Author Archives: Donncha

I was permanently banned by Facebook

My Facebook account was permanently banned on Wednesday along with all the people who take care of the Cork Skeptics page. We’re still not sure why but it might have something to do with the Facebook algorithm used to detect far-right conspiracy groups.

When your account is disabled you’re given the opportunity to upload some form of ID. That is the price of requesting a review. Unfortunately if you are permanently banned you will only be informed after uploading the photo that permanently banned accounts cannot be unbanned. It’s a particularly evil but clever way for Facebook to gather real world identifiable information about a user who may be desperate to get back into their account.

The good news is that our accounts were restored last night after two days in which we tweeted about it and contacted everyone we knew who might be able to help. Thank you to everyone who RTed, liked or commented on those tweets, or helped in other ways behind the scenes. I really do not know how this decision was reversed so don’t bother asking, sorry. We’re not the only group to be banned in error. It happened to a group of seventeenth century historical re-enactors who were banned but then unbanned.

The first thing I did when I logged in again? I downloaded all my information so if it happens again at least I have a copy of what I posted there. I haven’t come across the photo of my ID in my downloaded information however, though it might be there. I haven’t looked at all of it yet. Thank you GDPR.

If you have a Facebook account you should download your information too because it could happen to you too, even though you did nothing wrong. Go here and click the “Create File” button now.

Yeah, I know you won’t do it but you really should.

People say the age of personal blogging is over because everyone is on social media but I beg to differ. At least I won’t be banned from my own self-hosted blog any time soon.

Inchydonney Beach, December 12th 2020.

Update: All the admin users of Cork Skeptics were once again banned from Facebook on Friday, January 22nd 2021. If you know anyone in Facebook I would appreciate a word with them!

Update: Much later. Our accounts were restored and the Cork Skeptics page was restored but that’s twice now so we have deleted the page to avoid any more problems.

Make sure you do regular backups of your Facebook data!

Signs of the Pandemic

No mask on your face, big disgrace.

I can’t imagine going into a restaurant or pub for a long time still. The lockdown in Ireland has managed to reduce the infection rate of Covid19 in the country dramatically compared to levels last month but it hasn’t gone away.

Unfortunately the lockdown itself has decimated many businesses and put medical procedures on hold that would normally happen. I hope people take more seriously the advice to wear masks in busy public areas so we can avoid another lockdown in January but it’s almost guaranteed we’ll have another one in the new year. 🙁

Posted on Reddit today.

Howto: sync recent photos in Lightroom Classic

Lightroom Classic comes with 20GB of space on Adobe’s cloud service (Lightroom CC/Web/app) but did you know that you can sync photos to the cloud and then edit them on your phone without using that space?

The original photos are not synced, but a smaller cut down smart preview is which in most cases will be indistinguishable from the original.

If you create a collection, all the photos in that collection can be synced with the cloud. They’ll appear as an album of the same name in the Lightroom app on your phone or iPad. They won’t take up any of that valuable 20GB of space. Right-click on the collection and click “Sync with Lightroom”. You can also click the checkbox to the left of the collection name.

Unfortunately Adobe won’t allow you to sync smart collections, and I presume that is intentional for whatever reason. However, with the help of the Any Source plugin you can configure it to sync smart collections with the cloud. This very handy plugin syncs the smart collection with a dumb collection that can then be synchronised.

I use it to synchronise the following smart collections:

  • Published photos.
  • Unpublished photos.
  • Photos on my TODO list.
  • Recent Photos from the last 3 months.

The plugin has a free trial but is PWYW and well worth paying for!

Syncing my recent photos with the cloud is simple.

  • Create a smart collection.
  • Call it “Recent Photos”.
  • Add one rule: “Capture Date” “is in the last” 3 “months”.
  • Save.

That will create your new smart collection. Now follow the instructions to synchronise smart collections on the Any Source homepage. It might take a few minutes for the album to appear in mobile Lightroom but it will eventually.

Hide featured image if it’s in the post

I’ve been running a photoblog at inphotos.org since 2005 on WordPress. (And thanks to writing this I noticed it’s 15 years old today!)

In that time WordPress has changed dramatically. At first I used Flickr to host my images, but after a short time I hosted the images myself. (Good thing too since Flickr limited free user accounts to 1000 images, so I wrote a script to download the Flickr images I used in posts.)

For quite a long time I used the featured image instead of inserting the image into the post content, but then about two years ago I went back to inserting the photo into the post. Unfortunately that meant the photo was shown twice, once as a featured image, and once in the post content.

The last theme I used supported custom post types, one of which was a photo type that displayed the featured image but hid the post content. It was an ok compromise, but not perfect.

Recently I started using Twenty Twenty, but after 15 years I had a mixture of posts with:

  • Featured image with no image in the post.
  • Featured image with the same image in the post.

I knew I needed something more flexible. I wanted to hide the featured image if it also appeared in the post content. I procrastinated and never got around to it until this evening when I discovered it was actually quite easy.

Copy the following code into the function.php of your child theme and you’ll be all set! It relies on you having unique filenames for your images. If you don’t then remove the call to basename(), and that may help.

function maybe_remove_featured_image( $html ) {
        if ( $html == '' ) {
                return '';
        }
        $post = get_post();
        $post_thumbnail_id = get_post_thumbnail_id( $post );
        if ( ! $post_thumbnail_id ) {
                return $html;
        }

        $image_url = wp_get_attachment_image_src( $post_thumbnail_id );
        if ( ! $image_url ) {
                return $html;
        }

        $image_filename = basename( parse_url( $image_url[0], PHP_URL_PATH ) );
        if ( strpos( $post->post_content, $image_filename ) ) {
                return '';
        } else {
                return $html;
        }
}
add_filter( 'post_thumbnail_html', 'maybe_remove_featured_image' );

The post_thumbnail_html filter acts on the html generated to display the featured image. My code above gets the filename of the featured image, checks if it’s in the current post and if it is returns a blank string. Feedback welcome if you have a better way of doing this!

Rsync between Mac and Linux

99.999999% of my readers can probably ignore this one, but if you are of the small minority who use Rsync and have Mac and Linux computers in your home you’ll want to read this.

I have Plex running on a Raspberry Pi for my music. I have a large mp3 folder. Too large to run Syncthing on it unfortunately, but an occasional rsync is perfectly fine.

I thought it worked fine until I quickly realised it was syncing the same files over and over again. It turns out the Mac and Linux machines I’m using have different ideas about character sets their filenames are stored in. A file with an accented character on the Mac is completely different to one that looks the same on the Linux box.

The solution took a while for me to find but it’s very simple. Rsync has an option named --iconv to convert between character sets!

The solution was embarrassingly simple: Much due to a comment I read when researching the problem, I thought you were supposed to specify the character set in the order of transformation; but it seems as that is not the correct syntax. Rather, one should always use --iconv=utf-8-mac,utf-8 when initialising the rsync from the mac, and always use --iconv=utf-8,utf-8-mac when initialising the rsync from the linux machine, no matter if I want to sync files from the mac or linux machine.

Then it works like magic!

EDIT: Indeed, sometimes, checking the manual page closely is a good thing to do. Here it is, black on white:

--iconv=CONVERT_SPEC
              Rsync  can  convert  filenames between character sets using this
              option.  Using a CONVERT_SPEC of "." tells rsync to look up  the
              default  character-set via the locale setting.  Alternately, you
              can fully specify what conversion to do by giving a local and  a
              remote   charset   separated   by   a   comma   in   the   order
              --iconv=LOCAL,REMOTE, e.g.  --iconv=utf8,iso88591.   This  order
              ensures  that the option will stay the same whether you're push-
              ing  or  pulling  files.

HOWTO: Square Instagram images with white borders

I noticed that a lot of Instagram users, such as Alan Schaller to name but one, were posting images with thick white borders to make their images into the square images that Instagram favours. I like the striking look these images have in the Instagram gallery.

I wondered for some time about the best way of adding this border and from brief searches there are apps that will add the border but my workflow involves Lightroom so I wanted to integrate the border making into my export process.

I work on a Mac, and already have ImageMagick installed so I knew a little shell scripting would probably go a long way.

A couple of searches later, and I found this page describing how to use ImageMagick to create a floating image within a square canvas without changing the aspect ratio of the image.

Instagram resizes to 1080px wide so by using the following code I could make a rectangular image into a square:

convert -background white -gravity center input.jpg \
     -resize 1080x1080 -extent 1080x1080 result.jpg

Here’s an example from my street photo today. See it on Instagram here.

Dom Luís Bridge in Porto, Portugal.

Once I could do that, the rest was simple. I have a Lightroom export for Instagram images that resizes them and places them in a folder where they are synced automatically with my phone using Syncthing.

Export actions have a “post processing” section where Lightroom can call an external script. I created the following script, made it executable with chmod a+x add_instagram_border.sh and added to Lightroom using “Open in Other Application”.

#!/bin/sh

# Square and add white borders to images.
# https://odd.blog/

for i in "$@"
do
    /usr/local/bin/convert -background white -gravity \
        center "$i" -resize 1080x1080 -extent 1080x1080 \
        /tmp/out.jpg
    mv /tmp/out.jpg "$i"
    open "~/Sync/Instagram"
done

The script goes through the exported images from Lightroom, adding borders to them, and then at the end opens the folder in Finder for review.

Hopefully this will be useful to someone else. If you add borders to your images, how do you do it?

Close

Ad-blocker not detected

Consider installing a browser extension that blocks ads and other malicious scripts in your browser to protect your privacy and security. Here are a few options.

  • uBlock Origin is a free, open source, ad blocker for your browser.
  • Use pi-hole if you have a spare Raspberry Pi on your network.
  • Set the private DNS settings on your phone to dns.adguard.com to block adverts and trackers.