Happy Pico Day y'all! :)

It's that special NG occasion on which we celebrate all the greatness and creation that one site has given us over the years.

If you want to read up on the history behind this event you can do so here.

I collabed on a track for it this year with @Aalasteir. Aw yeah(r)!

Over in Norway they're celebrating today! It's their national day.

I'm Swedish, so I don't usually celebrate this, but for some reason a buddy (also Swedish) asked if I'd like to join him on a 'syttende mai' parade at Skansen - a folk museum/park smack dab in the middle of Stockholm with supposedly the biggest 'syttende mai' celebrations outside of Norway.

I've never in my life even considered celebrating this particular day, much less paying a hefty entrance fee + transport costs to do so, even less so when I have an upcoming trip very soon, and mingling with large crowds thus seems a risky business (though mom just caught a bug so who knows how that'll go) and thus... I politely declined. There'll be other and all the more festive occasions to get together for, I'm sure.

Since the proposal did cross my desk screen in the first place however I suddenly feel almost obligated to commemorate this one somehow.

So here's to y'all Norwegians. Happy May 17!

May this day be the realest dream! In a good way, I mean. Like may these festivities be: all you could possible scheme or schedule.

#NORWAYFOREVER

Ever heard of puter.com?

It's a virtual browser-based OS! A free one, with 500MB storage and a variety of standard apps and games installed and ready to use, in a style that seems familiar both to Windows and Mac, and thus ought be easy to get accustomed to for just about everyone.

I haven't tried running my own stuff, or uploading my own files, or creating an account to keep track of them (you get a guest session created for you when you visit the site without), but first impressions are: I'm impressed.

It seems you can even use it for website-related work. You can publish things, and link to them, and being able to do both that and computing, for free, with seemingly no restrictions at all on bandwidth and use, with an interface as smooth and inviting as this, is pretty dang cool.

And the name! Genius.

I'm not sure for what yet, but I think I might be using this more in the future... the .com Puter.

I've been getting fearful of Windows updates lately, cause recently they've been failing all the time. Both at home and at work. Both with Windows 10 and 11. Both on my laptop and stationary... not all updates, but some particularly annoying and persistent ones on pretty much all devices.

The issue at work was particularly troublesome, since it was a time-consuming update, and it kept failing halfway through, and it was at work! Each time it failed it spent even more time than it'd spent on the update subsequently restoring the earlier configuration too.

For a few weeks at least every time I'd get to the office and reboot the computer the update would kick in, and it'd chug away, and fail, and revert, and when I left the office and shut down the computer it'd try installing it again, so the next time I get in...

It just kept happening!

I tried troubleshooting. I cleared out temporary files, I restarted the update service, went through settings and CMD directives that might potentially fix things, but no dice. Eventually I just disabled updates for a certain period of time, and either I've yet to turn them back on again or this issue might've actually resolved itself with a latter one...

On my laptop I had to increase the HDD partition size for boot-related files for one particular update to finally go through.

My home computer's been upgraded to Windows 11 for a while, and so far it's been pretty buggy.

I don't recall the update number, but there was a notorious one that just wouldn't go through no matter what - I found out when I Googled the issue, and saw that at least I wasn't alone with it.

Today though? Windows just installed an update for me, so I rebooted, and suddenly all is good! It went fast too...

This is almost... unreal.

It works again.

Gotta keep 'em alive. :) Always fun to stumble upon these.

Some site-related updates since last y'all: I've updated the PHP version on CDB! Finally. From 7.4 to the latest and greatest.

I had some script-related issues with the upgrade, as I knew I would have, but sorted 'em out quicker than I thought I would. I tried an update years ago and that time things did not work so well, but something must've changed since then. Plugin authors must've done some work on making their plugins compatible, otherwise the scenario's the same...

There was one particularly weird issue with corrupted dates in the library, which I by the way ought probably integrate with the main site someday. All those posts could be in categories and subcategories here instead, and I'd need one less copy of WP to keep safe and up-to-date.

Anyway two post dates were just missing, and causing errors, of which the source was difficult to trace. Finally I figured it out, sorted posts by date to find anomalies, found two of them, updated the dates and all was good! Not sure what changes were made between PHP versions to make this an issue only after the upgrade, I wouldn't have found out without.

And why did those dates corrupt in the first place? Did two posts just never have dates - how would that happen? You can't post a post without.

I had to remove some outdated plugins and functions as well, though nothing you'll notice. Updated a few theme files too...

It's possible additional errors from less commonly used scripts that still rely on deprecated functionality will find their way into the error logs at a later time, but if I haven't had any errors yet they can't be that big an issue. It seems I'm pretty capable of fixing 'em myself if such things do occur, which is cool. Didn't figure I'd be one this proficient in this kind of thing.

Confidence boost +0.4 countermeasures.

On the main site the upgrade was simpler. I had just one function that needed adjusting, and suddenly previously incompatible plugins and dependencies all work again! All updates went well. Security's hopefully tip top again, and as a bonus the site should load faster - performance seems to increase with every new version of PHP too, though I'm not sure I'm actually noticing any difference on the site in that regard...

It's possible the newer versions of WP have been getting a bit more bloated too, and so other long overdue updates cancel out the potential benefits of all the more optimized PHP performance.

It's been a long time since I updated the core at this point. Would've been interesting to compare hardware use before/after.

I'm working on a better cache though, whenever time comes to implement that you should notice a more notable difference.

Right now I basically have no cache. I fear the wrong things get cached. Admin type stuff. But the more I learn the easier it gets to get a grasp on what's what and what's not there.

Aside from PHP I do still have some ongoing jQuery issues. I know the culprit, a stat-related script I use and will need to replace eventually.

For now I simply changed plugins for jQuery migration help in WP, hid the automatic notices on incompatibilities in both front and back-end, and until a future time at which I delve into other plugin alternatives, and remodel the current stats page, this is how it'll have to be...

Maybe I can edit the jQuery code in the plugin itself. It's possible it works just as well with a newer version. Time will tell. Clocks and all.

Otherwise, life-wise? I'm not wise yet but...

I was lifting weights in my room the other day, when suddenly I saw blue lights in the distance. Fetched a pair on binoculars and got to witness some kind of accident first-hand from my window! They had closed down the road a few kilometers off, with five police cars, two firetrucks and at least one ambulance on the scene.

There was a big rig parked on one side of the road, and maintenance vehicles on the other, and a long line of traffic waiting to be let through... and a bunch of people in reflective vests doing a lot of talking.

Nothing happened. They stood there. They talked. The blue lights flashed, the traffic stood still, leaves rustled in the wind... and that was all.

My impatience grew, I resumed computer dues, and forgot to check back and follow the process - next time I looked they were all gone.

We took a walk past the site that night and saw nothing at all. Not a trace. Not a wreck. No broken glass or twisted metal or blood stains on the field or anything. Wonder what that was all about...

Occasionally you do see an emergency vehicle or two speed by in a blue haze from our house - from the upper floor the view around us is pretty much unobstructed, with green fields and lower-level housing around us, but this was definitely the biggest thing I've witnessed thus far.

And it's still a mystery as to what it was! Gosh.

Hey have you ever heard of cow magnets? Courtesy of Tom Scott's newsletter.

This last meal video with Steve-O was surprisingly wholesome too, and enlightening. Worth a watch. Like the Leonardo Da Vinci thing, and happiness, and life and all... dude.

Last week we had some rain and glum weather early on, but the sun is fierce now. Spring in full. Summer soon. This my fuel. I go boom.

I'll be finally/hopefully/very probably taking this year's first flight up to the farm next Tuesday, so maybe no recap then... maybe after.

That's all for this Tuesday y'all. Have a ball.

/withdrawal