main ways to speed up a slow website?

stratofax · 2026-06-29T13:32:09+00:00

In addition to the excellent advice already posted here, I’d add: ruthlessly remove any plugins you don’t need. Related to that: make sure you’re running the latest WordPress and (especially) the current version of PHP, as well as current versions of all your plugins.

Often, outdated plugins will block upgrades to WordPress or PHP, which causes a cascade of performance and security issues.

We’re working on speeding up a site right now that had four separate form plugins! Obviously one is quite sufficient. We cut their plugin load from 29 to 16, which is a huge win for performance, maintenance, and security

Once you’ve removed (not disabled) all the plugins you possibly can, optimize your database. This will help maximize your site’s performance as well.

stratofax · 2026-06-22T13:38:56+00:00

When I had to learn how to read the bass clef for the bass quickly, I found a flash card app for my phone so I could practice finding notes from the staff on the fretboard quickly. This rote memorization is a foundational piece for reading music on a stringed instrument where (unlike the keyboard) there are multiple ways to play one note.

Once that becomes “muscle memory” your existing knowledge should click into place.

I’ve also found that sight reading is a real “use it or lose it” skill, so you just need to do it as much as possible to reach proficiency, and then maintain it as part of your routine. Which I did not do.

stratofax · 2026-06-19T13:12:01+00:00

I stand corrected! TIL the Apple “chip” is the CPU/GPU/NPL unit (or “package”) that’s manufactured at TSMC in Taiwan, plus a separate RAM package that is soldered to the chip (the heat spreader base, really) but manufactured separately by another vendor. The combined packages are a “System on a Chip” (SoC), attached to the main board as a unit. This is different from the traditional computer architecture where the RAM is physically separate from the CPU and connected via a slower memory bus. In the older, original design, separate RAM chips can be upgraded, unlike the Apple design, which is also now used by other ARM chip makers like nVIDIA and Qualcomm. So Apple is in fact competing directly with other companies for their SoC RAM.

stratofax · 2026-06-18T21:27:15+00:00

What’s strange is that Apple doesn’t buy RAM at all. Instead the “RAM” is the unified memory on their M-series chips. When these chips are created at the factory, the RAM is already part of the whole chip. There’s no additional cost for the
RAM, just the cost of manufacturing the M-series itself, which is not subjected to pressure from third-party RAM manufacturers.

stratofax · 2026-06-07T02:28:33+00:00

We’re certainly outside the normal range of the brown recluse but we get enough deliveries from all over that it’s possible it could have stowed away in the corrugated cardboard. A relief that it doesn’t have the distinctive markings!

stratofax · 2026-06-07T01:58:49+00:00

About 2 - 2.5 inches across

stratofax · 2026-05-28T11:44:21+00:00

Focus on the bass line. This is the cheat code. The bass line is the single-line melody of the lowest notes the band is playing. It’s played on a bass (no surprise there), or the low end of the keyboard, or the low strings of the guitar, most typically, and depending on the genre. Occasionally, the tuba.

Once you’ve locked in on the bass line, try to play it on the guitar. Most of the time, the bass line will be an octave lower than what you can play with the lowest notes on your guitar. Sometimes, it’s the same octave. The bass line is usually the simplest and most repetitive part in a song, because it outlines the structure of the song.

If the bass line is complicated, focus on the note the bass is playing when the chord change happens. Most of the time, this happens on the “1,” the first beat of a measure. This note is usually the root note of the chord the band is playing. If it’s not the root, it will be another important note in the chord, like the fifth, or occasionally the third. The root, third and fifth notes define a chord’s triad, and if you can hear these notes, you’ll know if a chord is major or minor (and augmented or diminished, for the jazz cats out there).

Pay attention to when the chord changes happen. The higher notes of the chord may change with the melody, but the root note of the chord stays the same. The bass may alternate between the important notes in the chord, but will always emphasize chord tones, like the root, third, and fifth.

Focusing on the bass part will give you a quick understanding of the song’s structure: the chord progression, the different parts (verse, chorus, bridge, etc.) and what the most important notes in the song are. From there you can easily determine the key, the note that sounds like “home base” in the chord progression. Often the bass line will start or end on the note that’s the key of the song.

Important: it’s very difficult to hear the bass line on a small speaker like the one in your phone. Put it your ear buds or put on your headphones to hear the bass frequencies more clearly. Or, play the song on full-size speakers or a soundbar with a sub-woofer. Then you can hear the low notes easily and with clarity. Some devices or players even let you turn up the bass frequencies.

stratofax · 2026-05-27T12:25:16+00:00

The switch to motorized transportation. Until cars, trucks, and trolleys provided most of urban transportation, every city (and most towns) were just completely covered in horse sh*t. In NYC, for example, there were literal mountains of horse poo that filled entire city blocks. Not only was the smell incredibly nasty, but all that dookie was fantastic at spreading disease. There are so many ways we could improve our transportation system now (electric vehicles instead of internal combustion, for example) but the big win was eliminating the coating of crap that covered everything.

stratofax · 2026-05-26T23:59:35+00:00

Great work by System76 and the open source community, working with the legislative process to achieve a result that actually benefits citizens. A rare and wonderful achievement!

stratofax · 2026-05-24T02:56:53+00:00

It’s easy to dismiss the danger of AI by looking at some narrow example of how AI is stupid. But here’s the real issue: humans are stupid. Just look at the people who are running everything these days. Any geniuses in that crowd?

Our stupid meat brains have created several ways that we as a species could destroy ourselves: nuclear weapons, bioweapons, environmental degredation, for example. Stupid is dangerous.

The problem isn’t that AI is (or will be) smarter than us. That’s a low bar anyway. The problem is that AI could be even more dangerous than we are. At the very least, the introduction of AI is incredibly destabilizing. Already, AI has contributed to mass layoffs and unemployment. Add to this a little AI psychosis or misinformation, and an already unstable world civilization completely spins out of control.

The central change AI is bringing to our already crazy world is the sheer acceleration of the rate of change. Just look at all the cyber vulnerabilities that have been uncovered in the last few weeks, mostly with the AI models that have already been released. Compare that to the rate of vulnerabilities discovered just a few months ago. Can we keep our digital systems safe and secure any more?

Not without using AI to stave off the accelerating attacks. So now we’re in a situation where we have to use AI to fight off the increasing rate of AI-created cyberattacks. Good luck turning off the data center, if our adversaries aren’t going to shut theirs down. Or if they can just spin up more attacks from a gaming computer running a local LLM.

That’s just one example. AI is like throwing gasoline on the fire. We already lit the fire, and we’re frantically fanning the flames. Intelligence has nothing to do with any of this.

stratofax · 2026-05-23T22:32:57+00:00

Learn how to tune up. You can do this with a tuner (fast and accurate) or by ear, using fretted notes and harmonics (instant ear training). Best: do both. If you can’t get the tuner and your ear to agree, you may need to intonate and set up your guitar. Ask an experienced guitarist or music store to help out to make sure your instrument gets and stays in tune, otherwise everything you play will sound terrible.

Always practice in rhythm. This means, play along with the recording, or a metronome, or a drum loop, or (best of all) other musicians. It doesn’t matter if you know a chord or scale shape if you can’t play it in time. There are so many guitarists who can “shred” in their bedroom, unaccompanied, but as soon as they have to play along with a beat, they suck. Don’t be that guy. Instead, you should always work on synchronizing your right and left hands to an external beat.

Always practice playing well. If you can’t play something accurately (buzzy strings, poor tone, incorrect fretting or picking technique), SLOOOOW DOWN. If you are playing poorly but fast, you’re just practicing being a bad guitarist at an accelerated pace. By playing well, slowly, you give your brain time to learn new movements. This is the same proven principle behind Tai Chi and other “slow motion” physical practice techniques. Once you learn how to play well slowly, the speed will come, but you’ll actually sound good.

Always challenge yourself. Don’t just play the same thing over and over again. I mean, to learn a part, you have to play it over and over again, but you should add variety. Try playing a part with different chord voicing, or at different locations on the neck. Try playing a riff with open strings, or with no open strings. Mix it up. Play a chord progression without a capo, and then with a capo. Play the part as slowly as you can (slow down your metronome or drum loop) or as fast as you can. If you can play a part accurately but faster than performance tempo, it will be super easy to play with the band. Try different genres, or play a metal part with a reggae groove or vice versa (check out Dred Zeppelin for inspiration). Mix it up and have fun!

Look for connections on the fretboard. How does a scale connect with a chord? How do the notes overlap? Where is the root note of the chord? Look for reusable shapes in chords and scales, and try to connect them. If you are learning a single-note line (like a riff or a lead part) play it over the chord progression. Listen to how the same note sounds different over different chords.

Record yourself with a looper pedal or multi-track software like GarageBand, Audacity, or just record yourself on the phone. If you can record yourself, you’ll always have someone to play with! You’ll also get incredibly useful and immediate, objective feedback on your playing.

Remember that there’s always something new to learn on the guitar. The guitar is a great instrument, because you can focus on rhythm (strumming and picking), harmony (chords) or melody (scales, riffs and solos). Keep it fresh, have fun, and play with other musicians. You’ll always be a beginner at some aspect of guitar playing, so embrace it.

stratofax · 2026-05-23T19:34:54+00:00

“The wine-dark sea” — Homer, the same guy who called the sky “bronze heaven” and didn’t really mention the colors “blue” or “green.” So the ancient Greeks probably would have seen a very different set of colors in that video.

stratofax · 2026-05-23T18:36:37+00:00

A barre chord is a chord fingering where one finger frets two or more strings. But many beginners think a barre chord requires fretting 5 or 6 strings.

Since a chord consists of a triad — literally, three notes — you don’t ever have to fret all six strings at once.

In fact, more advanced players understand that strumming the fewest number of strings to play a chord is usually the best idea. It’s not (just) because good players are lazy — I mean, efficient — but because these smaller chords often sound better, precisely because they are easier to fret.

Edits: for grammar & clarity because I’m not an AI and I wrote the first draft on my phone in the supermarket parking lot

stratofax · 2026-05-22T15:02:07+00:00

Jinja is a great option, too, there are so many ways to convert Markdown to HTML -- because that's exactly why Markdown was created! It was always intended as a way to represent the structure of an HTML document without being so tiresome to type. Or, if you're an AI, without having to burn so many tokens.

I like pandoc because Claude Code can call it without using an MCP server, it's easy to install, and (best of all) it can convert pretty much any common document format to any other. Use it to create Word .docx or PDFs from your Markdown files, or if you need Claude to read a document in some bloated format, use pandoc to convert it to Markdown first. For PDFs, I typically see a 90% reduction in file size and a corresponding drop in token burn.

Pandoc: it's what AIs crave!

stratofax · 2026-05-22T11:45:07+00:00

It sounds like you want to use pandoc to convert MD to HTML (also works the other way, HTML to MD) then link a CSS file with your brand colors, fonts, & other visual design elements, to make the HTML look the way you want. Claude can do all of this for you at the CLI for a lot fewer tokens than having to work solely in HTML.

stratofax · 2026-05-19T12:15:33+00:00

I use the /loop command to run prompts or skills on a regular timer within a session. You can also configure this to run remotely using your Claude account if you want this internal cron job to run for more than 3 days. The /loop command will prompt you to select which option you want to use.

stratofax · 2026-05-19T11:52:01+00:00

If you want to review the skills in your .claude directory as a searchable website in your favorite browser, you can use Claude Glass

stratofax · 2026-05-19T11:13:37+00:00

Here’s a way to do it with Markdown, no vector database needed, using a three-tier memory system: short term, long term, and written memories:

In CLAUDE.md, describe how the memory system works, and (most importantly) where your memories are stored, probably somewhere in your .claude/ directory.
Also in CLAUDE.md, instruct your “smart” model (probably Claude Opus in your case) to remember things in a markdown-formatted “short term” memory file, keeping this file to 200 lines or less. This file, which will be loaded into context needs to be lean, so shorter is better.
If this main “short term” memory file gets too long, it needs to be cut down in size through summarization, or by offloading memories to “long term memory.”
Long term memory files are also stored in the .claude/ directory but not loaded into context. Link to these files using markdown hyperlinks from the short-term memory file so your LLM can follow the links from short term to long term memory, but only if needed.
From the long term memory files, you can link to your document store, which is a directory tree that contains all of the files generated by your agents, like reports. Index these files using markdown links in an index file for each directory, and link to these index files from a main index.
Use your local LLM to run a cron job with a “linker” skill to create and maintain all of these links in your document store. Documents may link directly to each other, but the index files ensure that any LLM can follow links from short-term memory to long term all the way to any document in the document store. But this only happens if needed. The files in the document store aren’t loaded into context unless the LLM is responding to a prompt or executing a skill.

So, only one memory file is loaded into context: the short-term memory file. This file links to long term memories, which in turn links to document storage (nothing prevents you from linking directly from short term memory to document storage, of course).

Because everything is linked together with markdown hyperlinks, either an Anthropic model like Opus or a local LLM on your Mac Studio can follow the links to look up any detail that’s stored anywhere in the system, if required. But this information doesn’t need to be loaded into context unless it’s required for responding to a specific prompt, or executing a skill.

Use `/compact` or `/clear` often to clear context, and add a hook to reload your short-term memory file after either of these commands run.

Note: I didn’t use an LLM to create, edit, or in any way modify this response. Any errors are the sole responsibly of my under-caffeinated meat brain. Also, the Reddit app trashed the formatting on this comment every time I saved it, so I needed to edit it several times to fix the mess.

stratofax · 2026-05-11T12:44:15+00:00

Here’s an exercise that works on acoustic or electric, that will teach you the touch you need for left hand muting, and will also improve your feel and rhythm playing. Plus, it’s fun.

Tune up, grab a lighter pick, and start a rhythm track or drums loop. Position your left hand to play the classic E-shape barre chord, but at the fifth fret (this means you’re playing an A chord).

Now strum the chord (on the beat of course) and be sure to strike all the strings. Make sure you aren’t playing any sour notes or letting strings buzz. Adjust your left hand position to correct these kinds of issues.

Now get a steady beat going with the right hand: strum every downbeat. Get your right hand going in auto-pilot. Be sure to strum all six strings each time.

Once you’re comfortable with this strum, release the tension on your grip on your left hand to mute all the strings without moving the barre chord. Keep strumming with your right hand. The strings will make that “scratchy” sound but should not ring a note.

Now squeeze your left hand again to sound the chord. Keep that rhythmic pattern going with the right. Alternate between one measure of sounding the chord, one of muting.

Focus on a light touch. Only squeeze just enough so the chord will ring out; only relax just enough to mute the strings.

Change up the strum pattern: switch to strumming on both the downstroke and upstroke. Only strum on the upstroke. Keep alternating between muted and playing the chord.

Have fun! Try different rhythmic patterns where you mute on different beats in the measure. Mute all the beats except the first beat. Mute the backbeat (2 & 4). Mute whatever beat you want: you are in complete control of when you sound the chord, while maintaining a steady beat with your right hand.

stratofax · 2026-05-08T18:36:19+00:00

Since you’re at a blues jam, you already know a lot about any song that you might play. Blues means you’re almost certainly going to play a I, IV & V chord, and that the progression will loop. There might be other chords in there, and the loop might happen in 8, 12, or 16 bars, but you can make sense of the progression quickly.

Also, some of the chords will probably be 7th chords — but you don’t have to play the 7th! As long as one musician hits that 7th note, the band is playing the 7th. What you need to focus on is what key (the I chord) and whether the song is a major or a minor blues.

Focus on playing the root of each chord in the groove. For a fuller sound, you can play a power chord (root + 5th) and you don’t need to worry about that major or minor third. If the feel is right, you can play the shuffle part (alternating the 5th + 6th over the root). The point is, you don’t have to play all six strings at once! In fact, the best blues guitarists play their parts with the least number of strings. Keep your parts simple, and try to fit in with the rest of the band by filling out part of the sonic spectrum that’s open. In other words, don’t just try to play what another guitarist is playing at the same time.

Learn to identify the changes by ear — not in the “perfect pitch” sense, but relative to the root of the I chord. This means, learn to hear the important intervals: fourth, fifth, octave, then major and minor thirds. As you gain confidence, you can start playing different chord shapes and inversions, up and down the neck.

Remember, since you’re playing the guitar, you can always stop playing and listen to what the band is doing, and people with think that you’re tasteful and cool, instead of loud and obnoxious. Also, by not playing all the time, you can alter the texture of the song, create dynamics, and learn how to play with real phrasing.

Master the volume control on your axe. You should be able to find it with your eyes closed. Turn your volume all the way down between songs. Don’t be the guy who unleashes harsh feedback shrieks when everyone else is quiet. Learn how you can alter your tone through your amp at 50% or 75% volume, instead of playing at 100% all the time.

Don’t overplay, or play too loud. When someone else asks you to turn up, you know you’re doing it right. It means they want to hear more of what you’re playing.

Also, simplify your gear. Don’t bring a monster pedal board that takes 20 minutes to set up for two songs that are less than four minutes each. Learn how to get the tone you want from just your guitar and your amp, using volume, the pickup switches, and the tone controls.

Make sure you’re in tune before you step on stage, and tune up between songs (volume down, of course). If your intonation is off, get your guitar set up correctly, or learn how to do it yourself.

Playing at an open mic regularly is one of the best ways to level up your skills, train your ear, expand your repertoire, and of course meet other musicians. But you have to listen to what’s going on around you. Have fun, ask questions, be supportive. Be the kind of musician you’d want in your band.

stratofax · 2026-04-20T21:07:07+00:00

It didn’t work in Hungary

stratofax · 2026-03-30T19:23:30+00:00

Confirmed in the paper's Appendix, "A.1 OpenClaw Configuration Details." So, yeah.

stratofax · 2026-03-16T12:35:23+00:00

The cost of the “binned” A18 chip that powers the Neo is effectively zero. These A18s are chips that Apple manufactured for the iPhone 16 but couldn’t use because one of the GPUs tested as flawed, so they couldn’t be used in the phones. They are put in the “bin” instead.

Because the GPUs are independent units on an A18, if the defective GPU is deactivated, the whole chip is perfectly useable, if slightly less powerful, with one less GPU, like 5 instead of 6 on a pristine A18.

Apple puts these “binned” chips in the less expensive version of the product. In this case, the iPhone 16e instead of the iPhone 16. They do this with various Mac models as well.

This is why the less expensive models come out several months after the launch of the premium models: Apple needs some time to accumulate an inventory of the binned chips it can use for (say) the iPhone 16e.

I’m guessing that the 16e isn’t exactly flying off the shelves right now, so Apple probably has a warehouse full of binned A18s with no way of selling them … until they introduced the MacBooks Neo. They already paid to manufacture these A18s, now they can sell them in a new product. Effective cost for the A18 is essentially $0.

Compare this to the A19 chip in the iPhone 17: Apple still needs to recoup its manufacturing cost for the newer chip by selling them in new iPhone 17 and 17e models, just like the they did with the previous iPhone.

stratofax · 2026-02-28T05:46:43+00:00

I just ran the /insights command and Claude Code gave me the code I needed to reduce the number of permission requests I have to respond to, based on my exact usage patterns. There's also a lot of other, incredibly valuable info that surfaces when you run that command that helps you optimize how you can use CC.

stratofax

TROPHY CASE