I finally had to turn off the public number for my free Weather by Text service which I’ve been running for a few years. I was fine with the minimal cost running this on Twilio, but over the last couple of months someone has been abusing the number presumably with some automated script. The challenge with Twilio SMS is there is no way to block any abusive incoming text messages. Even though the pricing is pretty cheap ($ 0.0075 per message), it adds up quickly because you’re charged for both the incoming and outgoing messages. In the end, it’s not…
Here in California we’ve entered our third month of sheltering in place and working from home. One positive is less time spent commuting, but that also means it’s been harder to keep up with my podcast subscriptions. Combine that with the fact that there are so many good podcasts out there and I’ve had to shorten my subscription list a little bit (and be pickier about which episodes to listen to).
The first WordPress 5.4 release candidate was just published this week. The official WordPress Docker images are only published for release builds, so you can’t test any RC builds from there (for example on the Tags tab you won’t find 5.4-RC1 anywhere). However, it’s pretty straightforward to build the RC build yourself locally following these steps.
I recently launched a coming soon landing page for Engineering Tourist – a side project I’ve had in mind for a while. The goal is to highlight and discover engineering or technical tourist sites depending on your location. For example if you were in Tucson Arizona, you might discover the Pima Air & Space Museum which is really fantastic. Putting together this landing page was pretty simple (after all, it’s just a single static page), but involved learning and wiring up a bunch of services. Also, every service here is at the free or nearly-free level, so that keeps the…
As part of my ongoing effort to clean up all my old computer hardware, I finally organized all my video games for donation, and used a cheap barcode scanner to take inventory.