Category: tech

CD

My wife bought me a CD (Compact Disc) for Valentine’s Day, for my car, to be played when she’s not in it. Though she respects the influence the band had on the music recording industry she’s not a fan of Talking Heads. She’ll listen to other people’s cover versions though, and is especially fond of Simply Red’s ‘Heaven’. Weird.

But I have a shiny new CD.

Talking Heads 'The Best Of Talking Heads' compilation album. Pumpkin puppy wonders if she can chew the case. No Pumpkin, over my dead body.
Talking Heads ‘The Best Of Talking Heads’ compilation album. Pumpkin puppy wonders if she can chew the case. No Pumpkin, over my dead body.

It took way longer than I wanted to fight my way through the plastic wrapper, the pull tab on the strip running around it was completely hidden. Fingernails scrabbling at the wrapper overlap at the top edge of the case used to be the way I got in, and today was no exception.

Extracted it, placed it in the DVD player under the TV, closed the tray and pressed ▶️.

And this is what I see.

A useless CD track listing in a TV, indicating only Track 1, Track 2, etc., though it does show track durations.
A useless CD track listing in a TV, indicating only Track 1, Track 2, etc., though it does show track durations.

What century are we living in?

Well, right now I am living in the nineteen-seventies and eighties – matching the dates of the tracks (from 1977 to 1988). And do you know, it wasn’t a bad time to grow up after all.

Anyway, for me there’s just one track missing from this 18 track album – and it’s ‘Making Flippy Floppy’.

My favourites on this disc though?

All. They made enough to leave a tremendous legacy, but not enough to get tired of. And while I like to think after all these years I’ve heard all of their stuff I know I haven’t.

Ok, ok.

‘This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)’. It’s on right now.

I wanted it to be played on the last App.net social network’s Monday Night Dance Party, but making the request spelled the DJ’s @ name incorrectly.

Still, here I am.

Surf.social

(After spending time ‘testing’ I’ve added a few more notes in the addenda at the bottom. I’m likely to update this post as things progress… or ignore it entirely).

Well, the itch to try Surf.social (a new social and all-internet aggregator from the people who make Flipboard) became too great and I reached out to them. @marci@flipboard.social (internet royalty!) saw my plaintive cry and set me up with an invite code. Thanks Marci!

I’ve installed the beta app within the iOS TestFlight environment and signed in using my Mastodon credentials. Easy.

It took a while before the splash screen gave way to the intro (I succumbed to the urge to force-close it), and now I’m in!

Unstructured observations:

Adding sources to one’s Home feed or a custom feed using the built-in search page is fairly intuitive and quick. Just type something and a range of source types appear. Magic?

Me first, though I’m no narcissist. I hope. My Mastodon bio page is a bit truncated but it’s probably too big anyway.

The Feeds, Posts and Discuss tabs behave differently to each other.

  • Feeds shows one’s feeds (Home and custom).
  • Posts is a Flipboard-like flip interface with a limited number of one-at-a-time posts shown.
  • Discuss has a free-scrolling list of the same posts, again a limited quantity.

Right now my Watch, Read and Look tabs don’t have any content, and because it’s a beta I can only see the top of the words “Nothing is here right now”, with no ability to scroll down. I’m using a beta of iOS 18.3 until the next public update, and on an iPhone XS.

Ah, it’s variable, I looked at another feed and can see the whole message now. A good thing I’m used to pretending I properly beta test stuff isn’t it!

Picking an individual account to follow in a feed either shows nothing for a Micro.blog user’s account (I guess it’ll take a while to populate) or, in the case of the RSS feed for xkcd.com, another Flipboard flip layout. Incidentally, I initially used Surf.social’s browser setting to open in an external app, not sure I like it so will change.

And the xkcd feed truncates the images, based as it is on their height not width; I’d prefer to see the whole thing previewed but maybe that’s just me?

I do like Surf.social’s search. It’s a world apart from Mastodon’s because it finds stuff. (I know Mastodon’s philosophy is to limit visibility and thus the likelihood of abuse; so this is not a complaint).

Whoever’s working the Surf.social account right now sent me this very useful reply:

“Here are two ideas to dive in:

  1. Start by surfing some of the great custom feeds we’re featuring in Home. Try tapping the Sources tab to get a sense of how these feeds are built.
  2. Tap “Create a New Feed” to get started making your own custom feed. Once you’ve done this, tapping the star icon will let you choose between adding a feed to home or other feeds you are making.

The email you got from us should have more suggestions!

Contact us at support@surf.social if you have any issues

Otherwise feedback@surf.social is welcome

Ride on… 🤙

And with that I’ll stop writing and just have a play for a bit.

Addenda

(Listed in the order found, feedback for some sent to the developer via the TestFlight app):

I’ve explored a bit more and thanks to Marci added a ‘Puppy training‘ feed container containing their ‘Dog Training. Help!‘ feed container. It’s a really cool concept and it just works. Feeds of feeds in feeds, oh yes.

I’d really like to be able to add RSS feeds by URL but it doesn’t look to be possible, at least not yet. For instance I have feeds for a couple of subreddits I moderate; I’m sent either new posts or new comments in those subreddits, and I get my post submissions, saved links and incoming messages from across the network. I’ve a couple of custom Google News searches running too. When RSS feeds arrive I’ll be happier.

I recently signed up to the Bluesky.social network to follow accounts that primarily exist (or until recently) existed on Twitter – and do not exist on Mastodon, not yet. Now I’ve not looked in Twitter for a while. Whilst my timelines there aren’t as ‘polluted’ as some I’ve heard about I’m just opposed to using it since elmo bought the place. I’ve been careful who I follow to maintain a degree of sanity. However, Mastodon is where I want to be, and that’s why – for me – Bluesky isn’t comfortable. Using Surf.social removes the need to check Bluesky – and so I can focus on what I’m interested in without necessarily seeing any discussion.

Mastodon polls don’t show the available options, only the supporting text.

Update: I thought at first there was no ‘proper’ method to remove a source from a custom feed – that one must select it, add and then select the feed from which it must be removed. The dialogue then shows the operation’s success. And so I said “Early days yet.” However I found what’s likely to be the intended method of removing a feed – select the ‘…’ menu at the top of the feed and choose the option to remove from there.

Viewing a Mastodon thread a post is linked to still sends me out of the app despite me deselecting the ‘Use External Browser’ option in Settings.

A feed’s Watch (videos), Read (articles) Listen (new to me, no content yet) and Look (somehow different to Read) tabs now have content. Too granular?

The Listen tab is probably a placeholder for me because I haven’t added any podcasts yet.

Bug, or just my ineptitude: Attempting to add Jeremy Cherfas’ excellent food series ‘Eat This Podcast’ by searching first for his name brings it up in the Podcasts section (complete with familiar icon and description) but then attempts to add a ‘November Learning’ feed. Searching by its title instead simply fails to find the podcast feed in the Podcasts section or anywhere else.

Update: I really really do like the way the feed ‘containers’ work. I’ve setup 4 so far:

  • ‘Puppy training’ (containing Marci’s feed),
  • ‘Quotes’ (quotations),
  • ‘bazbt3’s feeds’ (unoriginal I know),
  • And one called ‘All’, containing the preceding 3.

So I’ve gone 3 levels deep.

Ok, quite a lot of the feed items don’t render particularly pleasingly, and I should probably turn off auto-starting videos (if there’s an option to), and I still don’t really understand why there are so many tabs and what they’re used for. But the app has promise, and I can see why the Flipboard team decided to make it, it’s kind-of… liberating.

Themes

Update below, maybe WordPress isn’t so bad after all?

I broke my WordPress self-hosted/managed site earlier simply by installing a theme, the one named ‘Default’.

The hosts’s AI troubleshooter failed miserably to make any form of difference when I started it.

To fix it ‘manually’ I first attempted to follow the help page linked to in the error message – go into myPHP and deactivate all the plugins.

Nope.

So then I searched for help directly related to WordPress themes and found the way to fix it is to delete the offending theme folder and rename an existing folder to the offending one.

Success, and I felt lucky I knew which theme was active.

And even more luckily everything is back up again.

My hosting plan includes only weekly automatic backups so yes, I just started one now.

Painful isn’t it, how something so complex can be broken by something so apparently simple as a site theme change.

Anyway, I just looked for similar issues with it and eventually arrived at the WordPress.org forum. The only response i found to its incompatibility with a previous version of PHP was the original poster replying to their own post to make a technical change within the theme file definition.

Pointless reporting it if there’s nowhere to report it, so I’ve given up and I’m sticking with ‘Simple Grey’.

Update: While attempting to fix my site I was sent an email from WordPress, “@bazbt3 🏡 Your Site is Experiencing a Technical Issue”. I was busy so didn’t notice it. The email described the fault and contained a special link to bypass the dashboard I couldn’t access – to enter a “special recovery mode”. Maybe now I know this is a thing, the next time the site breaks I’ll be more patient?

Flush

Our toilet cistern developed a fault just before Christmas, luckily only leaking into the bowl. Not a major thing, but we have metered water so it was costing money. The cistern is a low-profile type with limited flush volume to save water, and aside from the one repair a few years ago has handled everything we threw at it, if you know what I mean.

Visit 1

Anyway, a plumber came, looked at it and wanted to break through the tiles around it instead of extracting it after lifting the button bezel. No.

Anyway, I asked if he could confer with his office to query what happened during the previous repair. He agreed, closed the isolating valve to save us money and water ¹, and left.

Incidentally, it has a special seal not carried routinely by the national network of plumbers we used.

So I had to rebook.

Visit 2

Instead of ordering the part or the seal based on prior information, during the second visit the cistern was looked at and a part ordered for delivery to our home. So I had to rebook.

Visit 3

The part arrived on Monday, I rebooked immediately, and the plumber completed the work earlier today. Success! No leak, and we have a working flush.

And here is the one the plumber removed.

What a waste.

¹ We have another toilet, we’re posh we are.

Micro.blog initial issues

I’ve had a few fairly fundamental issues since setting up my custom domain on Micro.blog. Though my username is discoverable on Mastodon (Appdot.net) and the blog works at bt3.com with all links looking good, quite a few are concerning me.

I’ve asked for help via help@micro.blog, when they can spare the time, and I’ve posted this here not to whinge about it but so I remember how things started before I start messing about with CSS, styling my blog. 😱

Ok, the list:

  • Posts no longer automatically appear in my Micro.blog timeline.
  • Neither blog posts nor RSS feeds automatically crosspost to Mastodon, I have either to crosspost from ‘Pages’ or refresh feeds manually on the ‘Sources/Feeds’ page.
  • The comments box under posts is completely absent.
  • None of the comments made by me and others on Micro.blog or Mastodon before or after I set up the domain are visibly linked below the posts. They’re in the timeline though.
  • My custom 404 page does not display when I test by creating a non-existent URL. It’s the same for both the 404.html and the page at layouts/404.html – in a custom theme based under ‘Marfa’ or others, and edited wholly from the ‘Design’ page. Here’s the design I’ve used on both: https://bt3.com/404.html/ (a work in progress).

I’ve checked through the Help pages too, and this isn’t unusual.

Bluesky

I’m sure it’s just me but I can’t summon up the enthusiasm to continue even to crosspost to the Bluesky site. Why? Well, 2 reasons. My social home is the Mastodon-based appdot.net, and now I’ve tried Micro.blog I cannot decide between my self-hosted WordPress blog and one at Micro.blog.

I’m using Bluesky to pull together a few sports reporters and social accounts recently moved from Twitter/X. And that’s all.

The social aspect of being able to blog at Micro.blog and have replies in-line with the posts is compelling. However I’ve been using WordPress for some years now and I’m comfortable with it, but the official plugin linking it to Mastodon simply didn’t work for me. And if I’ve got this right I can continue with the WordPress blog and have it imported to Micro.blog – magic! I know it’s one-way so if I post to Micro.blog it won’t appear in the WordPress blog, but hey, do I care?

Not really.

So what’s next? A todo list:

  • I’ve turned off crossposting to Bluesky.
  • I need to unfollow the ‘Bridgy Fed’ bot to terminate the link between appdot.net and Bluesky.
  • I’ll probably add text in my Bluesky bio to mark it ‘read-only’.
  • I’m definitely going to experiment with retaining a link between my WordPress blog and the Micro.blog site for the duration of the free trial. At least hoping it’s automatic.
  • I’m unlikely to link my domain with Micro.blog within the trial period, even though it’s recommended to do it.

I’m so glad I’ve chosen to think about this over the weekend, it’s bordering on an obsession this trying to find out how things work.

Socials

Somehow, after a long social media hiatus mostly spent on Reddit, I found myself back on Mastodon (a Twitter replacement for me) and Lemmy (maybe a Reddit replacement one day). And, probably as a content consumer rather than an active poster, on BlueSky (a newish Twitter alternative). And for a few days, I’ve been using Pixelfed (a photo sharing service I’ll be using instead of imgur).

Bluesky is literally (not figuratively) the only social network my wife has ever shown any interest in, and only because of the rapid rise in popularity throwing mentions of it into multiple TV news broadcasts and news aggregators. There’s no way she’ll sign up, but anyway…

I’m currently ‘bridging’ the gap between Mastodon and Bluesky using the ‘Bridgy Fed’ service https://fed.brid.gy/. The theory is that posts I make on either network, and some of the interactions prompted by them, can be viewed on both networks and…

It’s just magic isn’t it. It’s probably how the web should be working by default at this point nearly 28 years after I first got online.

Basic security

One of the basic requirements of me using the free ‘IP2Location’ WordPress plugin for my blog is that its authors ask for attribution, which is fair. So here it is:

I just installed and configured the country blocking plugin from https://www.ip2location.com. I found it after a quick web search led me to this page: https://blog.hubspot.com/website/wordpress-plugin-to-block-countries.

The setup procedure is pretty simple: install it from the WordPress dashboard, sign up for a free account at IP2Location to install the database and stuff, and setup the block rules for countries or IP addresses.

An AI-generated monochrome image of a 1980s home computer on fire. Now if one owned such a beast of a computer it's likely one was very serious indeed about computing. I was. One PC had a 'Matrox Millennium' graphics card with an unimaginably vast 4 megabytes of video RAM.

(I didn’t want to pay Wordfence to extend their so-far excellent monitoring and blocking service, at least not yet).

Minecraft

Just over a year ago I ran a Minecraft server on a used Windows 8 tablet converted to Windows 10. It soon became apparent it wasn’t the best solution so I looked around and eventually figured out https://mcprohosting.com would give my daughters and me the best and cheapest performance.

We picked a world seed, fired it up and began to explore. My youngest daughter took to it like a, er… child does to new things, and explored the world, made and built things, exploited it as far as it could go, and then pretty much left for places she could more easily interact with her friends. No great loss there.

Before their boredom set in I built a scale model of our home and let the girls furnish it – and populate it with Mollie cat and Ruby dog.

But the very best thing I did was creat a perpetual morion machine using red stone and plungers. Here’s the YouTube video, screenshot not long before I closed the hosting account:

 

Incidentally, if I’d not closed the account and the details hadn’t been removed from the server, Mollie & Ruby would probably be a bit hungry by now, I can’t recall if we left the doors open when we left! (There were plenty of sheep and cows and chickens around, don’t worry)!