WordPress Goodbye on the Horizon

I’ve finally had a notification from WordPress that my plan is coming up for expiry.

I won’t be renewing it.

If you still want to view my posts after I kill the blog domain, it’ll be at https://blenderkitsune.wordpress.com (this currently redirects to https://blenderfox.com as the domain and hosting is still active)

WordPress, Automattic and AI

It has come to my attention that Automattic is going to be selling of the data of its users for training AI.

This is unacceptable and I’m sure violates at least some data protection rules.

While I can’t stop them using my past data, since they already have it and likely already HAVE trained their models on it, I can stop them using more of my WordPress data…. by not giving them any more of my data.

As such, when my WordPress plan here expires, I will not be renewing it. When the domain comes up for renewal, I’ll transfer it off WordPress entirely.

As for my blog? At the moment I’m looking at other options, including Medium, Blogger, and Ghost, and also self-hosted options.

Domain Transfer

My WordPress domain is coming up for renewal soon. I might migrate the domain off WordPress since I’m finding it very restrictive being unable to manage my DNS entries via the WordPress UI. This may cause the blog to be unavailable for a while, but I’ll drop a note here before I start.

Fedora 39

I decided to try upgrading my Fedora to Fedora 39 (from 38)

I ran into a few issues already.

  1. I used the option from https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/upgrading-fedora-offline/#sect-performing-system-upgrade to download and upgrade the system using the “on boot” update. This then caused the initrd issue I’ve encountered before (https://blenderfox.com/2023/05/02/fedora-5/), I fixed that by booting up the previous version, then finding I couldn’t log in unless I picked “Gnome on XOrg”.
  2. The breakage of Wayland login seemed to be related to Problems with wayland after updating to fedora 39 – Fedora Discussion. And interestingly was fixed in the same way: removing ~/.config/dconf/user, logging out and then back in via Wayland. It completely reset my Gnome state, so all my custom docked shortcuts were gone and it offered to run me through the Gnome tutorial again
  3. Running my ansible playbook to configure my machine again, seemed to run for the most part, but failed at installing a pip module — but that looks like a module build failure, not the playbook.

And now I discovered that there’s no F39 of VirtualBox yet, so I guess I’m rolling back for now….

Car Accident

I finally got some good news about my car accident from 2020 (https://wordpress.com/post/blenderfox.com/7610)

After just over 3.5 years, the other side’s insurance (Aviva) finally settled and the costs have been recovered. And I expect it was quite a lot of cost too. As mentioned in https://wordpress.com/post/blenderfox.com/8108:

Total costs the other side will have to foot:
Value of my car (written off): £3000
Value of the car next to me (written off): £2500
Value of the car that both our cars got shunted into (written off): £1500
Repair of the damaged car (sole survivor): £1500
Hire car (45 days @ £75 per day): £3375

Total Costs: £11875

And this is not including the other side’s own car, which was likely also written off.

I’m just glad it’s over now

WP: What are your favorite websites?

Daily writing prompt
What are your favorite websites?

Mastodon

StackOverflow

Google Cloud Console

Yes, a lot of technical stuff there

Writing Prompt: Is there an age or year of your life you would re-live?

Daily writing prompt
Is there an age or year of your life you would re-live?

18th. When I could start drinking. Never got totally sloshed, but being able to drink made me feel like an adult (naive, I know)

Covid

So last week, my boss and I had a one-to-one review going over things that had happened since the last review. Generally OK, but he was definitely not sounding right.

Turned out that he had picked up covid, and since I was both sitting next to him and had a face-to-face meeting with him, I decided to test myself, but gave it a day before doing so to make sure if I did have symptoms they would have enough time to manifest properly.

I was clear and tested negative.

However my boss was bedridden for about two days before he started answering some of his slack messages.

Now, over the weekend, his bad luck got even worse, and we found out his dad passed away. So not only is he recovering from Covid, he now has to deal with the end-of-life stuff for his dad.

There’s an expression in Chinese which literally translates to “misfortune doesn’t come alone”

Wishing him a speedy recovery and I’m sorry for his loss.