How to Find IPhone's Unread Messages

 My IPhone has been declaring I have 1 unread message, but I can't find it.

The solution was actually easy.

 "Hey Siri, read me my unread messages." 

Siri read my one message and closed it.

Is Silver or the S&P 500 a Better Investment?

 Back in 1979 some friends of mine in Dallas were really into buying silver, as in pre-1965 silver quarters. They firmly believed the US financial system was on the verge of collapse due to congressional overspending. The US dollar would be worthless due to runaway inflation and the silver coins would be worth a fortune and be the de facto currency.

As a poor college student I didn't have much money to sock away in silver, but I bought 6 silver quarters which equals a little more than 1 troy oz of pure silver.

Was that a good investment?  Let's see. In 1979, silver was about $11. per oz.

This year, 2022, my ounce of silver is worth $24.

What if I'd invested that $24 in the S&P 500 in 1979? The index has risen 12% on average since 1979, so my stocks in 2022 would have a value of $3,120.

So, $24 from silver or $3,120 from the stock market? You decide.

What does Google know about me?

I just updated my advertising profile at Google. It's easy.

Visit  https://adssettings.google.com/ and you'll see something like this:

You can click on subjects and remove them from your ad lineup. I removed "cats", but kept "dogs".

Free Online HTML Validator for an Entire Site - Datayze.com

I recently retired from 42 years of software development and have a little more time to work on my personal website, https://www.fincher.org. 

I've been working on it for almost 30 years and some parts are a little, ... , crusty shall we say?

I found a wonderful online free website analyzer from the good folks at Datayze.com that will gently scan an entire website and show areas that need fixin'.

Thanks Datayze.com!

Best Remote Ftp Client for the Mac

 I've been updating my website fincher.org, and needed a remote ftp client to access my dreamhost linux server. After some research I settled on CyberDuck. It's awesome! Did I mention it's free?

Best Electrical Rates in Texas - How to Select an Electrical Provider 2020

 In Texas we have the luxury (duty?) to select an electrical provider and a plan. We have   http://powertochoose.org/, the official website of the Public Utility Commission of Texas to help Texans select a provider and a plan.

From the site we can get a general idea of the price of power, but not a detailed analysis of what the yearly cost would be because electric companies may charge different rates depending on how much electricity we use each month.

For example suppose company A charges 5 cents for all electricity under 1000 KiloWattHours (KWH), and then 15 cents for any KWH over 1000; and company B charges 15 cents for all electricity under 1000 KWH, and then 5 cents for any KWH over 1000. We have to do some math to figure out what works best for our usage. Here's an example from Green Energy Exchange's rates:

I use GeekYourRate.com/ to do the math for me. The site charges $9.95 to take my monthly usage and crank through all the plans to find the best ones for me. Usually I use less than 1,000 KWH, but for three months in the summer, I go a little above 1,000 KWH. Here's the page using my usage:

GeekYourRate recommended Green Energy Exchange as the cheapest option. I tried their website, but it would never let me proceed beyond the review button - it was always greyed out no matter what I tried. 

So I went to the next company, V247. Their website worked and I enrolled.

I like  GeekYourRate.com/ since it does all the math for me and can save me hundreds of dollars a year.

Dreamhost upgrade to Apache 2.4 causes "[an error occurred while processing this directive]"

 I host https://www.fincher.org with a great hosting service, Dreamhost.  They recently upgraded my server from Apache 2.2 to 2.4.  It broke my whole site.

I wrote a Content Management System (CMS) 20 years ago using Server Side includes and Perl (yes, Perl).  It has worked flawlessly for decades and then got tripped up on this upgrade.

What happened? Testing for empty variables happened.  For example, if I want a page to have Google ads, I would define a variable at the top of a file

<!--#set var="AdsTop" value="AdsTop" -->

and then later include a file that tests for that variable,

<!--#if expr="${AdsTop}" -->

... include file with Google Ads ...

<!--#endif -->

Apache, changed the way variables are tested to be more explicit, which I can appreciate their thinking.

Now in 2.4 if you want to test if the variable "AdsTop" is not empty use the "-n" option:

<!--#if expr="-n v('AdsTop')" -->

... include file with Google Ads ...

<!--#endif -->

(or use "-z" to test for empty).

More details at https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/howto/ssi.html and https://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/ssi.htm.

You can skip the upgrade and set SSILegacyExprParser to on, but in my experience, falling behind on upgrades, eventually bites you in the behind.