This is the third in a series of Did You Know? blog posts. Each blog post gives ten fascinating facts on a particular topic. In part 1 the topic was science. In part 2 the topic was history.
Today, I give you ten facts about Geography:
1. Africa is the only continent that is in all 4 hemispheres: North, South, East and West.
2. Canada has half of all natural lakes in the world.
3. At 8, 848 metres (29, 029 feet), Mount Everest is the world’s highest mountain.
4. Out of the highest 25 peaks in the world, 19 are in the Himalayas.
5. Every continent has a city called Rome, apart from Antarctica.
6. The Antarctica ice cap has 29m cubic kilometres of ice and represents 90% of all the ice on the planet.
7. Australia is wider than the moon.
8. The UK has over 100 small islands around it.
9. The Dead Sea is made up of 33.7% salt, an unusually high concentration, and it is this that allows people to easily float due to natural buoyancy.
10. Russia is the largest country in the world covering an area of 17,075,400 square kilometres.
This is the second in a series of Did You Know? blog posts. Each blog post will give ten fascinating facts on a particular topic. In part 1 the topic was science.
Today, I give you ten facts from history:
1. It took Thomas Edison 1,000 attempts to invent the lightbulb. He was once asked about the failure of the 999 attempts. He is said to have said “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”
2. Between 87m-117m people are estimated to have died in World War 1 & 2. Approximately 37m people died in World War 1 and 50m-80m people in World War 2.
3. Ann Frank, her family and others lived in a Secret Annex for 2 years before being arrested by the Gestapo. Anne was sent to a concentration camp and died of typhus not long before the camp was liberated by the Allies. However Ann lives on in her diary published with the consent and permission of her father Otto Frank.
4. Queen Elizabeth I’s pinnacle of her rule was The Spanish Armada. King Philip II of Spain planned to send 130 ships to take Elizabeth I off the throne and seize England. However Elizabeth’s strategy beat The Spanish Armada. She sent Drake with a fleet of her own ships to attack Cadiz Harbour. Drake was successful destroying over 100 Spanish ships and returning with gold. Then when Philip sent the armada (or what remained of it), Elizabeth used fireships to scatter the formation of the Spanish ships. Then her ships picked off the Spanish ships one by one.
5. In each Roman Fort there were 500 men and horses. An average horse produces 23KGS of faeces and urine per day. That’s 11,500KGS of waste per day!
6. Winston Churchill is famous for being the Prime Minister during World War 2. But he was also an artist, starting his artistry in his forties. He created over 500 paintings over 48 years.
7. Between 75m-200m European people were killed by The Black Plague in the 14th century. This accounted 30%-60% of the total population in Europe. The Black Plague is thought to have been airborne and spread so quickly due to poor hygiene, poor living conditions (including disposal of human waste) and poor disposal of infected corpses.
8. The first black and white TV sold in the UK was around 1936. The first colour TV sold in the UK was around the late 1960s.
9. Britain first slaving expedition set out in 1562 by Sir John Hawkins. Slavery continued until 1807, when the UK passed legislation making slavery illegal and freeing all slaves. The slave trade was abandoned for moral reasons, rather than economic reasons, as at the time there was still a lot of money to be made in the trade of slaves.
10. The NHS and The Welfare State were both established after the second World War. The UK was recovering from an expensive war, yet still deemed healthcare, social security, free education, council housing and full employment as priorities. The NHS was established in 1948 and Social Security began 1945.
This is the first in a series of Did You Know? blog posts. Each blog post will give ten fascinating facts on a particular topic.
1. There are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way and 60 billion planets that could support life.
2. The amazon rainforest produces about 20% of the oxygen in the atmosphere.
3. The human brain uses 20% of the body’s energy and oxygen, despite only accounting for 2% of body weight.
4. Sloths sleep an average of 20 hours per day. They are beat by Koalas who sleep for an average of 22 hours.
5. An adult human body is made up of around 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms.
6. The coldest place on earth is Antarctica and the hottest place on earth is Libya.
7. 24,000 people are killed by lightening each year.
8. A species of Jellyfish can live forever. The bowhead whale lives for an average of 200 years and giant tortoises have been recorded as living for 152 years.
9. The oldest tree is estimated to be 5,062 years old.
10. Honey has been found in Egyptian tombs and was still edible. This means that jarred honey doesn’t go off or rot.
My blog has been hosted on Vidahost for a number of years. But they recently emailed to inform me a price hike. So I decided to switch to another hosting provider, this blog post is about the process of transferring my WordPress blog from one server to another.
I should add that it wasn’t just the price hike that caused me to make this decision. Customer support is much poorer now than it has been in the past. For example: I got an email stating I was running out of disk space. I opened a ticket to see if I could increase disk space without upgrading package. The Customer Agent basically said no.
Then when I was transferring my files from Vidahost’s (old) server to 1&1’s (new) server (more details below) I noticed huge error logs (2.5GB one of them) and many .core files (100-200MB each). These files had eaten up my disk space (from the usual 2GB of 10GB used). At one time a Vidahost’s Customer Agent would have looked at my files on the server to see why I had run out of space all of a sudden, spotted the problem and resolved it.
I asked my friends on Facebook if they could recommend a good, UK-based Hosting provider. One of my friend’s husband recommended 1&1’s.
I decided to transfer my hosting as 1&1 offered a better price, unlimited bandwidth (which I was always in the red on Vidahost), unlimited disk space and more up-to-date servers (I’d recently had a few problems updating WordPress plugins on Vidahost servers due to PHP version).
But the prospect of moving my WordPress blog from one server to another was daunting. How the hell do I do that? I thought to myself. So I Googled it and found this great Step by Step Guide by WPExplorer.
There were a few hiccups. I successfully exported my WordPress database, but when I went to import it on the new server it timed out. I checked the database on the new server and found it was missing the last few fields. So I googled and found this site Exporting Your Database from Your Previous Host by WPEngine, which explains how to export specific fields. I exported the missing fields and then imported them. First problem solved.
Then I downloaded my files from the old server and uploaded them to the new server using ForkLift by Binarynights without any problems. I changed my wp-config.php and uploaded it. My second problem was an Error Establishing Database Connection. I googled the error and found How to Fix Error Establishing Database Connection by wpbeginner. This site helped me realise what I hadn’t updated in the wp-config.php.
My final step was to change the NameServers for my domain. I did this and my blog and emails went down for about 24 hours while NameSever propagation took place.
Once my blog and emails were back up, my final problem was that my blog wasn’t displaying right. Nothing I did fixed the problem. In the end I opened both the old server and new server’s File Explorers in Google Chrome.
It was then spotted the problem, all folders and files had different file permissions on the new server. So I changed them to match the settings on my current server, which solved the problem. Here is an article that explains more about file permissions: Ask Unbuntu – What is meaning of 755 permissions.
