I managed to avoid Covid-19 all this time, but on Monday afternoon I started to come down with what I thought was a bad cold.
Monday night test. No photos of the positive tests on Wednesday.
The first few hours on Monday evening were the worst, with a dull headache, shakes, coughing, fever and tiredness forcing me to bed early. I got progressively better over the next few days, but there was still that wracking cough, congestion, fever, tiredness and the shakes that would strike randomly or all together.
I’m still isolating. If I dare speak too loudly, I’m wracked by coughing that almost has me doubled over. I can feel perfectly fine, but then a tickle starts in my throat, and I’m coughing again.
My wife has been amazing, caring for me. She is my rock through this time. Somehow, it appears I didn’t infect her. We spent 6 hours in the car together on Sunday. I tested myself on Monday, but it was negative. I should have worn a mask then, even with the negative result, but I didn’t. It wasn’t until Wednesday when the tests turned positive. My teenage son has escaped too, I hope!
Thankfully, I’m fully vaccinated. I don’t like to think what it would be like if I wasn’t.
Before we start, do you know what Mastodon is? It’s sort of like email, where you can send an email from gmail.com to a yahoo.com account, except it looks very like Twitter. This pcmag article is a good introduction to it. Jeff Jarvis wrote a good post too, and Time Magazine interviewed Eugen Rochko, the founder of Mastodon that you should read.
This weekend, a probably sizeable chunk of #IrishTwitter migrated to Mastodon. We’re not the only ones. Twitter has been getting more hateful and acting as an echo chamber for lots of horrible people over the years. The sale of Twitter to Elon Musk, the firing of half the staff, his pronouncements of “free speech” all point towards the site being less regulated, less maintained and less moderated. You can’t deal with complaints if there’s nobody there listening to complaints of harassment or hate.
(No we didn’t)
I don’t doubt that many of us will continue to visit and contribute to whatever Twitter becomes. Over the last few years, most of my interactions there have been publicising my blog posts. All I could see on there was angry tweets from different people, or people who were broadcasting their top ten ways of doing X, Y or Z. Hardly any actual conversation.
So, Mastodon. I woke up early on Saturday morning and discovered there was a #TwitterMigraton to Mastodon. I already had an account on mastodon.social but Irish Twitter was moving to mastodon.ie, and that’s where I went too, creating @donncha@mastodon.ie.
Judging from what I’ve read elsewhere, all mastodon instances are experiencing a HUGE surge in user registrations as people look for an alternative to the stinking sinking ship that is Twitter.
On Saturday, the admins of mastodon.ie ran into performance difficulties as they dealt with the influx of new users. The site slowed down and people couldn’t upload images. Over 6,000 people are on that instance now.
Remember the early days of Twitter?
The admins increased their hosting plan, eventually maxing out at the top tier. To pay for hosting they asked for donations. Right now they have raised over €4100!
How do I add my WordPress blog to Mastodon?
It’s mostly straight forward. Install these two plugins:
The installation instructions are unfortunately not great. After you install both plugins, go to your Profile page (Users->Profile) and scroll right to the end. Down there you will find your profile identifier. It will look like @author@hostname.tld. For this blog that is @donncha, and I have my photoblog at @donncha. Search for those on Mastodon and you will find my two blogs. Please feel free to follow!
When a post is made and shared on Mastodon, it allows others to reply. Those replies to the toot on Mastodon will be sent to your WordPress blog as a comment! That blew my mind when I discovered that!
Troubleshooting
I discovered that running the plugins on a multi-site WordPress install will cause problems. Instead of activating it on the root install, you need to activate it on each one. I presume that’s maybe because the rewrite rules are added on plugin activation, but that’s just a guess.
If you have caching you might want to turn it off, or at the very least disable caching in /.well-known/ as that’s where Mastodon and other services will query your server for updated information.
It can take 10 to 15 minutes before a new post is seen. Be patient!
Why not?
There’s one reason you might not want to do this. Your blog will be on a Fediverse instance by itself. Your blog posts will only show if someone is following it, or you boost the toots on Mastodon, or in the Federated feed. They won’t show in the Local Feed of your Mastodon instance. The best way around this is by careful use of relevant hashtags, but please don’t spam them, or you’ll be blocked.
Alternatives
You can hook your WordPress blog to your account too. I haven’t used them, but I saw two people use these plugins. Those posts will appear in the Local Feed of your Mastodon instance, which is a plus for discoverability.
You can also use IFTTT if your site can’t run plugins, and you have an RSS feed. Some details in this blog post. Thanks Sandy for that link!
I’m very excited about this. Is it too early to say that there’s enough momentum to sustain a #IrishMastodon community? I hope it succeeds.
Edit: George has a guide on his blog explaining how to do the same thing but points out that you need the WebMention plugin to receive replies as comments. I saw replies to my toots appear here as comments, but only if they were direct replies. If I replied to someone who replied to my blog that reply wouldn’t show as a comment, and I just tested that again and WebMention doesn’t change that, unfortunately.
Matthew Thomas has created a remote follow tool called apfollow, with source available. This creates a page where you can follow a Mastodon account by entering your own details in a box and it redirects you to your home server to do the follow. Here’s a link to follow my Mastodon.ie account. It fails for me, but maybe that’s something to do with mastodon.ie settings. I’ll fill out a bug report but it looks promising.
If you’re in this part of the world, then daylight savings means the clocks went back an hour last weekend. Your phone adjusted itself, as did some other gadgets, but your oven probably didn’t, and your camera almost certainly didn’t update either.
I couldn’t possibly describe how to fix the time on your camera, but on my Sony A7III I was able to disable “daylight savings time” and the time was corrected. I need to switch it back on next Spring, of course.
If, like me, you forgot to do that on Sunday morning, or even worse, you’re in the USA where they switched a few weeks ago, you can use a handy tool in Lightroom to fix the time on any photos you took. It’s in Metadata->Edit Capture Time… and you can adjust the time on multiple photos at a time.
Good thing too, as I had to adjust the time on several hundred photos.
Of course, if you’ve been travelling to another timezone and forgot to adjust your camera time, you should use “Edit Capture Time” to fix the time on those photos too. Years later, you’ll wonder why photos taken at noon are pitch black, and it wasn’t an eclipse…
Queen will release a new song tomorrow, Face it Alone, with vocals by the late Freddie Mercury. First play was supposed to be on BBC Radio 2 in the UK, but a French DJ played it last night, and somebody recorded it. I first heard there would be a new song back in July, and I was so excited to hear what it would be.
The song comes from a demo recorded in 1988 or 1989. There are copies of the demo floating around out there, but it looks like they’ve been scrubbed from YouTube. There used to be a version of it here last July. The demo wasn’t great. It was probably recorded on a tape recorder with a microphone held up in the air as other people talked nearby. I presumed that Queen have a better recording of it.
Is it any good? I listened to it once. I’m not jumping up and down with joy that there’s a new Freddie Mercury song. They didn’t have much to work with, and it unfortunately shows. Freddie’s vocals sound very auto-tuned. His singing at the start of the song sounds like an AI effect you’d hear on a Zoom call to remove background sound. It ruins his voice. Other vocals are better, the guitar is great, but it’s not a song I’ll listen to on a regular basis.
Edit on October 13th: the official video is out now. Sound quality is much better, of course, but that first verse sounds very forced. The last line, “is set on fire”, does not sound natural. I would love to know how much processing went into making this track.
You’re the only one who logs into your WordPress website.
You only do it on your computer at home.
You lock your computer every time you step away, even when there’s nobody at home.
You have a 2FA plugin which adds a new field, and means checking your phone on each login.
You might have become annoyed from time to time when you forget to check the “Remember me” checkbox on the login page. You know that you will have to log in again tomorrow or whenever the login session expires, rather than in 2 weeks time. Just because of an empty checkbox.
There’s very valid reasons for not checking this box. If you use a public computer, or one in an office and don’t lock your computer, then you want to be logged out. For the rest of us, it’s a bonus if you don’t need to login again so soon.
Here’s a tiny little script that will check the “remember me” checkbox. Create a php script called remember-me.php in wp-content/mu-plugin/ with the following:
A good few years ago, Apple changed how their screenshot function (CMD+SHIFT+4) worked by adding a small preview before it was saved. This allows you to edit the screenshot before it’s saved and used.
I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I used that to edit the screenshot. More often than not, I (metaphorically) drummed my fingers waiting the couple of seconds it took for the preview to disappear, so I could upload or do something with the screenshot.
How do I get rid of it? I looked around for a solution ages ago, but my Google-fu failed me. Last year I looked again, and I found this post that describes how it’s done.
Because this is probably something you want to do but never realised it, I’ll repeat what they said there. This is how you stop the floating thumbnail preview when you take a screenshot in macOS. It’s so easy!
Press CMD+SHIFT+5 to launch the screen capture app.
Click on Options.
In that menu deselect “Show Floating Thumbnail”.
So simple, but it will save many precious seconds throughout my day!
Many years ago I set the location of screenshots to a screenshots folder, so I have been into that options menu. Maybe the floating thumbnail setting wasn’t there at the time.
Petrol in Ballinspittle is only €1.819/lt today. That’s the cheapest I’ve seen in a long time.
After listening to this Planet Money podcast about the cost of gasoline I wonder if we will have expensive petrol and diesel forever? Reason being, it’s unlikely that new oil refineries will ever be built again as demand for oil products plummet in the next decade. A guest on the show predicted that a barrel of oil will be $20-$30 in ten years time.
Electric cars are becoming a lot more attractive, but I won’t be looking to buy a new car for quite some time.
For you, my American reader, there are 3.78541 litres in a US gallon. That means the price of gasoline/petrol here is $6.89/gallon.
Aside from all this, the reduction in oil production will have a detrimental effect on sulphur production. It’s a by-product of that system and used by the metal and fertilizer industries. It’s cheap as chips now, but if there’s a shortage, the price of food will skyrocket.
Well, I bought several books recently. They’re all photography books, but I wanted to share one photo from the book I bought yesterday.
Edna Egbert on the ledge, No. 497 Dean Street. 1942.
The book is New York exposed : photographs from the Daily News, and you can read it online on archive.org or buy it in a few places if you search for it.
When I flipped through the book in Vibes & Scribes this photo was the first one I saw and immediately grabbed me. It totally looks staged, but Edna’s son, Fred, got married, joined the army, and had not written to his mother since, and she was distraught! I don’t know if she could have killed herself landing on the steps of that house, but there were sharp spikes on the railings if she had jumped far enough, so who knows? It was a cry for help.
A policeman kept her talking for 25 minutes while others rigged a net.
As officers Ed Murphy and George Munday tried to persuade her to come back into the building, she brandished a mirror and started swinging it at them. The police grabbed her arms and she proceeded to sit on the ledge.
600 people gathered to watch. The police tried to persuade her to come in the window, but she either jumped or was finally pushed to fall safely in the net.
According to census records, Mrs. Egbert was either 42 or 44-years-old, not 50 as noted in every article about this story. Her husband John Egbert was 64 and their wayward son Fred was 20. Whatever became of Mrs. Egbert and her non-writing son Fred is unknown.
The book is full of other great photos, some you’ll recognise and descriptions to explain what’s happening. Borrow it for an hour on archive.org and take a look through it.
Back in the day, magazines were a huge part of the computer scene. Each machine had a dedicated magazine, and if you were lucky, more than one.
I bought my Commodore 64 in 1989, but I had a Speccy 48K before that. A company called Newsfield published a magazine called Crash that catered to the interests of the Speccy, and also one called Zzap!64 for the C64. The transition from Speccy to C64 meant moving from one magazine to another of course. One constant in both worlds was Oliver Frey’s amazing artwork that graced the covers of both magazines.
My favourite is probably the cover of issue 50 of Zzap!64, the first issue of that magazine I ever bought, but he painted so many others it’s hard to choose.
Choose I did however, as I bought a number of prints off his website in late 2021. I bought the Speedball print featured above, as well as the Retrograde and Elite covers. I’m awful for hoarding things and I still have the tube the prints came in with what is probably Oliver’s writing on it, or maybe his partner, Roger’s, who knows?
All this is to say I’m a huge fan and admirer of Oli’s work. So it was with great sadness that I read that he passed away at 7:55 this morning. He was only 74. Thank you for the art, Oli. My condolences to your partner, family and friends.
I have found a brand new error in Lightroom that doesn’t appear in search engines yet. It started happening after the update today. There are similar error messages reported on the Adobe forums, but not this one.
Edit: the next morning it looks like Adobe have fixed their site and the documentation above is live! For unknown reasons, that warning dialogue has gone away. The only major change was updating to macOS 12.5.1. If you see the error, “Lightroom Classic does not have access to some Standard folders.” then hopefully updating macOS will do the trick, but the documentation is now working and suggests going into Systems & Privacy to give Lightroom Classic more access.
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