January 2024 – Something Odd!

A Mastodon account is an email to spammers

This morning I received a spam email where the spammer accidentally CCed everyone, instead of BCCing them. They also seemed to have spammed many people named Donncha, so hopefully none of them reply-all asking to unsubscribe.

It’s not the first time, but they included an “email address” that isn’t an email address. They used my @donncha@mastodon.ie Mastodon account. They also included my Gmail address, which is how I received the email.

A screenshot showing the text:
donncha.o
donncha.o
donncha.o
donncha@
donncha@
donncha@
donncha@
donncha@
donncha@
donncha@
donncha@
donncha@
donncha@
donncha@
donnchagi
donnchah‹
donncham

I started receiving email to this blog’s @donncha@odd.blog address and to photoblog’s @donncha@inphotos.org address too, but I’ve blocked them already.

Screenshot from Fastmail showing an email alias is disabled.

If you publish the address of your self-hosted Mastodon account, you might want to make sure you don’t have an email address there too, or you’ll start to get unwelcome emails.

BTW – you should pay for your email, especially if you have self-hosted domains. Fastmail is great. Here’s the post I wrote about Fastmail when I switched over last year.

View at Home 0.1

View at Home is a simple Tampermonkey script to make interacting with Mastodon (and probably other Fediverse services) easier. When you open a Mastodon post, it’s not possible to comment or favourite it unless it’s on your own home instance. The usual way of dealing with this is by copying the link into the search box of your own instance and clicking the resulting link.

The search box from the Mastodon web client.

This script will add a “View at home” button to the top left of the page when you look at a Mastodon site. By clicking on this button, it will search for that page on your own Mastodon instance and then redirect you home so you can comment or favourite it.

When you install it, it will give you dire warnings about the extra capabilities it requires. These are needed to make the search on your home instance, and to save the hostname of your home instance in Local Storage in your browser. Please read through the code to be sure you trust what it is doing, as the permissions are wide-ranging.

The first time you run it, the script will ask for your home Mastodon instance. Enter the hostname, without the protocol in this box, and it will be saved to the browser Local Storage. If you get it wrong, click the “Reset Config” button, and it will show you the same popup.

ChatGPT4 was used to help write this script, with edits and prompts by me when it wasn’t exactly what I wanted.

This is a first release. If you find any bugs or have suggestions, please create a GitHub issue in the View at Home repository, comment on this post, or contact me on Mastodon.

F***ing Kidney Stones

The pain I’ve felt in the last few days because of a tiny little stone inside in my body is worse than anything I’ve ever experienced. Absolutely excruciating and uncomfortable. It’s weird drinking lots of water only for my mouth to be dry moments later.

I’m feeling ok right now, at this moment, but I doubt that it’s over yet. I’ve been to the doctor and following his advice. Yet again, feeling so lucky to be married to a wonderful woman who takes such good care of sick ol’ me.

Blarney is Frozen

Schools are back this morning, but temperatures are staying around 2ºC (feels like -3ºC) which would be manageable except it rained around 4am this morning. Local roads are lethal, with vehicles already skidding and crashing.