Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Solution for unmet dependencies or broken packages while installing Wine32 on Ubuntu Eoan 19.10

    I’ve faced this problem several times, where it is not possible to install 32 bit Wine on Ubuntu (and possibly Debian). In each case, the problem has been packages installed from Ondrej Sury’s repository (for installing php7 in my case). It may be a different repository in your case, but the reason could be the […]

  • Why I adopted Mastodon

    There is this strange phenomenon in India, where you are now expected to justify using a new social network and discontinuing with an older one. Many Twitter users, unhappy with Twitter, have chosen to create accounts on Mastodon instances. The discontentment with Twitter is hardly a recent thing. The network has been a hotspot for […]

  • Does WordPress v5 aspire to be a static site? Gutenberg fail.

    I have been using WordPress for over a decade now, almost exclusively. I’ve had trouble, broken plugins, compatibility issues, white screens of death, and worse. Heck, I remember a time when one of the first things to try when inexplicable problems happened was to reinstall the core. Using FTP. But these were problems. Something people […]

  • Transposh translation filter and Yoast sitemaps compatibility

    Transposh translation filter and Yoast sitemaps compatibility

    Transposh Translation Filter is a seldom updated, but very useful plugin for running multilanguage sites on WordPress. It is free, it is very intuitive to use and so far, does not appear to slow the site down too much. You can find the plugin here. Due to some differences with WordPress, the version on WordPress […]

  • Quick fix for curl: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcurl.so.4: undefined symbol

    So you’re trying to install something or compile something or you have curl installed, but it won’t work, because…. # curl -V curl: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcurl.so.4: undefined symbol: nghttp2_http2_strerror Or it may be some other package doing this. If you land up on this obscure blog searching, chances are you already have been pulling […]

  • Google AMP and four drawbacks

    Godfather google has foisted yet another of its whims on us. As always, it is for our own good only. Because we are too stupid to design sites that look good in mobiles that load faster, Google has come to our rescue because everyone wants a faster web, right? In theory there is nothing wrong […]

  • Google’s prank on Gmail users that wasn’t a prank, but juvenile nuisance at best

    Google’s prank on Gmail users that wasn’t a prank, but juvenile nuisance at best

    Google decided to prank Gmail users this year by offering a button that would attach a “mic drop” gif to the email and move the conversation to the archives. Going by the general understanding that the prank is on me, and looking forward to seeing what Google have come up with, I clicked the button. […]

  • Nginx with http/2 and usability problems

    Nginx with http/2 and usability problems

    So Nginx released the mainline version 1.9.5 and then 1.9.6 with an experimental http/2 module. For those using spdy, the upgrade in itself should be simple, by simply replacing “spdy” with “http2” in the listen directive in the server configuration. The server will not start till this change is made. Sadly, what should have been […]

  • your ip 127.0.0.1 has been flagged for security reasons – Jetpack

    So I was troubleshooting the configuration on my server and removed all non-essential code. This meant that the proxy was not forwarding the IP address of visitors to the backend. Imagine my surprise to try to login to post to the blog when I found access to admin blocked with “your ip 127.0.0.1 has been […]

  • How to fix mixed content warning if page loads insecure content in spite of #WordPressHTTPS? #W3TC

    So I had been confounded. I used to have a sweet green securely loaded blog for ages and I didn’t know what I had changed to make it start throwing up mixed content warnings. I didn’t recall changing ANYTHING on the blog at all. Yet, when pages were accessed over https, they loaded assets over […]

Got any book recommendations?