Rants and Raves

Welcome to Rants and Raves! I kept hearing that I needed to write, so here is the blog that I ended up starting. It is mostly an accounting of my progression through creating a web site, nuances with code, and tips about what I did to make things work. In there you will find sprinkled about some gems of life, and letting loose fun. Enjoy!

RRRRAAAAVVVVEEEE!!!!
2022-10-17
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Music Cleanup
2022-10-16
I've been working on cleaning up the music I have, turns out the meta data is a bit trash. Plus the lack of information on the web about a lot of songs, or albums. Then there are all of the variations of songs to sort between. Is it a cover, or a remix, or is the artist even correctly attributed? (Ugly Girl is not by Weird Al Yankovic or Aqua) I have been using MusicBrainz Picard (https://picard.musicbrainz.org/) to help look up, change meta data, and rename files. Worth it for your own cleanup.
Access MySQL In App Database
2022-10-15
Azure has the free option for MySQL In App for small databases, the other Azure databases cost money. A big downsides is that you can't connect to and manage the databases externally. To manage the database login to portal.azure.com, go to your app, go to the MYSQL In App section. At the top of that section click the icon with the word Manage. That will open phpMyAdmin in a new browser window. Voila - database manager! Make sure to refresh your app first so the database is running.
Footer Added
2022-10-14
I added a <footer> section to my page. I do feel like there are some rules about it needing to be inside of the body, but it just seems like a basic section to me. It definitely helps to define the different sections and for formatting purposes. I am not necessarily noticing any particular default formatting on the predefined element different that any generic <div>
New Feature: Date Posted
2022-10-13
Added the date posted so everyone can see when the post was made. In the view just needed to add: <tr> <td>{{ $blog->created_at }}</td> </tr> With Laravel the controller grabs the 'blogs' data and loops @foreach($blogs as $blog) to display the information. Still going to make things a bit more pretty.
Mountain Adventure
2022-10-12
Today we stopped in a forest in the high mountains of Arizona. We brought the puppers out, did some "parkouring", walked a trail, checked out some flora and fauna, and did some jogging back to the truck. It was a nice 18 °C which was great for the amount of activity we did. There were some animal prints, flowers, and decomposing foot eating tree stumps.
Pushed Site To Azure
2022-10-11
Just verified that I can push my Laravel project to Azure. I first pushed a broken site, then pushed my current site. Both are stored on my local machine. The DB did not get wiped in this process, which is nice since I almost forgot to back it. The command I use is: az webapp up --resource-group $Azure_Group --name $Azure_App_Name --location $Azure_Location --sku FREE --runtime "php:7.4" --os-type=windows --plan $Azure_App_Plan Keep in mind that a new site needs some additional prep.
Get Group Policy Editor On Windows Home
2022-10-10
Save the following code in a .bat file, then run as administrator to get access to gpedit on Windows Home: @echo off pushd "%~dp0" dir /b %SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package~3*.mum >List.txt dir /b %SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~3*.mum >>List.txt for /f %%i in ('findstr /i . List.txt 2^>nul') do dism /online /norestart /add-package:"%SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\%%i" pause
Group Policy Editor NOT On Windows Home
2022-10-09
Or is it? So Windows apparently doesn't want the common person to have easy access to their slightly more advanced tools, such as gpedit, unless you pay to upgrade your version of Windows. Well, turns out, like Hyper-V, you can still get access to those tools, if you run some code to access it. I used: https://www.ghacks.net/2021/11/29/how-to-enable-the-group-policy-editor-on-windows-11-home/ It seems you need to use run or fully type gpedit.msc into the windows search.
Azure CLI Success
2022-10-08
Setting the Execution Policy for the LocalMachine scope was persistent. Documentation here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.core/about/about_execution_policies?view=powershell-7.2 After a reboot I was able to use the az login command without any errors popping up. As another side note, I am glad I wrote down the process I used to setup things earlier, because the tutorials I was referencing have been updated to use the Azure portal instead of the CLI.
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