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Terence Eden

Because #BotsInSpace is shutting down (😢) I'm looking for a new home for my bots.

I have an RSS feed which posts to BlueSky…
And I have Bridgy which converts BSky to Fediverse…

So… Welcome @openbenches.org !

(This is an experiment. Feedback welcome. I might try self-hosting. Not sure yet. I don't know how to move followers across.)

Terence Eden

Thinking about this further… I would like your advice and wisdom on how I should self-host my many bots.

All one one sub-domain?
@bot1@bots.edent.tel
@bot2@bots.edent.tel

Separate sub-domain for each?
@bot@bot1.edent.tel
@bot@bot2.edent.tel

Buy a new domain for each?
(LOL nope!)

Something else?
(What?)

Terence Eden

🆕 blog! “http:, ftp:, and ... dict:?”

I went for a spelunk through an ancient codebase a few weeks ago which contained a curious regex that I just couldn't grok.

{<((https?|ftp|dict|tel):[^\'">\s]+)>}i

I'm familiar with HTTP and FTP. I worked in the mobile industry, so knew that tel:+44... could be used to launch a dialer. But DICT?!?!?! It turns out that, lurking on […]

👀 Read more: shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/09/http-

#internet

🆕 blog! “http:, ftp:, and ... dict:?”

I went for a spelunk through an ancient codebase a few weeks ago which contained a curious regex that I just couldn't grok.

{<((https?|ftp|dict|tel):[^\'">\s]+)>}i

I'm familiar with HTTP and FTP. I worked in the mobile industry, so knew that tel:+44... could be used to launch a dialer. But DICT?!?!?! It turns out that, lurking on […]

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Bruce Lawson ✅ (quiet time)

@Edent 'nifty' doesn't mean 'groovy'; groovy is nifty with lashings of extra 'cosmic'. HTH.

Jon Wood

@Edent of course curl supports it. Is there anything you can’t use curl for?

dan 💾

@Edent Oh, interesting! Sticking a dict:// url into Safari on my Mac makes it want to open the Dictionary app.

But it falls apart after that... with your example it tries to up the ‘dict.org’ directly after the :// and gets no entries found, instead of connecting to the dict.org server :/

Safari wanting to open a dict:// url in the Dictionary app
The Mac Dictionary app not finding any entries for dict.org
Terence Eden

The new version of Firefox for Android has a built in translation tool.

And, even better, it protects your privacy by doing the translation on your device, rather than sending data to the cloud.

support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/a

Switch today!

screenshot of Firefox offering to translate from French to English.
Show previous comments
Marcos Dione

@Edent for full pages it was released two releases ago. For text selection, it's now in the RMB/context menu.

Maxi 10x 💉

@Edent My version has had this version for over a month now?

Neil Brown

@Edent Yes! It is so convenient to have this on mobile as well as desktop, and Mozilla seems to have implemented it really well.

Terence Eden

Boring technical question which neither the documentation nor ChatGPT can answer.

I want to automate screenshots using #Python's #Selenium Webdriver with #Chrome.

This works - but the non-logged in experience of Twitter forces dark-mode.

I want a light-mode screenshot.

I can't find a way to set SEC-CH-PREFERS-COLOR-SCHEME in Selenium. Nor can I find a light-mode toggle for non-logged in Twitter users.

Any clues gang?

(I want to automate replacing my Twitter embeds with a screenshot.)

Terence Eden

Aha! There's a way to cheat!

The old Twitter embed API lets you manually specify colour scheme - and is easy to screenshot.

For example: platform.twitter.com/embed/Twe

Hopefully I can replace all the Twitter embeds on my website with images (and, yes, I will add alt text).

Thanks @samir for giving me the inspiration.

Terence Eden

Here's a list of everyone standing for election who has a Mastodon account:

candidates.democracyclub.org.u

Only 11 candidates so far.

If you know of any others, please add it to their candidate page.

If you know of anyone standing, please encourage them to join the Fediverse.

#UKPolitics #GE2024

Terence Eden

You receive a call on your phone.
The caller says they're from your bank and they're calling about a suspected fraud.

"Oh yeah," you think. Obvious scam, right?

The caller says "I'll send you an in-app notification to prove I'm calling from your bank."

Your phone buzzes. You tap the notification This is what you see.

Still think it is a scam?
1/3

In app popup. "Are you on the phone with Chase? We need to check it's you on the phone to us. Let us know it's you and enter your passcode on the next screen. @ Not you? Your details are safe. Just tap 'No, it's not me' and we'll end the call."
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Rob

@Edent Whenever my bank calls me, I hang up and call them back myself at their normal customer service number.

Inbound calls from a bank? Never. Not on my watch.

Androcat

@Edent Man-in-the-middle, I would wager.

I.e. the con is calling you up, then initializing a password restore interaction with your bank, timed so that you accept the verification, giving him access.

I only ever accept that sort of verification on calls that I have initialized myself.

Григорий Клюшников

You receive a call on your phone. The caller says they're from your bank. You hang up and call back to the bank yourself. End of story. If the caller objects to you doing that, that by itself is an enormous red flag. You never, EVER take incoming calls from "your bank" seriously.

I myself have an additional rule that I always reject calls from unknown numbers, unless I expect one (delivery, taxi, etc).

Terence Eden

🆕 blog! “A (tiny, incomplete, single user, write-only) ActivityPub server in PHP”

I've written an ActivityPub server which only allows you to post messages to your followers. That's all it does. It won't record favourites or reposts. There's no support for following other accounts or receiving replies. It cannot delete o…

👀 Read more: shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/02/a-tin

#ActivityPub #fediverse #mastodon #php #Symfony

🆕 blog! “A (tiny, incomplete, single user, write-only) ActivityPub server in PHP”

I've written an ActivityPub server which only allows you to post messages to your followers. That's all it does. It won't record favourites or reposts. There's no support for following other accounts or receiving replies. It cannot delete o…

Matt Cengia

@Edent "they are cursed and I cannot read documentation. But mostly the cursed thing.”
😂

Terence Eden

🆕 blog! “Rebuilding FourSquare for ActivityPub using OpenStreetMap”

I used to like the original FourSquare. The "mayor" stuff was a bit silly, and my friends never left that many reviews, but I loved being able to signal to my friends "I am at this cool museum" or "We're at this pub if you want to meet" or "Spendi…

👀 Read more: shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/01/rebui

#ActivityPub #fediverse #FOURSQUARE #geolocation #OpenStreetMap

🆕 blog! “Rebuilding FourSquare for ActivityPub using OpenStreetMap”

I used to like the original FourSquare. The "mayor" stuff was a bit silly, and my friends never left that many reviews, but I loved being able to signal to my friends "I am at this cool museum" or "We're at this pub if you want to meet" or "Spendi…

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David Flanagan

@Edent the whole idea that Mastodon doesn’t support something and PixelFed does is frustrating.

ActivityPub servers should host all our vocabularies and apps show what they understand, but sadly Mastodon and every other app decided to forgo the Client to Server API and use something bespoke 😞

Ben 🥳

I've been working on my own ActivityPub site (this one, socialsoup).

I want to allow user to add a location to their status / notes. Mastodon allows you to Mention users, and stores this in the tags property, as well as hashtags. Maybe this is a good place to attach a location too?

I'm definitely going to follow along with what you're doing here :)

Terence Eden

🆕 blog! “Using date-based CSS to make old web pages *look* old”

How do you know you're looking at an old website? You may have found a page which has lots of interesting information, but how can you tell it's a modern and relevant result? Some websites don't contain dates in their URls. There may not be a © date or publication date shown on the page. […]

👀 Read more: shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/12/using

#css #design #history #HTML

🆕 blog! “Using date-based CSS to make old web pages *look* old”

How do you know you're looking at an old website? You may have found a page which has lots of interesting information, but how can you tell it's a modern and relevant result? Some websites don't contain dates in their URls. There may not be a © date or publication date shown on the page. […]

Jon Hicks

@Edent I love this! If I had the energy I would love to re-implement the relevant site designs to my older blog articles.

Terence Eden

Yet another entry for the "Falsehoods programmers believe about names" codex.

bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-67

So-called "real name" policies are often a result of a cultural hegemony which cannot conceive of anything outside its narrow set of experiences.

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Fish Id Wardrobe

@Edent The article makes clear to me something I hadn't really formed into words before: this natural fluidity of names and anonymity in general is a leveller for the poor and disadvantaged. The idea that everyone has just one name (and should not be able to avoid using it) only helps the haves, not the have-nots.

James Baker

@Edent It’s an interesting area. Even in the U.K. you can change your namely freely as many times if you like and without anything other than a signed statutory declaration of your new name. The power to change your name is an important right imho

Rocketman

@Edent This is great. And it’s another recommendation that everyone go and read “Seeing Like A State”.

In this case: standardized names have the effect of handing power over individuals to the government.

By maintaining the casual attitude to names the article describes, Nigerians are keeping out of their lives a state that may not always be benevolent, or even particularly competent.

Terence Eden

Remember, Emoji must come from the Supplementary Multilingual Plane region of Unicode; otherwise they're just ✨sparkling✨ characters.

Terence Eden

🆕 blog! “Some thoughts on Mastodon search”

The latest version of Mastodon includes search functionality. It's early days, but seems to work pretty well. Here are some of the interesting things I found when using it. Search is complex - expectations I don't mean the act of searching a database - that's routine - but I mean it is socially complex. Lots […]

👀 Read more: shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/08/some-

#mastodon #MastodonAPI #search

🆕 blog! “Some thoughts on Mastodon search”

The latest version of Mastodon includes search functionality. It's early days, but seems to work pretty well. Here are some of the interesting things I found when using it. Search is complex - expectations I don't mean the act of searching a database - that's routine - but I mean it is socially complex. Lots […]

Dale Reardon

@Edent I have opted in to search - If I boost a post from someone who has not opted in does their post become searchable on my timeline?

Leon Overweel

@Edent

> Nor can you find people who are talking about a specific page on the web.

Is this accurate? Searching for exact URLs of news articles to find people talking about them is exactly the use case I was looking forward to the most 😞

Kudra :maybe_verified:

@Edent I've been having thoughts on search for a LONG time (decades... drunkdna.livejournal.com/69280 ... this is probably my favourite thing ever said about me ever online and I'm impressed it's still there!) and it's safe to say I am VERY pro-search, but also pro-consent and individuals having granular choices around privacy everywhere.

I think the ability to make private posts OR public posts from the same account already solves the biggest and clearest divide there, but further granularity is not a bad thing, though the more complex, the more daunting for many in trying to navigate using any new app or site. It's tricky.

While it's obvious that it's impossible to search /eberything/ (but Google sure used to do a good job a decade or two ago, and we still have the Wayback Engine...) I'm very interested to see how search develops in Fedi. I think hashtags are doing an ok job at making things discoverable by topic, and it's been interesting to see how different sites have tackled discoverability. You gave a really good overview in your post. Kudos!

@Edent I've been having thoughts on search for a LONG time (decades... drunkdna.livejournal.com/69280 ... this is probably my favourite thing ever said about me ever online and I'm impressed it's still there!) and it's safe to say I am VERY pro-search, but also pro-consent and individuals having granular choices around privacy everywhere.

Terence Eden

Today I have shown great restraint.

Rather than registering yet another domain name, I created a new subdomain on one I purchased a couple of years ago.

Please learn from my wisdom.

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DELETED

@Edent I recently bought a .social domain of the username I've been using in various places for nearly a decade, really just my initials, I just found out yesterday that it's the same username one of the columbine shooters used online apparently. I guess I need to bank on people not knowing just the same as I didn't.

Dave

@Edent why take the joy out of everything though?!

Terence Eden

Could you please help me find some folklore?

The Brothers Grimm recorded the story "Der süße Brei" about a magic porridge pot.
When instructed, it produces food until told to stop. One day, the owner forgets the magic word and the village is engulfed in porridge.

If you are NOT German or English-speaking, does your culture have a similar cautionary tale?
If so, what foodstuff is it about?

Thanks gang, boosts appreciated.

Could you please help me find some folklore?

The Brothers Grimm recorded the story "Der süße Brei" about a magic porridge pot.
When instructed, it produces food until told to stop. One day, the owner forgets the magic word and the village is engulfed in porridge.

If you are NOT German or English-speaking, does your culture have a similar cautionary tale?
If so, what foodstuff is it about?

Terence Eden

Today I was meant to be flying in to San Francisco to attend Twitter's Developer Conference - Chirp.

Twitter had paid for my flights and hotel, because I was one of their developer insiders. I planned to spend the week meeting friends old and new.

Instead, Alan the Hyperprat canceled the conference. So I'm staying in the UK.

So I'm going to spend the week hacking on Mastdon's #API and building cool shit. That'll show him!

You can see what I'm working on at shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/11/build

Today I was meant to be flying in to San Francisco to attend Twitter's Developer Conference - Chirp.

Twitter had paid for my flights and hotel, because I was one of their developer insiders. I planned to spend the week meeting friends old and new.

Instead, Alan the Hyperprat canceled the conference. So I'm staying in the UK.

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John Allison

@Edent Wonderful idea. Look forward to seeing what you come up with.

Anton Piatek

@Edent presumably it gave some specific advantage? UUID or GUID would work for globally unique, no?

Terence Eden

A five year old Reddit post just helped me solve a knotty problem.
I hate to think how much useful info is being lost in ephemeral services like Discord, Slack, and IRC.

Terence Eden

Why don’t video calls have stereo audio?

This is probably me being a bit dense. I'm on a video call with two other people. Alice is on the left of my screen, Bob is on the right. Why isn't the audio in stereo?

(Zoom lets you send stereo audio - but only of you have a stereo microphone. Whereas I'm talking abound individuals sending mono and receiving to stereo.)

Every video conference sy

shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/why-d

#/etc/ #audio #wfh

Eugen Rochko

@Edent Depends entirely on the app. In TeamSpeak you can configure sound from different participants to come from different angles ("3D sound").

Terence Eden

The new version of Firefox for Android is brilliant.
I recommend switching to it. I've been using FF as my daily browser for years and it works flawlessly.

Update screen for Firefox.
micha

@Edent @rauschma it has addons!!
And very soon to come much more. But it has ublock-origin!

Ahurac :artix:

@Edent I recommend using the Fennec fork available on F-Droid for more privacy! it should recieve the update soon if it is not already the case

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