Yes or no?

I spent quite a bit of today making some Melonpans. Unfortunately I overestimated how long they'd take to rise (I made them using wholemeal flour, so I thought they'd need longer than normal), and when I checked on them they had risen too much and 'popped' (deflated to be wide and flat). Still, they tasted quite nice when baked.

I also spent quite a bit of time working on one of my wordpress plugins and writing a blog post for my photo tips website.

With regards to my photo tips website, I was checking the G+ page for it and found that Google have introduced a stats page. However, the stats page shows that I had 663 new followers in the past month. This definitely is not correct, unless a load of people also unfollowed me. The stats show a big spike on one day, so maybe a load of spam accounts followed me on that day in the hope I'd follow them back, and then subsequently unfollowed me?

Whether the stats are wrong, or are correct but don't show unfollows, they seem to be pretty useless. Manually noting the number of followers and then seeing how it goes up or down still seems to be the only option for the moment.

Forcing refresh of Hosts file in Windows / Filezilla

As part of my web dev work I use an Ubuntu VM. Sometimes I need to transfer over files from the host machine, which I do using FTP through Filezilla. However, the IP address assigned to my Ubuntu VM sometimes changes, which means updating the Hosts file on the host machine with the new IP for the VM.

This used to work quite nicely, but the past few months I'd found that I needed to restart my PC otherwise Filezilla would still try to connect to the old IP even after the hosts file had been updated the new IP address. However, I found today that this was not actually an issue with a Filezilla update as I had previously thought. Instead it seems that it is because I have moved the location of the hosts file, and symlinked C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts to the new location.

It seems quite strange to me that the system would refresh the DNS immediately when the hosts file is directly edited, but not when it is symlinked to a file that is edited. Anyway, I found the solution to avoid having to restart the PC to refresh the hosts file / DNS: Simply open a command prompt, then run ipconfig /flushdns.

In other news: