Month: April 2025

I host my website on asmallorange.com and recently, I noticed that Brave and Chrome would no longer load the website without TLS, and I didn’t have a certificate — it was raw HTTP only. I looked in the cPanel, and the hosting provider wanted too much money to give it a TLS certificate. A web search turned up “CertSage ACME client”, and within 10 minutes, I had it set up and now my site has a proper TLS certificate from Let’s Encrypt. Thank you to everyone who made this possible, and I especially appreciate the vision of Let’s Encrypt.

We have lived in our house for 17 years, and have replaced three dishwashers — a disappointment because in my mind, even a cheap dishwasher should last 20 years. The first was quite old, inexpensive, and still functional, but was loud and cleaned adequately only when we pre-rinsed all food bits.  After two years, we replaced it with a different brand, a higher-end model with a steel tub — a KitchenAid. It cleaned dishes better — until it didn’t. The plastic roller axles on the lower tray broke, and I replaced them with steel bolts and nuts. The impeller drive motor broke, and I replaced it. The upper tray had plastic that broke, and I repaired and replaced it over four years. My young children sometimes got the twist ties from bread bags in the dishwasher, and I’d eventually find them in the disposal of the dishwasher, and would pull them out, along with gunk.

At some point, the control board fried, I contacted KitchenAid, and they said they’d sell me a new high-end model at a discount price. So I went with that. It wasn’t as much of a discount as I had hoped, and initially, it worked well.

However, over time, it had somewhat similar issues to the previous dishwasher — nylon parts were engineered cheaply, or engineered to fail over time. I replaced things as they broke, and when its ability to clean went downhill, I decided I’d had enough — I would “fire” the previous team of engineers and “fire” the entire process and culture that created the less-than-stellar machine, and “hire” a new team of engineers, with a different process — so we bought a Bosch.

The Bosch is different. No disposal. No heating element. No cheap plastic rollers. It has cleaned well, and has been a joy to use for over two years. It continues to clean well.

I don’t think the engineers from the previous company were inept. They had a different environment and a different set of constraints to work under — an environment that did not serve me, the customer, well. So I found one that had a mileu, culture, insights, and vision that have served our family better.

My wife has been using Printmaster for over 25 years, and for the past several years, she’s been using version 18.1. When it stopped working recently, she enlisted my help. It turns out the desktop shortcut not longer functioned — it gave an odd install error. When I created a link to the executable, and pinned that to her toolbar, it worked — it functions again.