/reader

But I thought about it, and my brain told me I’d spend a grand on it and absolutely no more. So I wrote them back and said exactly that. Then they emailed back a lower offer, and I said “no”. Then they wrote back with another lower offer, and I said “no”. Then they emailed back and said fine a grand, and I said “ok”.

Part of the reason I did it is that they sent a URL on godaddy.com where the transaction actually happens. I use GoDaddy anyway — I like them for reasons.

All it does is redirect to this site for now. But it opens the idea of using it for family members who might want a site off it. ruby.coyier.com is kinda neat.

Any ideas?

It’s broken.

It must not be broken for everyone, otherwise surely you’d have fixed it. But it’s broken for me.

First, it won’t take my legit new address. If I put the Suite number in there, which is extremely required for the mail to get into the right box, it’s invalid. But that error message? There is no “Street Name field”. You get this one box, that’s it.

I can get it to go through because I can get it to pre-fill with a suggested similar address then change the suite number to the correct one. Maybe that’s at the heart of the issue?

Once past that, eventually you need to collect your $1.10 and verify the address via credit card, which is completely fine and I want to do that.

It’s this screen. It is not possible to get past:

There are a bunch of console errors and warnings, a bit different in each browser. Above is Firefox. After clicking “Next”, a loader comes up for a sec then disappears. No feedback. It just doesn’t work. It’s broken.

I’ll have to stop into a physical office one of these days and see if they can file the change there. Not sure if they do that. I bet they tell you to do it online.

I did report it. It’s Service Request 79335936.

UPDATE: I got a call back about my service request the same day from a very nice lady in Portland. Here’s the deal. The USPS doesn’t care about the box number at the place I was forwarding my mail to. I did need to include that information, but I had to prefix it with “PMB” meaning “Private Mail Box” instead of “Ste” meaning “Suite” like I did before.

I had to format it exactly like this for their system to understand and accept it. This is un-knowable information, at least to me, but that’s what customer support is for I suppose and USPS was all over it. In fact they just left me a message the first time they called, then followed up a few hours later and I was able to answer the phone then and chat with them and it all worked out fine.

I’d come in here, delete it, and they would default back to whatever they default to, some other numbers.

So I’d either leave them like that, which immediately fixed the internet, or set 1.1.1.1, Cloudflare’s DNS, as I have it in my head that it’s possibly “faster”. Either way, it worked, but every time I restarted the machine, it was back to 127.0.0.1 and broken. I tried all kinds of jiggery-pokery to get it to stick, but it wouldn’t. I also tried every month or so to sort it out, and always failed.

The good news is that it’s fixed!

The lead came from my co-worker Stephen finding a Reddit thread that mentions an app called NextDNS that does that so it can handle DNS itself. I think I maybe did give NextDNS a shot at one point, but didn’t like something about it (or had trouble), and thought I had fully uninstalled it.

Obviously: I did not have it fully uninstalled. It was nowhere to be found in my Applications folder or through search, but a vestige of it did remain.

I ended up using this very strange app called Etrecheck where you type in your problem and it does system diagnosis stuff and tries to figure out your issue. It was when nextdns showed up in the results of running that as an “Unsigned File” that was “running” and “probably malicious” that I put 2 and 2 together.

Rooting out this file (and an alias to it) and deleting it made the problem go away.