Toby's Log page 2

Last Thursday, I got about 4.5 inches of rain at my house (Akron). A good ground soaking. I got a bit of wet carpet in my basement, but no damage. I hear there was bad flooding in the valley.

Hasn’t rained since, so I’ve still had to water my garden, but not as much.


Site partially static

I am pleased to say that most of the non-blog parts of my site are now served from static files. I have been working toward making a static version of my site for a while. I have created a PHP static web task that can crawl a site and turn the responses into an Apache friendly directory structure. Those pages now can be served extra fast, without going through PHP, and could be served on a free static host if I wanted. To go static, I not only had to write the code to build the static files, but also had to modify my site code to have the desired output when called from that context and modify my Apache configuration to respond correctly and add some headers that were being added by PHP before.

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Compact about:profiles in Firefox

Firefox allows us to create multiple browser profiles to separate our activities, such as work, personal, finance, etc. It has an about:profiles page to manage and launch these. The page has not gotten much UX love and does not make very good use of space. On load, I can’t see the full second profile on my laptop (Macbook) screen. After living with this a long time, I decided to use userContent.css to customize the appearance so everything fits on one screen and I can quickly and easily find the two things I need most of the time: Each profile’s name, and the button to launch it with.

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Readable query output in MySQL CLI

I tend to prefer a GUI like Sequel Pro for looking at database data, but since Sequel Pro doesn’t support MySQL 8+ and I haven’t settled on an alternative, I found myself needing to use the CLI. It also can just be faster to use for new or rarely accessed servers or whatever, and is nice and lightweight. However, it wraps query output by default, and with many or wide columns, it can become very hard to read and figure out which data is in which column. Recently, I went looking for something better, and found a StackOverflow question with a couple ways: outputting vertically, and using a pager with a nowrap option set.

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