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Ole Hedeager, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Content Warning: suicide/self-harm This post was adapted from a mixture of an old blog post, and something I posted on my Wikipedia user page. According to my site views, nearly 150 unique visitors saw my (now removed) blog post the other day - normally I’d be pretty happy about that, but the post yesterday really wasn’t great. It’s not that it was badly written, but on reading it back today it just isn’t the type of post I want to making. Let me explain why… ...

I just upgraded the version of PHP on the server running this blog, and popped over to /wp-admin/site-health.php to check for any errors. There were a few, the main one which caught my eye being The REST API encountered an error. For the Google results, that error message in text is: The REST API request failed due to an error. Error: stream_socket_client(): SSL operation field with code 1. OpenSSL Error messages: error:14094410:SSL routines:ssl3_read_bytes:sslv3 alert handshake failure stream_socket_client(): Failed to enable crypto stream_socket_client(): unable to connect to ssl://words.samtarling.co.uk:443 (Unknown error) (http_request_failed) ...

Okay, I know we’re not upgrading Apache, but y’know what I mean - let’s upgrade a Debian web server using PHP 7.3 to PHP 7.4! I’ll also cover some pointers on if that web server is running WordPress. 0) Assumptions I’m assuming: The server runs Debian 9 (Stretch) or Debian 10 (Buster) with Apache version 2.4.38* (though it should work for other versions) Apache is using the PHP module, not PHP-FPM You have sudo and SSH access You’ve made backups and any sites you’re hosting can tolerate downtime 😉 * You can get this info by running /usr/sbin/apache2 -v ...

I’d recently been having some issues with my Google Pixel 3XL - I’ve had the phone a while, so it’s fairly common for some little issues to crop up nearing the end of a contract (just as the warranty expires of course..) This however was a bit of a shitty one. The bluetooth and WiFi would suddenly turn off (normally when I’m driving somewhere and relying on the bluetooth for Waze) and just would not turn back on. ...

Laragon is local WAMP development server (and a much better one than XAMMP..) - I use it for most of my development work. Recently I’ve moved a couple of my ongoing projects over to PHP 8, and was caught out slightly by some unexpected behaviour. Laragon makes it pretty easy to add a new PHP/Apache version, but it makes a slight mistake when generating the mod_php config. You need to change ...