PHP published a major security vulnerability yesterday. It’s a big enough security concern that basically all php everywhere needs to be updated. Naturally, I spent some time figuring out what could be updated.
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This year, I decided to participate in Suck at Something September. My chosen project was drawing a picture. Yes, I drew one picture. I don’t draw, I don’t even like handwriting things, but the presence of LLM-generated art makes me want to do it anyway.
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There’s a new “create a pass” feature in Apple Wallet for iOS 27, and I just used it to add library cards, with barcodes.
[Read More]I picked my daughter(Beatrix, age 7) up from her school play rehearsal and took her to the grocery store with me. I had parked next to the cart return area, and Beatrix was excited to help return the cart before getting into the car. After we got into our car, but before I’d started to drive away, a store employee came to collect the carts in the return area. Beatrix watched through the car window while this young man lined the carts up and stacked them together. 🛒
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Austen at Sea by Natalie Jenner is a historical fiction. It takes place decades after Jane Austen’s death, and centers on two sisters who are big fans of Jane Austen’s books. The book starts out in Boston with the news of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. The sisters eventually travel to England by sea. Louisa May Alcott appears! There is theatre, court drama, family mystery, and literary discussion. A theme of women’s suffrage and equal rights is present throughout.
[Read More]There have been tropical storms passing by Southern California, causing us to have unusual weather. It’s been humid, which almost never happens here. The temperature rose past 105℉(41℃) on Wednesday, and it did not cool down much at night. One of the great things about our region is that even when it’s hot during the day, it usually always cools down at night.
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A tropical storm passing by has given us rain today, in Southern California in September. Rain in September is unprecedented, and we won’t leave home again until it stops.
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Rolls and Rivalry by Kristy Boyce was a fun, fast read. A cute YA romance with childhood friends/rivals, and really fun supporting characters.
[Read More]Our school district started 2 weeks earlier than last year. It’s been about 99℉ / 37℃ all week. My elementary kids had to eat lunch inside, and school pickup traffic is at rainy day levels. My fourth grader kid literally cooked s’mores outside in a solar oven that he made today, so I guess the weather was good for that.
The Last King of Faerie, the first book in Cassandra Clare’s newest(final?) Shadowhunter series, The Wicked Powers, is expected to release November 3, 2026. Here’s the re-read I have planned to prepare for this new book. Will I make it? Time will tell! The new book is supposed to take place after The Dark Artifices and center the characters Kit, Ty, and Dru, with Ash being featured as well. I took that into account when choosing what I want to re-read.
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I just love Rainbow Rowell’s writing. Julia at the Drive-In by Rainbow Rowell is a short story from Amazon’s short story collection, The Edge of Everything. It’s the short tale of a girl named Julia who goes to the Drive-In movie theatre the weekend before school starts for her senior year of high school. It’s mainly a little slice of life story that focuses on lots of weird thoughts and worries from the mind of this young woman, with a vivid setting.
[Read More]Recently, I was entering the weather for a blog post. I just type my weather in manually when I want to include it. It was for a review of a book that took place in a region where they use Celsius, so I decided to include my current weather in Fahrenheit and Celsius. In the Apple Weather app, I tapped the option to change between Fahrenheit and Celsius. It was then that I noticed that ℉ and ℃ were not just a regular F and C with the degree° sign symbol, but their own unicode special character.
[Read More]My kids have already been in school for a week because the school board decided to start the year two weeks earlier than last year, just stealing two weeks of the summer break that we can never get back. They started school(2nd, 4th, and 9th grades) last Thursday. Yes, the first day of school was a Thursday. And then had a complete 5-day week this week. Longest week ever! I’m glad it’s Friday!
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My sister got tickets to a Death Cab for Cutie concert on August 2 at The Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, and invited me to go. The venue was an outdoor theater in Griffith Park.
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Today, while browsing through the Way Back Machine on Internet Archive, I stumbled upon an old website that I had made, RunWithTheBest.net (archive link). This was almost certainly my first “professional” website, and I believe I made it in the year 2000 when I was sixteen years old.
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The Name Game by Beth O’Leary was fantastic. It starts off like an easy-reading romance with flashbacks of deeper character backstories. There’s a cozy small island setting, and a bit of mystery surrounding the two people called Charlie Jones.
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