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A year ago I purchased for home use Apple's Mac Mini M1 with 512 GB SSD built into the computer. Coming more from a Windows and Linux background, it wasn't the operating system or Apple services that lured me to make the purchase but instead its small footprint in both size and presence. While the Mac Mini is a neat computer on its own, there are a couple tradeoffs. The negatives include fewer ports and the lack of ability to upgrade both memory and internal storage. I was afraid to turn this around, I was looking at unattractive cables to external devices spread across my desktop making that "small footprint" no more. Luckily, I looked and found a more elegant solution with my purchase of the newly released Qwiizlab UH25 SE USB C Hub.

WordPress 5.9 was recently released. As was hinted in the BuddyPress 10.0 article, the most anticipated new feature in this new version of WordPress is full site editing. The Site Editor is a new feature to WordPress that allows block editor users to build their entire site with blocks. Unfortunately, full site editing is only available to content creators that are using a Block theme specifically designed to take advantage of the new feature.

Full Site Editing doesn't stand alone in WordPress as additional features and tools have been added for the site editor to come to life "out of the box" once version 5.9 is installed.

BuddyPress 10.0.0 "La Pino'z" is the first major release of 2022 for the WordPress plugin. BuddyPress is a plugin to build online communities and includes features such as user profiles, groups, activity streams, notifications and can be integrated with the WordPress plugin bbPress to enhance community forums.

Highlights of new features and significant changes in BuddyPress include:

Like most office workers, two years ago at the start of the pandemic my employer moved our non-operational staff from the office to the home. Although my wife and son initially had to work remotely too, they didn't stay long and have since then returned to work and school. Yet, here I still sit the only human being at home for eight hours a day.

Despite being busy because I'm working the family has come to expect during my breaks from my workday to be that person to do an extra load of laundry, vacuum the floor, start the dishwasher, or let the dog out.  The argument goes now that now I'm essentially a stay at home Dad that doesn't have the commute time to and from work...I can use that extra hour in the day doing family chores. Mind you, I'm still putting in eight hours of work for the office and my break times away from work computer need to be limited to 5 to 10 minutes. That's not much time to get the expected or unexpected tasks done at home. I'm grateful that I don't do all the housework manually thanks to robotic vacuum cleaners.

It make take awhile but when I make a mistake I will eventually admit and correct the error of my ways. Half a decade ago, I turned my back on supporting niche websites and focused all my effort in creating a new multi-topic website which you now know as socPub. As counter-intuitive that it sounds, the more diverse and interesting topics we published under this website, our number of loyal visitors to the website decreased in numbers. I found this analysis to be alarming and discouraging.

I've heard lots of opinions these past couple months from family and friends that vaccines against COVID-19 work. I've also heard from other family members and friends, some of them anti-vaccine folks, that if/once you have survived COVID-19 you have natural immunity that protects you during future exposures to the virus. To me, the comforting news is the numbers collected here in South Dakota, both sides of this discussion are correct.

Month after month, analysis by local papers and our hospital system have consistently shown the following to be true.

It has been no secret that since the start of the pandemic, I've been obsessed with vinyl records all over again. Part of my interest is out of nostalgia for my old records but I've also bought a lot of new music also being released on vinyl. And you know what? I'm not alone. Weekly sales in the United States of vinyl albums jumped to their second largest week since the MRC Data tracking of sales in 1991. According to Billboard.com:

The third feature release of Drupal 9 recently became available. New features and improvements in Drupal 9.3.0 include:

Well we made it to December, but it won't be long before Sioux Falls other parts of the upper plains get hit with it's first Winter Storm. Here in Sioux Falls, the current forecast is calling around 9 inches of snow during the day Friday. Snow amounts in a forecast are subject to change as the actual event arrives but overall our local National Weather Service office does a great job in forecasting these winter storms. The above graphic and the below description is from the NWS Weather Story that was posted on their page late Thursday afternoon, December 9, 2021.

For two-wheeled motorcyclists a 382 mile trip is quite doable but can still be a challenging trip when crossing the high plains and mountains. Only the dumbest people would do such a lengthy trip two-up on a mini bike though. If you recall that's what exactly happened in the movie Dumb and Dumber with the shows two main characters, Lloyd Christmas (played by Jim Carrey) and Harry Dunne (played by Jeff Daniels).

But if the mini bike scene in the movie isn't funny enough for you, what would happen if you made this same trip from the plains of Nebraska to Aspen, Colorado for real? That's exactly what Zack Courts and Ari Henning did in a YouTube video for RevZilla and Common Thread XP.