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Random Thoughts

Free up Email Storage

June 2, 2021 by Webhead

Now that Google Photos is no longer free, Google storage will be eaten up pretty quickly if you’re still using them. One area you can free up some space is your email in gmail.

Search, Select All, Delete

To reduce space, first you would need to find the emails you want to remove. Searching is Google’s specialty so this is no problem. Google lists the search operators you can use on this page. But you can also use some of my hand dandy searches below.

Once you find the emails to delete, you can select all by checking the select all checkbox in the upper left corner, then you can click on “Select all conversations that match this search”.

Now that you have all the email you want to delete selected, click on the Trash icon to delete. You’ll have 30 days to change your mind. After that it will be deleted forever. Of course you can also go into your trash and Delete Forever right now.

Now onto some helpful hand dandy search queries:

Search for the big stuff.

Find all emails with attachments larger than 5mb, 10mb, or larger and older than so many years. A pretty conservative search would be to find attachments 15mb or larger older than 4 years old. To find more mail, reduce the size or the years.

size:15mb has:attachment older_than:4y 

Search for the un important stuff

No one reads all the promotions that reach your mailbox, so why keep them? If your gmail is automatically categorizing emails, you can find all your promotional emails older than so many years and remove them.

category:promotions older_than:2y

Search for that specific one

Sometimes deleting a category may be too much. You can also target emails from specific senders or unread emails.

from:([email protected]) older_than:2y is:unread 

Filed Under: Random Thoughts Tagged With: gmail, google

Macbook and the read only SD Card

May 19, 2015 by Webhead

Until recently I thought my SD cards from my camera were write protected by the camera formatting.  Apparently it’s just my macbook pro being flaky.  The macbook has some flaw where even when switching off the manual lock switch, SD cards are still readonly.  The solution is to set the switch in the middle between lock and unlocked.  You’ll need to try it a few times to get the position just right, but once you do the card is writable.
Sources:

http://www.jackenhack.com/sd-card-readonly-macbook-pro-card-reader-solved/

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2166984?start=0&tstart=0

Filed Under: Random Thoughts

Solar Service logging every couple seconds

November 20, 2014 by Webhead

After updating to OSX 10.10.1 my mid 2010 macbook became very slow.  Looking at my System Logs I found the following messages repeated over and over and still continuing:

11/20/14 8:10:53.608 AM Solar Service[518]: End of data
11/20/14 8:10:53.608 AM Solar Service[518]: Event = 2 device index = 2
11/20/14 8:10:53.626 AM Solar Service[518]: Input data callback for device 0x68cc0
11/20/14 8:10:53.626 AM Solar Service[518]: End of data
11/20/14 8:10:53.626 AM Solar Service[518]: Event = 2 device index = 2
11/20/14 8:10:53.627 AM Solar Service[518]: Input data callback for device 0x68cc0
11/20/14 8:10:53.627 AM Solar Service[518]: End of data

Logitech’s Solar Service app was printing a lot of messages.  Not sure if this was causing the slowness, but it definitely isn’t good.  There is no fix for this, just need to ignore the log messages.  Here is how to do it:

http://forums.logitech.com/t5/Keyboards-and-Keyboard-Mice/Solar-Service-writing-thousands-of-log-entries-on-Mac-OS-X-for/td-p/690182/page/2

Filed Under: Random Thoughts

WPEngine for WordPress Hosting Worth It?

January 9, 2014 by Webhead

This is not so much of a review, but more of how I came to a decision on WPEngine. 

At $29/ month for the Personal plan I would not have even looked at WPEngine a year ago.  Why pay that much for hosting when you can find $5/month hosting around every corner?  Updates?  I can do that.  Caching? Backups?  check and check.  What does WPEngine have to offer?

While in the proposal stage of acquiring a new client, this client got hacked.  Luckily to fix the hack WordPress just need to be upgraded.  But instead of redesigning the site, the top priority became finding a new host that offers better security.  This client was on a reputable host, so $5/month hosting like HostGator or GoDaddy would not satisfy the client’s peace of mind.

Finding WPEngine

My favorite WordPress focused company, WooThemes, had a recommended hosts page.  Among the hosts were Pressable (previously known as ZippyKid ) and WPEngine.  Pressable was the cheaper of the two offering SSL and CDN on their cheapest plan.  As ZippyKid they also touted having great security as a selling point.  However, as Pressable, they had no info whatsoever about their security.  Not even their “malware scanning”!  So wait, how can we justify to the client that Pressable is any better than their previous host?  Crap!  (I know no host is hack-proof, but we gotta have a reason for choosing a specific host).

Enter research into WPEngine.  The first thing I did on their website was search for “security” in their blog.  What surprised me was the amount of posts on their blog about security.  Do a search on security on their site and you’ll see what I mean.  Not only do they talk about recent security issues, but how the community is dealing with security issues and details on how their security system and processes are protecting their clients.  That in itself gave me peace of mind that these guys prioritize security.  The icing on the cake was reading “WordPress Hacked? We’ll fix it free!“.

Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side

I usually have buyers remorse especially when I could have gotten something cheaper and don’t really utilize all the features I have purchased.  But last year, before I tried WPEngine, I had a client that didn’t have a website yet, needed SSL and was OK with spending some money on quality hosting.  So I went with Pressable with this previous client (especially since the Personal plan at WPEngine doesn’t support SSL).  I have since migrated this client to WPEngine.  Below are some comparisons between Pressable and WPEngine (as of this posting).

Pressable vs WPEngine

  • Backups
    • WPEngine – At the click of a button, free.  Also automatically scheduled daily for  you.
    • Pressable – Inactive by default.  Need to back up to Amazon or Rackspace.  (in other words, not exactly free).
  • Domain settings
    • WPEngine – Doesn’t handle email or any of your domain settings
    • Pressable – If you want, you can direct your nameservers to Pressable and they can adjust your domain settings (like where to point your email) for you.
  • Git Support
    • WPEngine – Deploy your website using git ( i haven’t tried this yet)
    • Pressable – None.
  • Error Logs
    • WPEngine – View your php error logs from the User Portal
    • Pressable – None.
  • Stats
    • WPEngine – Visits and Bandwidth stats for you to monitor and download.
    • Pressable – None.
  • Speed
    • WPEngine – I have tested about a dozen different websites so far and all have a load time of less than 1 second from within the US.
    • Pressable – I have tested one website on here and the load time is above 2.5 seconds.

Both Pressable and WPEngine are great, but dollar for dollar WPEngine seems much more worth it.  If you have multiple clients, the Professional Plan makes it hands down worth it since you can install SSL and use a CDN for free.  Each install breaks down to $10/month.  You may be thinking you can do caching, and backups on your own, but what if something goes wrong with those plugins?  How many times have you actually restored a backup from that plugin?  How many times have you fixed a hack or prevented one?  How much is a peaceful mind worth?  WPEngine can handle all this for you.

Pre-pay for WP ENGINE HOSTING for 1 year and GET 2 MONTHS FREE!

Happily Ever After

As you know, I didn’t go to WPEngine because of the speed, but I was curious to see what differences it could make by simply moving a site over.  I was pleasantly surprised to see the site loaded almost 40% faster.  And believe me, it’s noticeable for this particular site.

To get a more accurate reading of the speed changes you should sign up for a free account at Pingdom and monitor your website for a week or so.  Then sign up to WPEngine (60 day free trial) and again try it at pingdom.  If you’re not happy with the results you can always back out of WPEngine.

Original Site

Moved to WPEngine
Moved to WPEngine

 

Update: More on Security

After using WPEngine for about 6 months I am fully satisfied with the security on WPEngine for WordPress websites.  WPEngine stays on top of plugin vulnerabilities and they scan your installation daily.   here are some examples:

  • TimThumb script:  If you install a theme or plugin with the TimThumb script (a popular PHP script used to resize images known for having some huge vulnerabilities in the past) WPEngine will detect what version it is, and if it’s not the newest version, they will automatically update it.
  • JetPack plugin:  Jetpack recently had a vulnerability in their email sharing feature.  WPEngine was on top of it notified their customers of it while disabling that feature for them.

Also, WPEngine hosting is secure enough to be PCI compliant “as long as no payment card data is stored, hosted, or otherwise processed by WP Engine…”.   See more at WPEngine and PCI Compliance

Update:  Speed

WPEngine now offers a tool to test the speed of your website.

 

Disclaimer:  I have become a WPEngine affiliate because I do believe in their product.  Links to WPEngine on this site are probably affiliate links.

Filed Under: Off the Shelf, Random Thoughts, Server Stuff Tagged With: hosting, optimize, wordpress, wpengine

Environment Setup

October 25, 2013 by Webhead

October 10, 2022

After 9 years, I thought I’d update this list of tools. Only a few passed the test of time:

  • Forklift – (paid) I forgot why I stopped using FileZilla. I think it was just becoming an eyesore.
  • Local WP – Easy setup, easy install, easy to manage WordPress sites.
  • SourceTree – to push/pull your code so it stays in synch with other environments you may have or other teammates.
  • Visual Studio Code – THE editor being used today. Extensions, open source, supported by a big company (Microsoft).  
  • Slack – Still the top chat program.  Crazy, I don’t remember the name “HipChat”. I just remember there was a chat program between AIM and Slack that I used.
  • ImageOptim – To optimize images, taking up less disk space and load faster.
  • Webpack – This is a bundler that has a very steep learning curve. But once set up, it’s not bad.

Virtual Box is still used occasionally, but tools like BrowserStack is enough and IE not being used (finally) helps too.

Dropbox is still worthy to use, but Google Drive is much easier to use. Although it’s not in the list because I don’t use it much.

October 25, 2013

This week I had to temporarily work on a new laptop so I had to set up my dev environment from scratch.  Of course, I wanted the same tools and apps I had on my permanent environment.  I find that these tools and apps stick with you for some time so below is a list of apps that I needed to install on my new development environment.

  • Dropbox – to easily share files between computers both locally and over the web.
  • FileZilla – to upload files to the servers
  • MAMP – to test your code locally before uploading to the live servers
    • See MAMP Optimizations to start MAMP on startup without the GUI.
    • Remember to set the <Directory> override to AllowOverride All if you want your WordPress or other sites to use .htaccess.
  • SourceTree – to push/pull your code so it stays in synch with other environments you may have or other teammates.
    • Set up your SSH keys using BitBucket’s tutorial.
  • Sublime Text 2  – to edit your files.
    • If you want to open files via the terminal, follow this updated tutorial.
  • WordPress – not so much a tool, but it is part of the testing environment.
  • Slack or HipChat -or whatever trending chat program.  to communicate to others
  • Virtual Box – To run those pesky versions of Internet Explorer.
    • Then head on to get free VMs from Microsoft so you can get all the lovely versions of IE.
  • ImageOptim – To optimize images, taking up less disk space and load faster.

Filed Under: Coding, Off the Shelf, Random Thoughts, Tools

Find large files on mac

July 9, 2012 by Webhead

Found a good article on how to find large files on the Mac OS X.  You can also save it as a smart folder so you can quickly see the largest files on your computer.

http://www.chriswrites.com/2012/02/10-tips-to-free-up-hard-drive-space-in-mac-os-x/

Filed Under: Random Thoughts Tagged With: mac os x

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