Updating

Ever read a blog post and think, “I wonder how that’ll work out”? Or maybe it’s an old one, and, “I wonder what ended up happening?” Sometimes updates are necessary to correct information or impressions, and sometimes it’s just kind of interesting. Whether necessary or interesting or not, this post is an update on several earlier posts.

The green water

Back in July, I wrote about how we’d started adding some green stuff to our furbabies’ drinking water to help them fight dental disease. I mixed them in empty (and washed…) 2 litre milk bottles, and that worked well for a long time. However, I recently noticed spots forming on the inside of the bottle, and from the outside the spots look like mould (photo up top). Looking inside the bottle, they don’t seem to be mould (it looks like reside of the green stuff), but I won’t take any chances.

So, I’m now changing the bottle generally every other week. This isn’t all bad: I’m reusing bottles before I recycle them. But, it did surprise me.

‘Red Peak’ is part of it all

The government moved to legislate under urgency to include the “Red Peak” flag design in the upcoming flag referendum. The design, which has had a groundswell of public support (and opposition, of course…) was included when the Green Party agreed to support adding it to the referendum, giving the government enough votes to get the measure through Parliament. The Labour Party insisted that a question be added to the first referendum asking if New Zealanders even wanted a change, the government refused, and the Greens moved in. Shrewd politics, really, and a popular option will be part of the first referendum.

Browser wowser

Last August, I broke my web browser. Since then, Firefox is better—but I’m still using three web browsers for different things.

Firefox apparently agreed with what I said in that August post and changed their settings to allow users to re-enable add-ons that were “unverified” (there’s since been an update to the password add on, so that’s all good, anyway).

However, one HUGE bug remains: I can sign into my Google account to post to this blog, but then Firefox immediately signs me out again. I can’t use Google’s Chrome because it won’t allow me to edit the HTML of a post (and Google owns both Blogger and Chrome…). So, I write and edit blog posts in Apple’s Safari browser, the only one that’s fully functional for using Blogger.

Neither Safari nor Chrome permit downloading YouTube videos (I’m talking, of course, only about downloading videos that are legal to download). Firefox does. So, I use Firefox for YouTube.

I’ve (mostly) solved the customisation issues with Safari and Chrome, but I’ve found that Chrome has weird performance issues that no other browser has: It becomes unstable at times, and web pages opened in it start responding in a choppy way. The only solution is to quit Chrome and re-start it. Chrome also has a few other performance issues that, while annoying, aren’t important.

Today things change: I’m switching to Safari as my main browser only because it’s the least troublesome one, and this’ll drop me down to two web browsers. I wish things were back how they were, but they’re not. This will have to do.

Spring may be springing

Early last month, I complained about the lack of Spring in our Spring. There are signs that now, as we near mid-Spring, the season may finally be arriving. We’re having more sunny days or, at least, parts of sunny days, and the daytime temperatures are finally slowly going up, though nights are still quite cool or cold.

Still, the way I measure the niceness of weather is by the laundry: If I put washing out on the line and it actually dries, we’ve moved into Spring, since washing hanging on the line for entire sunny winter day doesn’t dry. By that measure, Spring may finally be springing. And I am glad.

There: Now we’re up to date.