rants & raves

blogposts op blog.futtta.be met geklaag en gezaag of met ongegeneerde idolatrie (or; ranting an raving, to be taken with a pinch of salt)

CookieYes? No thanks!

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I just reviewed the performance of a customer’s WordPress site. Things got a lot worse he wrote and he assumed Autoptimize (he was a AOPro user) wasn’t working any more and asked me to guide him to fix the issue.

Instead it turns out he installed CookieYes, which adds tons of JS (part of which is render-blocking), taking 3.5s of main thread work and (fasten your seat-belts) which somehow seems to increase DOM size to over 60K elements in this case.

I knew cookie consent solutions can have a performance impact, but this? Thanks but no thanks!

Spectra 2.12 performance regression (update: due to AI assistant)

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So I like and use (aka “ultimate addons for gutenberg”) on some of my WordPress sites.

If you use Spectra as well, you might want to be know that Spectra 2.12 has a significant performance regression, sucking in almost all of wp-includes/js/dist.

Here’s hoping this was not intentional and that it’ll get fixed soon 🙂

More info in https://wordpress.org/support/topic/2-12-significant-performance-regression/

Update Feb. 15th: the regression is due to the new AI features, as a workaround go to Spectra -> AI features -> Manage AI features and disable “AI Assitant” (and “AI Copilot” if you don’t need/ want that either).

Eurovision 2023; my winner is … Blanca Paloma

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About #Eurovision; Loved Croatia, Finland and I’m happy my fellow-Belgian #Gustaph did (very) well. But my favorite by far this year was Spains #BlancaPaloma

Flamenco-ish, intense, great voice, beautiful act, uncompromising electro-track that completely avoids the standard 4 to the floor beat that is way to present in Liverpool.

So much to like & discover, I’ve got it on repeat!

Blanca Paloma - Eaea (LIVE) | Spain 🇪🇸 | Grand Final | Eurovision 2023
Watch this video on YouTube.

Twitterless Twaddle revisited

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screenshot of my "archived" twitter profileAlthough I removed the “twitterless twaddle” byline from this blog years ago and I was present on Twitter with my @futtta-account, I’ve never been an avid user. That means I have no “social capital” there and given the Musk shit-show it has quickly become, I revisited the Mastodon account I created in April this year (when Elon declared he wanted to buy Twitter) and as instructed by God I happily “archived” my Twitter account by removing all my follows, protecting my tweets, changing my name and gently closing the door behind me (and I finally deactivated my FB account as well).

So if you want to get social with me, I’m https://mastodon.social/@futtta. Not that I’m good at doing the socials, not that I’ll have much to say there, not that Mastodon solves all problems with social media, but it does feel good to be on a federated/ distributed social network using open source software, not owned by one company or one person.

Нет войне!

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My work as a developer of free and open source software is an expression of my firm belief in humanity, communication and collaboration. War is the opposite of those beliefs and I strongly support any action that opposes Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. As such the protests in Russian cities against the war need to be heard loud and clear and repeated by anyone who believes in dialogue; Нет войне!

Rant: Fitbit on bicycle fail

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So Fitbit is notoriously bad at getting a correct heart rate when the user is cycling. Compare below 2 screenshots of the same 1h ride I did earlier today, one from Fitbit and one from myWorkouts (nice Android app) which uses a Bluetooth chest-strap to measure heart rate;

37 minutes below 114 bmp? Average of 112? Bollocks!

I fully understand a wrist-mounted device is not ideal for monitoring heart rate when in bicycling position, but wouldn’t it be great if the Fitbit app kept an eye out for a Bluetooth chest-strap in that case if only to ensure not having utter nonsense (not only HR but also energy spent) in their exercise stats?

Past, present and future laptops

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bulky T510 and tiny n135When my Thinkpad x250 broke down last week with what appears to be a motherboard failure, I tried to convince my daughter to hand over her T410 but work-from-home-schooling does not work without a computer, so she refused. Disillusioned in my diminishing parenting powers, I dug up my 10 year old Samsung n135 netbook instead. It still had Ubuntu 14.10 running and the battery was pining for the fjords, but after buying a new battery (€29), updating Ubuntu to 18.04 LTS and switching to Lubuntu it really is usable again.
Now to be honest, I did get replacement laptop (a bulky T510 with only 4GB of RAM) with my own SSD inside from my supplier, so I’m not using that old netbook full-time, but happy to have it running smoothly nonetheless.
The future, to end this old-fashioned geekery off with, will very likely be a Dell XPS-13 9300 (yep, I’ll be cheating on Lenovo) on which I’ll happily install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on. I’ve upgraded my wife’s x240 to that already and I must say it runs smoothly and looks great when compared to 18.04 which I’m still running.

Autoptimize closing in on W3 Total Cache

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Fun fact; As per wordpress.org “popular plugins” ranking , Autoptimize is slowly but surely closing in on what used to be the go-to solution for Web Performance Optimization W3 Total Cache based on the “active installs” metric. Who would have thought? What a crazy ride …