constants and variables

I learned–perhaps finally understood–how apache and let's encrypt work. I had a long-standing issue with certificate renewals and I hope that the auto-renewals will work now that I have solved how apache works on my server.

Turns out that when you hack shit together, it tends to be… hacky. I hope that my knowledge will continue to grow and the lessons (re)learned today will be easily recalled if I find myself with a broken install for my various websites on my server here.

I have links to share and I need to make time to share them with you, whoever you are. I hope that they are at the very least insightful.

Everyone who's worked in support can relate to the headline alone on this article. I've also seen this a lot on the other side of support, with the service provider blaming the hardware and the hardware support blaming the service provider. And if it's the same organization, it's the same thing, only with different departments.

There's a meteor shower tonight and although this article is a bit old, it's always going to be relevant. Light pollution is a big detriment to nature and ourselves. I love electric lights, do they all need to be on all the time though?

I've had conversations before about liking the art and disliking the artist and most of the time I am quite capable of separating the two. This article specifically relates to the author of “Master and Commander”. I wonder if every famous person is (not so) secretly a terrible person and if this is a by-product of our obsession with fame.

And finally this post from the Oatmeal is epic. If you read nothing else, read this last one.

This is a quick post to let you know that I'm still here. I have a lot of links to share and I need to share them to get them out of my backlog. Expect a bit of a dump in the coming days.

In the article we learn that plants can sense the vibrations of falling rain and awaken to germinate.

This is awesome. The experiment placed several yields of rice seeds in 3cm of water and exposed some of the yields to simulated rain. With measuring equipment they discovered that the vibrations caused by the falling water could be detectable by human ears as the sound of rain.

I'm constantly amazed by nature and am working to incorporate this finding into my seedling station to see if I can get better yield with some sort of automated watering system that mimics rainfall.

Some people in a city were tired of the pot holes not being filled by the city administration. Every city has them, and every city administration seems to delay in repairing them if ever.

I have the thought that if they built the roads better the first time, pot holes would not be an issue. Though that's likely to put the road crew out of work after a few years and that's a sticky proposition.

Back to the story, they decided to paint the pot holes with spray paint and other people took notice. Social Media posts were made and more attention surrounded it. City Administration had to take action and repair the road. They took action because they could. They wanted to highlight that even if you're feeling small and insignificant you can do something to make a real difference in the world. Read the article, you'll find a nice surprise.