Newsletter Leaf Journal CLXXXVI 〜 But NLJ M
Our [newsletter] week began with half a day of downtime (followed by a separate 2-3 hours of downtime and concluded with the publication of the 999th and 1,000th regular New Leaf Journal articles. In addition to covering that, you will also find 22 links from around the web and links from our ever-growing archive.
Welcome to the 186th edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of the perennially virid online writing magazine, The New Leaf Journal. This newsletter comes to you as always from the editor of The New Leaf Journal, Nicholas A. Ferrell. We had an interesting week with some downs, including a 14-15 hour down, and ups -- namely our 999th and 1000th full articles. The good news is that unlike the last few weeks, I actually have things to write about in this newsletter. Without further ado...
Leaves from the week that was
I published four new articles since mailing Newsletter 185. I published the first of the four articles twice. Do I get double credit?
- Lawn Chairs Are Bigger in Texas (This photo post was so big that I published it two times instead of one)
- Breaking Rules in GBC Pokémon TGC Tutorial (This would have been a great entry in my "ask not why" around the web category had I found it "around the web" instead of publishing it to my own website)
- 999: The Dialogue (Celebrating 999 articles at The New Leaf Journal with Justin and Justina)
- Turning My Pill Bug Video Clip Into GIF (But let no one say I used up our best content before hitting article 1,000)
I also published a few posts at The Emu Café Social, which, like The New Leaf Journal, encountered some technical turbulence this week.
- Telling Southwest I’m Back (I told them twice)
- Koko Analytics and Relevanssi (On a neat WordPress thing that I could do but do not have enough of a use-case for)
- Microsoft and Valve (I speciously covered the ill-founded rumors that Microsoft was about to make a serious bid to acquire Steam)
Now for our next section.
Leaves from the week that was
Let's see what was happening around the web...
Checking in on the behemoth Federal agency entrusted with airport security in the wake of 9/11
U.S. gave Cuban delegation inside look at security at Miami's airport
Stephen Dinan for The Washington Times. May 21, 2024.
"'The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) routinely works with all countries with direct flights to the United States. TSA hosts government officials and members of the aviation community at U.S. airports to foster a strong global aviation security posture,' the agency said in a statement."
TSA apologizes for giving Cubans security tour of Miami airport
Stephen Dinan for The Washington Times. May 23, 2024.
"'TSA apologized that this visit was not coordinated and communicated ahead of time with airport and county officials,' the agency said, promising to do better at coordinating future delegation visits."
The classics
Plato’s final hours recounted in scroll found in Vesuvius ash
Lorenzo Tondo for The Guardian. April 29, 2024.
Plato would have just written about Socrates.
Etruscan tomb hidden by vegetation revealed
The History Blog. March 13, 2024.
So that's where it was...
Political Corruption in Athens and Rome
Lisa Gershon for JSTOR Daily. May 24, 2024.
Thank goodness the politicians left corruption out of our great Greco-Roman inheritance.
Ask not why...
Super Mario 64's "Unopenable" Door Finally Opened After 28 Years
Damien McFerran for Time Extension. May 13, 2024.
I remember the door but was never too worried about opening it.
Put a Little Pigeon in Your Next Clock Project
Dan Maloney for Hackaday. May 17, 2024.
Proof that actual utility is overrated.
Do Hi-Chew-flavor Hi-Chews have a reason to exist?【Taste test】
Casey Baseel for SoraNews24. April 28, 2024.
I would be inclined to stick with the flavored ones.
My unique foreign policy analysis in two separate-but-connected comments
Why Azerbaijan's Flag Is Flying Amid New Caledonia Unrest
Amos Chapple for RadioFreeEurope. May 21, 2024.
Trollzerbaijan...
Azerbaijan: Baku denying French accusations of meddling in New Caledonia
Eurasianet. May 22, 2024.
...just got Bak[to]u.
Policing
Brooklyn cop killed in action 100 years ago receives headstone for first time
Dean Moses for AMNY. May 21, 2024.
An all-around nice story that is well-worth your while.
Stalking the shadows: Go with NYPD Transit cops as they explore dangerous subway tunnels in search of graffiti vandals
Dean Moses for AMNY. April 10, 2024.
Secret motivation: They are protecting us from the sob stories that ensue every time one of the idiots suffers the unfortunate consequences that may follow from playing on the train tracks.
I have questions
NYC’s anti-Kremlin Russians stood in 4-hour line to vote against Putin – despite believing election was rigged
Alyona Uvarova for the New York Post. March 20, 2024.
"Alexandra planned to write Navalny’s name to pay tribute to the opposition leader, but fearing the consulate’s cameras and landing in trouble upon her return to Russia, the young woman cast her vote for Vladislav Davankov, a candidate many in opposition picked as the least evil." (If her name is actually Alexandra and she is actually a student at NYU...)
Japanese developers avoid black loading screens for a genius reason
Amber V for Automation West. May 21, 2024.
Am I a genius because I guessed the reason before reading?
Big surprises
NJ cops wrangle runaway 200-pound pig named Pumba
Jorge Fitz-Gibbon for the New York Post. May 6, 2024.
I was not surprised to see that the pig has tusks.
Despite international hires, TikTok is Chinese at its core
Caiwei Chen and Viola Zhou for Rest of World. May 7, 2024.
The scales have fallen from my eyes.
What the peck?! Wild turkey spotted strutting around Manhattan after epic journey
Natalie O'Neill for the New York Post. May 8, 2024.
Small wonder it did not choose November for its New York City vacation.
Spend money to make money
Japan’s 1980s Property Boom
Daniel Dematos for The Tontine Coffee-House. September 19, 2022.
"In 1988, the entire land value of Japan supposedly exceeded that of the United States four times over. The land value of Chiyoda alone exceeded that of all of Canada. The grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo were estimated to be worth more than the entire real estate value of the state of California."
Tamagotchi caused Bandai to lose 6 billion yen, despite being a hit toy of the 90s
Verity Townsend for Automation West. May 23, 2024.
Making Tomagotchis could be like printing money so long as you do not make more Tomagotchis than your money printer allows.
Microsoft is a well-oiled machine
DuckDuckGo was down
Hacker News.
There would have been less confusion had everyone read my articles about DuckDuckGo's heavy Bing dependence.
Daily News Stuff 21 May 2024
Pixy Misa at Ambient Irony. May 21, 2024.
Some good and humorous commentary on Microsoft's new "recall" feature.
Somewhat on-point bonus
Hello there Mr. Wheel bug.
Ray at Along The Ray. May 20, 2024.
(Waves)
The Old Leaf Journal
Let's dig into our archives...
The Last Stand of Constantine XI
N.A. Ferrell. May 30, 2020.
The 571st anniversary of his heroic last stand falls on Wednesday and...
Constantine and the Last Vespers at Hagia Sophia
N.A. Ferrell. July 14, 2020.
Shortly before Constantine XI's final last stand, he offered his final prayers at the Hagia Sophia.
Remembering Second Lieutenant Carleton Burr for Memorial Day
N.A. Ferrell. May 25, 2020.
Remembering a humble U.S. Marine for Memorial Day.
An 1895 Poem on Memorial Day and Piece by Theodore Roosevelt
N.A. Ferrell. May 29, 2021.
The two points in the headline are not directly related, but they go well together.
Flowers for Brave Soldiers – Memorial Poem
N.A. Ferrell. May 29, 2023.
Another poem to mark Memorial Day.
New Leaf Milestone: 500 Articles
N.A. Ferrell. February 10, 2022.
I published our 500th article (this commemoration was actually article 501) shortly after moving The New Leaf Journal from Bluehost to a Hetzner VPS server. Perhaps it was fated to be that article 1,000 would come shortly after moving from one Hetzner VPS server to another.
Most-turned leaves of the newsletter week
I list our most-read articles from the previous newsletter week (Friday to Saturday) in each edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal. These statistics come courtesy of Koko Analytics, our local, privacy friendly page-hit counting solution (see my review). Below, you will find the most-visited articles of Newsletter Week 21 (May 18-24) along with stats for 2024 and going back to the first week of 2021.
Or so I would usually say...
We have a bit of a gap this week. The gap covers something in the neighborhood of 5:00 P.M. on Saturday through 8:00 A.M. on Monday. You may be wondering how this could be since I noted the site was only down for about 13 hours (plus another two later in the week). Well we can save that discussion for the next section. Just note the gap is there and this week's statistics may have some loyal ranking fans demanding asterisks.
#1. The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei (N.A.F. March 14, 2021)
2024: 5 appearances and 4 top placements.
History: 137 appearances and 73 top placements.
#2. An In-Depth Look at Norton Safe Search (N.A.F. October 18, 2022)
2024: 11 appearances and 2 top placements.
History: 23 appearances and 7 top placements.
#3. Recommended F-Droid FOSS Apps For Android-Based Devices (2021) (N.A.F. November 28, 2021)
2024: 15 appearances and 1 top placement.
History: 72 appearances and 9 top placements.
#4. Planning and Angel Next Door Season 2 (N.A.F. November 5, 2023)
2024 & History: 3 appearances.
#5. Against Half-Way Yogurt Thievery (N.A.F. May 2, 2020)
2024 & History: NEW
Analysis
I was hoping that if we must have an incomplete weekly ranking, that we would at least see something amusing come out of it.
Mission accomplished.
We see nothing fun in the top four. The top four consist of usual suspects from recent weeks -- and our top two articles have combined to lead the ranking for the last five weeks.
But what happened in fifth. There we see the first New Leaf Journal article having my byline -- a pre-NLJ story about having accidentally purchased a half-empty Chohani Flips yogurt, making its top-five debut more than four years after going online.
All of its views (literally all of them) came on Thursday and Friday. I have reason to believe it was shared by an online Russian magazine but, being that my ability to lead Russian is lacking, that is just my guess from our referrals. To be sure, I am almost certain it would not be in the top five without the missing day and a half from our ranking, but it persevered under the same rules as every other article and makes what is -- caveats granted -- one of our more improbable top-five appearances.
We also have another fun curiosity thanks to the debut of my Chobani Flips anecdote. This week's ranking features representatives from all four years of The New Leaf Journal, with 2021 being featured in 1st and 3rd place, 2022 in 2nd, 2023 in 4th, and 2020 in 5th. We do not have many 2020 articles that meaningfully compete for top five spots these days, so this may be the only time we have a full year house in a 2024 week.
News leaf journal
Where to begin?
Let's try to give the reader's digest version...
- Shortly before 5:00 P.M. on Sunday, May 19, 2024, I destroyed the VPS server which hosted my two WordPress projects. It ran into an issue while updating that I could not quickly resolved and I had wanted to downgrade my VPS in any event because I was paying for more resources than I needed.
- Because I initially planned as a stopgap to move both sites to Pikapods (which I use for a different project), I pointed thenewleafjournal.com to use Porkbun's name servers instead of Hetzner's (this is also an upgrade generally because Porkbun has a much better DNS panel).
- Porkbun could not pick up the domain after the name server change so, being somewhat in a hurry, I set up a new (smaller) VPS on Hetzner and reinstalled Cloudron.
- I was able to use the Porkbun API to give Cloudron access to thenewleafjournal.com but when I tried to set up a new WordPress install using the domain, the DNS would not resolve.
- I went to bed at about 1:30 A.M. because I was tired and had work to do the next day.
- I woke up at about 6:30 A.M. and had a eureka moment. I had reason to believe some DNS resolvers could find thenewleafjournal.com because I had confirmed I could set it up for email after moving to Porkbun. I ran a DNS resolver check and found every major provider except Quad9 was able to find it. Now guess what my default DNS resolver is when I am not using Mullvad VPN, which I had not been the previous evening.
- I switched to Cloudflare to set up The New Leaf Journal (Porkbun uses Cloudflare for its name servers) and was able to re-configure the site, albeit we had a brief delay when my UpdraftPlus import was failing due to using too much memory (resolved by increasing the MySQL memory limit in Cloudron).
- I would say we lived happily ever after but we had a brief 2-3 hour crash on Tuesday when Cloudron ran out of space with backups and could not update The New Leaf Journal. Fortunately, I cleaned out the offending backups, moved all Cloudron backups off-site, and mounted extra storage as a precautionary measure for the future.
Whew. It was a rough week -- not least because I also had real work to do (e.g., reading a 500 page hearing transcript shortly after reviving The New Leaf Journal), but all is well that ends well. I am now saving about $3-$4 per month for the same performance and I much prefer managing our domains on Porkbun instead of Hetzner. I do not think we have any other pressing issues at the moment but I am keeping better backups now, and I took notes on how to rescue the server if we run into similar issues in the future.
Speaking of backups...
I still use UpdraftPlus to backup both of my WordPress sites. It is precisely because I can easily restore sites from UpdraftPlus backups that I was not (and am still not) too concerned with server backups. I had set UpdraftPlus to back up once per day and in The New Leaf Journal's case, it backed up somewhere around 5:00 P.M. EST. Alas, I blew up the server right before its Sunday backup, so our Koko Analytics statistics for Saturday evening and all of Sunday disappeared. This is also the reason why I noted at the top I published two posts (one NLJ and one ECS) two times. I had published both on Sunday before the troubles, so I had to re-publish them on Monday after the sites were revived in their new home.
These mishaps aside -- I did make a few positive changes. I removed a few heavier plugins from the backend. One of these -- our related posts plugin -- makes a difference for you the reader. I had been using a plugin that automatically added "related posts" to the end of every article. It was somewhat hit and miss -- and I set some manual related posts in some cases to improve on its performance. It is a big plugin and I decided that for our purposes, we could do better. I replaced it with Manual Related Posts, which requires me to set all related posts by hand. As a result, almost none of our articles have related posts at the moment. But I will set them for all new articles and gradually add them to older articles over time.
Notable leaf journal
Victor V. Gurbo, who occasionally publishes New Leaf Journal articles, recently started making use of his Pixelfed account for posting photography. As of the publication of the instant newsletter, he published three very aesthetic photos from Hungary. If you cannot follow using an ActivityPub account on Pixelfed, Mastodon, or the like, I recommend keeping up with Victor's newest posts by using his account's ATOM feed. I explained how to use Pixelfed feeds in a 2021 article.
Taking leaf
Absent any further technical issues, I will work on continuing to publish a normal number of articles next week -- granting I do also have a decent amount of work related to my day job. There are a couple of time-sensitive pieces i need to get moving on, so I will focus on those.
If you enjoyed this newsletter, are not already a regular reader, and want to see what it looks like when I do not have to devote space to describing why our site was down for half a day, you can subscribe via email, add our newsletter's RSS feed to your favorite feed reader, or simply check in on our newsletter archive every week. See your options here. Better yet, make sure you are following The New Leaf Journal (without which this newsletter would not exist) and The Emu Café Social.
Our next newsletter lands on June 1. I hope everyone has a relaxing and contemplative Memorial Day in the interim.
Until the trees have leaved in May,
Cura ut valeas -- Nicholas A. Ferrell.