Author: Nate Dillon

Setting up a LAMP stack on DigitalOcean

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I’ve hosted most of my sites on a DreamHost shared server since 2005. It has always been easy to use and well maintained. But after DreamHost increased prices in March, I decided it was time to look at what else is available.

DigitalOcean has been on my radar for quite a while due to its reputation and inexpensive cloud servers (as little as $5 per month). I can run 2 or 3 cloud servers on DigitalOcean for about the same price as my DreamHost subscription. The downside of course is that the cloud servers are unmanaged, which means potentially more work for me to maintain. I have some experience running an unmanaged Rackspace server in my previous job, so I decided to go ahead and give it a try.

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Updating an Apple Watch Series 3 is a nightmare in 2021

The Verge highlights the same problems I’ve had when updating my Apple Watch Series 3, a product they currently produce and sell. Despite not adding any apps or content to my watch, I don’t have enough space to install updates, thus requiring me to completely wipe the watch every time I need to update it.

One thing left out of the article was that the update process (downloading, preparing, verifying, installing) starts over from the beginning if anything goes wrong. This is what made the most recent update such a pain for me. After wiping my watch to clear space, the watch spent over an hour-and-a-half preparing the update. Once it got to the part where it started to verify the update, I got a message saying that my watch was not connected to wifi and the installation stopped. When I tried to install it again, it started back at the downloading step, but of course, I now didn’t have enough free space on my watch, which required yet another wipe of the watch.