dullneon.com » random notes » page 23

After more than a decade with the same hosting provider, I decided to uproot it all and find another host. Because who doesn’t like the self-inflicted anxiety of migrating years of files, databases and settings over a couple of nights, right?

I got to this stage because I had a cursory look at what other hosting companies were offering and realised I could get better value for money elsewhere. So I took the leap and left my reliable-but-expensive Singapore-based hosting company to try out InMotion. So here are some things I learned over the last two weeks while making the move.

• Some months ago, I had signed up for a free-tier AWS account to play with. It’s cheap as chips. It’s also way too much work for a simple website. And I am not sure I endorse Amazon’s stranglehold of the cloud. (Where possible, I try to stay away from monopolies who make it free/cheap to get addicted to their crack.)
• Alibaba? No, thanks.
• Every single web hosting review website is a veritable ant nest of affiliate link marketing sitting atop automated posts, modal windows, and exclusive expiring deals that re-appear repeatedly in new private browser windows. They make money out of whatever you click. A useful source of opinions from real humans is from the Web Hosting Talk forums.
• Unless you use a VPS, Ghost is not available to mere plebeians on shared root-less hosting.
• cPanel is cool, but… ermahgerd the interface looks an abandoned Linux distro from the previous decade. Actually, Softaculous is uglier than if cPanel were running on Thanos’ chin.
• Currently InMotion does not provide an IPV6 address for your server space. It felt nice having an AAAA DNS record for a while with my old host.
• There are security headers your server should be sending to ward off bad shit. Also learned about Content Security Policy (CSP) which is really painful.
• Mozilla Observatory is cool.
• Let’s Encrypt is cool.
• Filezilla is available for Linux!
• InMotion has a huge online support repository. Now that’s what I call #content.
• InMotion provides a WordPress migration guide which every proper, well-prepared, sensible hosting migrant should read first if they’ve never done it before.
• Calling WordPress’ Jetpack a plug-in is like labelling an upsized Big Mac® Extra Value Meal (with curry, chilli and tomato sauce, two types of sundaes, a salad, and a last-minute Happy Meal inclusion) a light mid-afternoon snack. Jetpack is cool but feels a bit bloat-y.
• That China’s Belt and Road Initiative for infrastructure includes a plug-and-play internet for the recipient countries was an amazing revelation for my small mind.
• My disdain for influencers and social media explained in a rational, less annoyed tone.
• That Content Security Policy (CSP)? In order to implement it, I need to remove the inline CSS and JavaScript that are peppered throughout this site in a misguided attempt at inline acceleration.

The question shouldn’t be why, but the more excellent why not.

Heartbreaking stories and pictures of Singaporean single mothers by Charmaine Poh.

Some people confuse privacy and anonymity and think they go hand in hand, and that protecting privacy means that you need to protect anonymity. I think that’s wrong. Anonymity is important if you’re a whistle-blower, but if you cannot prove your identity, your crazy rant on some social-media platform shouldn’t be visible, and you shouldn’t be able to share it or like it.

Macs bought in China can no longer display the ???????? Taiwan Flag Emoji, no matter which region is set in System Prefs https://t.co/nTJqBiYCvB

— Jeremy Burge ???????? (@jeremyburge) March 27, 2019

I use the oldest words in the English language. People think I’m an ignorant bastard who doesn’t know the ten-dollar words. I know the ten-dollar words. There are older and better words which if you arrange them in the proper combination you make it stick. Remember, anybody who pulls his erudition or education on you hasn’t any.

Humans have unconscious skills → Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much more powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge. We are all prodigious olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it.

The ARJ website hasn’t been updated since 2014.

• Robot dexterity (“to help Grandma out of bed”)
• New-wave nuclear power (so anyone can trigger Judgement Day)
• Predicting premature births (and worry about falling birth rates another time)
• Gut probes in a pill (for those who cannot stomach Anesthesia)
• Custom cancer vaccines (though you still need to go through a biopsy)
• The cow-free burger (which will make Bill richer than he needs to be)
• Carbon dioxide catcher (so we can all make our own sugary soda drinks at home)
• An ECG on your wrist (puts the Swiss watch industry on life support)
• Sanitation without sewers (which can fit in a backpack next to the nuclear power bank)
• Smooth-talking AI assistants (whose eyes are like angels but the heart is cold)

MIT Technology Review: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2019, curated by Bill Gates

I was an idiot who made the same stupid decision, day-after-day, multiple times per day. I was a smoker and even though I knew it may eventually kill me, I chose to deny the truth to myself. The pain and suffering I caused my family was not worth the perceived “satisfaction” that really did nothing more than waste money, separate me from my family, and eventually destroyed my body. I did many good things, helped lots of people, and even made a decent living. At 66 years old, I lived a decent life, but there are so many events and milestones I will not be able to share with my loved ones. The moral of this story – don’t be an idiot. If you’re a smoker – quit – now – your life depends on it and those that you love depend upon your life.