Other What's ruining your life right now?

Depending on the type of fly, you might have luck with a vinegar trap: get a glass, pour in some vinegar, add a bit of Fairy liquid. The flies are attracted to the vinegar 'cos it smells like rotting fruit (mostly 'cos, y'know, that's pretty much how you make vinegar), and the surfactants in the washing-up liquid reduce the surface tension so when they land they fall through and drown.

This same trick is why the phrase "you catch more flies with honey than vinegar" (as in: you're more likely to get what you want if you're sweet rather than sour) is actually bunkum. You'll catch way more with vinegar than honey!

 

Nginx. Converting a site over to HTTPS and for some reason one of the images doesn't work in HTTPS. Every other image we've tested even from the same directory in the file structure work. we copied the image to a new file with .bak.jpg and it works perfectly. Just this one files doesn't work.

 

I couldn't find it anywhere that would indicate that when using grep. Will have to have another look today.

 

If renaming the file works, why not just rename the file?

 

It's an award image used in articles. Changing every articles HTML would be impracticable to say the least.

 

<twitch>

Why would you need to change the HTML? Either change the award image in the CMS, which should change all the articles automatically if it's got anything about it, or just say "sod it" and throw a rewrite rule into the server config. Job's a good 'un.

 

Unfortunately it's for a different publication that doesn't have a nice CMS that allows us to easily do that. The rewrite rule was my first suggestion but it gave a too many redirects error.

 

Hmm - sounds like the rewrite rule wasn't right, 'cos it should only redirect once. I've done it before for hard-coded stuff I can't easily change, and it works a charm.

Sounds like a job for sed, that. Or a better CMS, but sed's probably quicker for a one-off change.

 

So I just looked this morning and the image is magically working with no changes made. We suspect something was going wrong with the cache.Very odd

 

Looks like my motherboard's dying. The on-board network went a while back, and I switched to a USB 3.0 Ethernet dongle. Now the two USB 3.0 ports on the rear have gone away after a reboot, which is super annoying given that pretty much everything was connected to one of 'em - keyboard and mouse included.

It's all working using the USB 2.0 ports, and - this being the really strange bit - the single USB 3.0 port at the front is working fine. Bah.

EDIT:
Right, fixed. Turns out that some of my problems may have been related to the AMD-Vi IOMMU, 'cos shoving "iommu=soft" in my modeline has dramatically reduced boot times, restored the on-board Ethernet, and even made the USB 3.0 ports work again. I can put off upgrading for another couple of years - huzzah!

EDIT EDIT:
Yeah, AMD-Vi support appears to be semi-shafted in the Linux kernel, presumably starting right around when I upgraded to 16.04 and noticed my Ethernet had died. No fix yet, beyond disabling AMD-Vi/booting with a software IOMMU. Poo-sticks.