this annoying website 'feature' will go away.

It's no surprise to anyone that obesity in America is getting worse every year. This animated map shows the progression in the US between 1985 and 2007, and it's quite a depressing sight. Lots of factors are contributing to everyone's weight gain: poor eating habits, no exercise, etc., but part of the blame certainly lies with food manufacturers. In recent times, food portions have increased by an incredible amount, and they only seem to be getting worse. Not only are the larger portions contributing to our weight gain, they are also making it much harder for people like me to shop in the grocery store.

Before I go much farther, I must confess that I'm not a big eater. Growing up, I knew guys who could eat two or three times as much as I do at each meal. And there are plenty of my peers today who can do the same thing. So I realize that I'm already starting out on the low side of the curve. However, this doesn't change the fact that food manufacturers have gotten out of control with portion management.

Shopping for one is difficult enough to begin with, but I've noticed that it's gotten more so in recent times. While at the grocery store recently, I picked up some potato chips for lunch through the week. The bag I bought had "20% more chips free," making it even larger than the normal bag (which is a little too big to begin with). A sign below the bags of chips offered the following deal: buy 2 get 2 free. So, you have to buy four bags of chips to get a deal! Who in their right mind eats four, full-sized bags of potato chips? Even in reasonably sized families, that's an insane number of chips to buy at once.

Similarly, doughnut manufacturer Krispy Kreme apparently no longer sells their half-dozen doughnut boxes. Instead, they offer a new box of 9. Every once in a while (maybe once every two months), I used to pick up a half-dozen doughnuts and eat them through the week with my breakfast. By the end of that week, the last doughnuts had nearly grown stale, but were still good enough to reheat. A box of 9 would certainly not last the way I eat them.

There are plenty of other examples, but these two stick out in my mind since I encountered them recently. If food manufacturers would provide smaller portions, at somewhat lower prices, I would be able to enjoy their products more often and I wouldn't be wasting perfectly good food. As an added bonus, I wouldn't eat as much, and would feel better as a result. Does anyone else feel the way I do?