Category: tech

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.
An AI generated image I created to illustrate a point I’ve already forgotten.

(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)!

TwigPen

I'm just about to turn off the IFTTT trigger that tweets notification of my blog posts to Twitter. I've written a wrapper for Python's 'Twython' module; one that provides auth and, right now, the ability to post a tweet. Fingers crossed, hoping it seamlessly replaces IFTTT.

It's called TwigPen, a name borrowed from my pnut.io social network app PigPen. It's used like this from within a Python script:

import TwigPen

…some code to define tweettext…

TwigPen.postsomething(tweettext)

TwigPen Oops 3

After it simply failed to tweet, I rolled the TwigPen code into rssupdatepnut; what follows is a repeat of my previous posts.

-mild bleating follows-

An updated version of my previous post follows. Executive summary: "Doh!"

-original below-

Oops! I forgot to git pull origin master the updated script from the rssupdatepnut GitHub repo.

…

Daft Baz scratched head for a few minutes thinking the script'd failed for some techy reason. No, simply PEBKAC.

Am I feeling lucky?

-original above-

It turns out I messed up here too, with the result below:

$ python3.6 rssupdatepnut.py

File "rssupdatepnut.py", line 81

TwigPen.postsomething(pnut_message)

^

IndentationError: unexpected indent

I'd better fix it then, instead of blogging about it!