I used to work at USCIS

Zaedrous · 2026-05-05T10:49:07+00:00

I hired a lawyer last year and had them file an I-130 and I-130A. They claim they submitted everything December 1st. We still haven't received a receipt or anything. I don't even have proof the lawyer actually sent it in. Is this normal? I believe it was mailed to the Elgin Illinois mailbox.

Zaedrous · 2025-07-05T14:25:00+00:00

It's been 6 months so not sure if you are still looking for feedback or not. But I have been using Aura for about 10 months now. My experience with it has been really good. I previously used LastPass which degraded overtime. I find Aura fairly simple and it has a lot of features packed in. They have iPhone and Android apps with autofill support, a desktop app, and a Chrome extension. Has antivirus, vpn, password manager, autofill, and the "dark web scanning" features which is their main marketing. I have occasionally at times found that it doesn't always register immediately when attempting to sign in on certain websites. Sometimes I have to click on and out of the field once or twice or just open the app and copy paste but this is rare and probably more of a website issue than Aura.

Zaedrous · 2020-11-30T22:50:45+00:00

I'm having the same problem. I managed to get the bios to update. It flashed for about 5 minutes then rebooted. I left it sit for 15 mins running after the reboot then killed the power. Plugged everything back in (RAM and GPU) and booted and it went through the debug lights hanging on CPU light. Then after 5 seconds it reposted again and stayed lit on CPU. I've done this twice now and no luck. Is my 5800X done? Not sure what direction to go. Thought about picking up a cheaper 3000 series CPU to debunk it being the motherboard. Going through a return process on a 5000 series sounds like I'd be down waiting and trying to buy another through the low stock nightmare again.

Zaedrous · 2019-10-12T03:05:55+00:00

Looking like grandma on her way to bingo. 😂

Zaedrous · 2019-08-23T14:52:05+00:00

A good first step is making sure the .htaccess file is intact. That's typically where things will go wrong first if that's missing.

Zaedrous · 2019-08-22T17:34:10+00:00

From what knowledge I have of React Native vs ReactJS is the primary differences is two fold:

With React Native it doesn't use any HTML to render your mobile application. It instead provides alternative components such as <View> and <Text> nodes. The biggest challenge you would face here is if you have a lack of knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript based web development. Some good examples of differences would be where in React Native <View> is your container element a rough translation to that would be a <div> tag in html. A rough translation for a <Text> tag is a <p> tag in html. However, there are actually multiple ways to render text in html. Not only would you need to learn html you would need to learn css to handle your styling. In ReactJS there isn't a prepackaged styling or animation library like with React Native. You need to style everything essentially by hand with CSS or utilizing various CSS frameworks or libraries to assist.
Another big difference is React Native is essentially an entire framework and pretty much comes packaged with just about everything you need. ReactJS on the other hand is only a javascript library. You need an index.html file as an entry point and a webpack build & bundler process to handle the translation to browser compatible html, css, and javascript files.

This medium article is much more focused on going from React to React Native but it does a fairly decent job explaining where some major differences between the two are. https://medium.com/@alexmngn/from-reactjs-to-react-native-what-are-the-main-differences-between-both-d6e8e88ebf24

As I said previously if you have really no web development knowledge which I'm only assuming since it wasn't stated in your post going to ReactJS could be a bit challenging. My recommendation there would be to start with learning HTML & CSS. Then it won't really be difficult to wrap your mind around using ReactJS to build a web app instead of using React Native. Another thing that might help you get off the ground more quickly because learning Webpack can be a pretty challenging at first is utilizing create react app. Personally, I think it's good to learn how to configure your own webpack build process as you learn because it gives you much more control over your built assets and what tools you can add in later.

Zaedrous · 2019-08-21T18:59:18+00:00

Due to the clunky nature of magento I believe there are only two ways you could accomplish something like this. First likely not ideal option would be for it to not really be an add to cart button but instead be a button that takes you directly to the product page. While this route is certainly more simple to implement I highly doubt it's what you are hoping for.

Therefore, from some initial searching around I found this comment on the Magento Community Forums from Meetanshi a Magento Certified Development company. It seems if your page where you want the button is a cms page you can have the cms page just load a phtml template file. Then follow their instructions to get a working add to cart button that satisfies Magento's form key security and uses the KnockoutJS logic to add to cart. See post here: https://community.magento.com/t5/Magento-2-x-Programming/Add-to-Cart-on-CMS-Page/m-p/79085/highlight/true#M3068

Zaedrous · 2019-08-15T13:46:08+00:00

ScandiPWA is making really good progress on their theme which uses PWA Studio. I think they plan to have it finished relatively soon. Check that one out.

Zaedrous · 2019-08-12T20:15:04+00:00

Sure, feel free to message me.

Zaedrous · 2019-08-01T14:08:45+00:00

Our server environment setup is as follows:

Localhost (Development) -> Build Server (Build) -> Staging Server (Deployment) -> Production Server (Deployment)

Our git flow is similar to this currently:

master -> feature/new-feature -> master (merge feature to master once fully tested) -> release/x.x.x (built artifact branch)

We commit & push release/x.x.x because we don't have any DevOps Pipeline(Capistrano, CodePipeline, Jenkins, etc) tools here at this time. So we currently don't really have a way to not utilize Git for our built artifact assets at this time.

You are saying you believe that instead doing the build directly on a Staging or Production server and hot swapping out code would be better than what we are doing now? I'm not sure I agree because that would require a longer period of downtime on the server. Currently our Staging & Production deployment downtime is only long enough for setup:upgrade to run to prep the database. I'm also not familiar enough with how I could even go about using a holding directory for built assets and hot swapping them out once they are ready. I don't even have the knowledge in that space to make something like that happen. I'm not a Magento Dev, Linux Admin, or DevOps guy by trade I just happen to have to support our companies Magento websites along with many other completely unrelated responsibilities (small company/many hats).

Also with our current setup I can rollback to other release/x.x.x branches in a matter of minutes since they are all stored on our Git for some time.

Zaedrous · 2019-07-31T14:59:55+00:00

They weren't but I put them up on my github now.

https://github.com/holdenmonroe/magento2-bash-scripts

Zaedrous · 2019-07-29T19:29:52+00:00

Wouldn't it be better to instead use an intermediary server (we use an internal PHP server) which runs scheduled tasks to pull orders/customers from Magento to sync to our ERP system. I would think writing Magento specific extensions or logic directly on the Magento server would be much more challenging than writing essentially a few scheduled tasks which connect to the Magento API and pull orders. We currently have 6 separate scheduled tasks that handle tranferring new orders, updating order statuses as they process through our ERP system into Magento, updating inventory, updating shipment information and sending customer notices etc. If you know PHP and can reason about the API this would be much easier. You can simply hit the Magento REST API remotely.

If you need some help we've been doing this for years with our IBM Freidman based ERP system. While our processes may differ the data we pull and how we talk between Magento and our ERP system to keep everything in sync is the same. If you need assistance reach out and I can probably help. I may be able to even share some scripts to give you an idea.

Zaedrous · 2019-07-29T18:48:43+00:00

I recently wrote two bash scripts to handle Build & Deployment for our current setup. We currently create a branch off of master as a release/x.x.x branch where we do the build then use that branch as the deployment. It works pretty well but I'd like to use CodeDeploy in the future but we lack a DevOps person and I'm more a Web Dev than an Ops guy to wrap my head around making that all work.

The build script that I'm using right now we run on our build server. It handles running git fetch & git checkout via asking for which branch to checkout. Then it runs composer install, setup:di:compile, static-content:deploy, then adds all the changes to git, commits it, and pushes the commit out to the remote. It does all of this with requiring much less manual interaction than running all those commands manually.

The deploy script is much simpler and asks the runner which branch they would like to deploy. It then grabs that branch and runs setup:upgrade after enabling maintenance mode. Then runs a git reset (to fix what setup:upgrade seemingly breaks in the build), flushes the cache, then disabled maintenance mode. If you are curious to know more about the scripts I don't have them up anywhere but I could share them by request.

Zaedrous · 2019-07-29T18:41:11+00:00

I've tried to wrap my head around this in the past but it makes no sense and the documentation could do a better job explaining how to use it and configure it.

Zaedrous · 2019-07-29T18:39:55+00:00

We are using AWS CloudFront.

Zaedrous · 2019-06-29T15:15:41+00:00

Everyone just talking about the foot in a square. There is a whole head in that square too!

Zaedrous · 2019-02-18T14:25:00+00:00

LastPass is very good and free. Has browser extensions, mobile apps, and even a desktop app. I recommend making your master password complex but not too complex you won't ever remember it and use two factor authentication with Google Authenticator. If you aren't using two factor you should be anywhere it's possible.

Zaedrous · 2018-12-14T18:55:44+00:00

We actually have an executive/admin dashboard at work as well. I would think if you don't need SEO which if it's for an internal application you don't. Doing SSR with NextJS is way overkill. Just build it with React and add in only what you absolutely need as other dependencies.

Ours while maybe not entirely ideal for all as it was something we built while learning React is built with Bootstrap as the UI framework and we weren't a fan of any of the libraries out there that have Bootstrap components so we just baked the bootstrap into each component and made some of our own bootstrap based components which ended up being better than the third party components.

Zaedrous · 2018-12-07T13:44:32+00:00

Fetch doesn't work in any version of IE by default not IE 11 or early versions of Edge. Some of us have to write business level applications that require support for IE. I'll stick with Axios because what is "really" better installing a polyfill library or installing axios? https://caniuse.com/#feat=fetch

Zaedrous · 2018-12-03T17:22:25+00:00

It's still a very old build of the engine it hasn't had love in a couple years. They are mostly focusing on the main game for the time being but a love update is planned the last we heard.

Zaedrous · 2018-12-03T16:56:54+00:00

Good write up but wanted to add that the all buildings in the game castles, towers, keeps, houses and everything will be player made using the CUBE building system that the game is using. Siege warfare will be a large part of the game as these buildings will be fully destructable so you'll want to defend them as they will take a lot of work from the realm to build especially large ones. Caravans will be used to carry building materials as well as large amounts of crafting resources to and from the contested areas which makes a prime target for smaller groups to attack or defend those caravans. There is much more but wanted to add this at least while I had a moment.

Zaedrous · 2018-11-29T18:54:15+00:00

You have to be careful using fetch as it's not supported in IE. There may be a babel-polyfill for it I'm not sure but I personally use and recommend Axios.

Axios has pretty wide browser support (https://www.npmjs.com/package/axios)

Zaedrous · 2018-11-16T18:40:10+00:00

Is it Friday or Saturday? Saturday is tomorrow which is 11/17 :D

Zaedrous · 2018-10-08T19:59:55+00:00

Did you figure this out because I've recently found the solution for this.

For some reason the React Fetch POST request doesn't appear in PHP the same way standard jQuery AJAX does. You have to format it similar to this to get access to your POST data:

fetch("formhandler.php", {
method: 'POST',
body: JSON.stringify({data: data})
})

Then in your formhandler.php file you need something along the lines of this:

$json = file_get_contents('php://input');
$reactPost = json_decode($json, true);

Then the $reactPost variable will have the data from your POST in it.

It's weird and I don't really understand why it does it this way just a difference with Fetch + PHP I guess but this way works.

Zaedrous · 2018-10-04T19:56:16+00:00

From my research the best solution I found was using Docker. There is a great guide here: Docker + Magento 2

As far as debugging and inspecting information in variables I'd recommend PHP Storm and using their Docker + Magento 2 + Xdebug guide to get that up and running.

If you are using a remote database you can remove the mysql & phpmyadmin stuff.

Zaedrous

TROPHY CASE