January 2024 – Words from fallingstuff

Fixing the Automattic Connection

Today’s post is going to be a relatively short one, something had broke on the site and the fix was quite simple. For the longest time I used a Jetpack plugin from Automattic to share to social medias for me as I stopped routinely checking Facebook and Twitter. One day back last year (around that June time frame) I realized that these posts were not getting made consistently. After doing some digging I realized why – Automattic had monetized the once free Jetpack social plugin, now the “free plan” only allowed for 30 shares a month.

Maybe I missed the announcement and am just ranting incoherently for no reason, but … I am not paying for a service that I was using for free that the new boss decided should be making more money… profiteering gluttons. Of course, the list of alternatives was very short and disappointing since almost all were geared toward letting visitors share posts to THEIR social media instead of automatically sharing posts to YOUR social medias. In the end I landed on Social Media Auto Publish from XYZScripts.

This plugin is giving me the same publishing options I had before and for free too, with the caveat that I needed to do a little “developer” work to connect to the various social services. What I needed to do was quite simple and documented (so I will not go into the details here), however the company that produces the plugin allows an option to let them do the setup work for me for a small fee. With that the site is back up and broadcasting out to the social platforms of the world.

Buyer Beware

Every now and then I pop onto eBay or into a thrift store and see what kind of things I can find – electronic usually. With all this talk of saving the environment not to mention that I am a believer in the fact that old electronics (computers especially) often times times still have life left in them when someone throws them out, and over the years I have gathered together a small pile of things. With this collection I have toyed around with the idea to start what I am thinking will shape up to be two new series. The first series will be a Thrifting series – that is finds at thrift stores, eBay, etc that are interesting things that can be reused or repurposed. The second series will be a series of repair blogs, because people like to donate and sell trash… Good looking trash, but trash.

Kicking off this dive into reuse and repurposing we have two tales of when sometimes eBay is a good and bad … First, a good listing, this Asus gaming laptop – up for sale because it “did not boot”. The picture that the seller was showing was that of a blue BIOS screen saying the laptop would just boot loop back to that screen. Knowing that a laptop setup to boot UEFI that did not have an OS installed would do just that, so I scooped it up. My hunch was 100% correct, the OS was missing or damaged. A quick reinstall of Windows and I had a working gaming laptop.

Working Windows AND it has 2 hard drives!

Now, sometimes eBay is not so good… Thinking I would get lucky twice, the listing said that the keyboard had water on it for an hour – just some water on the keyboard should be no big deal to repair. I went ahead and took the plunge…

The Lenovo laptop arrived looking fantastic and did not burst into flames when I plugged in the charger but it would not power up. So I opened the shell…

Well that corrosion in the middle of the main board tells the whole story. The “hour of water” had caused corrosion that ate through the main board damaged the battery connectors, various flexible connectors, and basically destroyed the board. The M.2 and hard drive had been removed so the seller would have likely known the board had sustained this much damage – and was not mentioned.

The point of these eBay stories is that not all listings are good and not all are bad. Obviously “Buyer Beware”, be sure to read the fine print and when the offer looks too good to believe, it probably is and you should not waste your money.

So .. about 2024

Well, something obviously happened last year .. but the specific details are a bit of a blur. I know what did happen was definitely NOT according to the plan from last year. Looking back, last year became a mess of shifting priorities (in both my personal and professional life) and tasks lost to not being written down. In short, I would be working on something, get distracted, and the ideas got lost. Finally, somewhere around June / July, when I took some time off work, content posting got more or less put on hold.

Now, being a new year, the work begins again starting with a few things last year that never got to post – those are being drafted now – and then I have a list of things I want to work on, so the year is looking strong so far. The goal again is 52 Musics, 52 Memerys, and 26 content posts. As an added challenge – an extra 20 Musics, 25 Memerys, and 13 content posts to catch up from last year. (Clarification – a content post is something requiring at least some research or work on my part – reactions to news topics or slinging pictures up do not count.)

So here’s to the New Year … may she be a damn sight better than the old.