Category Archives: Tech

3 months free Backblaze again

Well, well. Backblaze are offering 3 months free if you sign up before December 31st, again. I first heard of this offer in 2013 when I published a post about in March that year.

Backblaze is a cloud backup company that have a neat app that runs on your computer and backs up everything on it to encrypted storage. If you have external drives, as long as they’re plugged into your machine, Backblaze will happily keep all of it safe.

Some of my photos, from 2005 all the way up to 2022. Backed up on Backblaze.

You get your normal free month to test it and figure out if it will work for you. If you sign up, you get 2 months more for FREE! And, best of all (for me), I get 3 months free too for referring you. Yay!

Do I recommend Backblaze for backing up your PC or Mac? Why yes, I do. I’ve been paying them since 2013. I have over 3TB of photos backed up there and with 30 days of revisions I can go back and restore anything I find missing or corrupted. You can increase that 30 days to 1 year, but I’m fine with 30 days.

How much is it? I went with the 2-year subscription. It’s $130 for 2 years, which works out at less than $6 a month. A bargain, if I ever saw it.

Anyway, sign up to Backblaze through this link, and you’ll get an extra 2 months free added to your subscription if you pay them money. You don’t need to pay them money immediately. You still get a free trial of a month to test it out.

I know, I know, you’re not going to do it. You’re not worried about your computer dying, are you? I would be a nervous wreck if I didn’t have backups of my photos, videos, and other documents. One little accident, an old computer dying, or ransomware, and it’s all gone. I’d lie awake at night worrying about my work if that was me. But that’s just me. 🙂

The Twitter Meltdown (again)

I don’t really have anything enlightening to say about Elon Musk kicking journalists off Twitter, except that it’s not really surprising. He seems to be rocking from one crisis to another. Has the Twitter Terms of Service been changed to, “Don’t hurt Elon’s feelings”?

CNN journalist, Donie O’Sullivan shared an interview on his Mastodon account about it, which of course you can’t share on Twitter.

Anyway, I can see from here that there are thousands of people opening new Mastodon accounts every hour since that happened. I jumped ship in early November when he fired half the staff in the company. Two weeks later, a quarter of a million people joined Mastodon in one day. This surge in new users is nowhere near that big. While Twitter, the website, didn’t collapse within days, I still think it’s only a matter of time. Take a look at Twitter is Going Great to get a quick feel for how badly it’s going great. It appears they haven’t updated yet with the latest news, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.

Tumblr is another website benefiting from the exodus, but they can handle it. As Matt said in a recent interview,

Particularly in the last month or so, we have seen some huge waves and droves of users. Fluent celebrities like Ryan Reynolds, Lynda Carter, and Halsey are coming over or coming back. It has been a fun time to be on Tumblr. I tell the team that fortune favors the prepared. There are also a lot of other places people could go, but we are ready for the waves. We can handle 200,000 to 300,000 sign ups a day. We can handle what’s happening.

Matt Mullenweg

Before this influx of new people joining, my Mastodon feed was definitely quieter than it was a few weeks before. Early mornings are always quiet because I mostly follow Irish people, but the local feed was quiet with minutes going by between posts. That all changed today. My “Elon Musk” filter hardly had to do any work in the last week until today, but it’s working hard now!

It started with Eugen Rochko asking “What a thing to wake up to”. Then we found out that Twitter had banned sharing Mastodon links on their site. What is ridiculous is that Twitter is massively bigger than the entire Fediverse. How can Elon feel threatened by such a small alternative website network? As Dave Winer said, “There’s a story to tell about this, and it isn’t over yet.”

If you do join Mastodon today, here are a few things you should do:

  • Add an avatar.
  • Write an introduction post or fill in your bio.
  • Write a couple of posts and pin them to your profile. When people from other instances (other servers) see your profile, they’ll see the pinned posts. They won’t see any other posts if you’re not friends with anyone on the remote instance.
  • Look up some hashtags. The WordPress hashtag is busy. You can follow hashtags too!
  • Add .rss to any Mastodon URL to get an rss feed. Add the feed to your blog. Look at the sidebar of this blog for an example.
  • Boost liberally. There’s no algorithm so that’s how posts go viral.
  • I’m there as @donncha – say hi!

Consider adding your blog to the Fediverse, but in my experience, I prefer to share things from my own personal account. It’s much easier to chat with others that way.

Restore terminal access to Dropbox on macOS

Dropbox just updated and moved the Dropbox folder to ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox, a secure location. There is still a symlink from ~/Dropbox to that folder, so hopefully any local scripts will continue working.

The first thing I did was open an iTerm2 and attempt to look in ~/Dropbox with cd Dropbox. As it is hard-coded in my brain, when I change to a new directory, I will want to see what’s in it, so I immediately typed ls -l. Too fast for my own good, as I noticed the flicker of a dialogue appear and disappear when I tapped the return key.

~/Dropbox » ls
ls: cannot open directory ‘.’: Operation not permitted

I had denied iTerm2 access to the Dropbox directory. Oops.

Thankfully, it’s easy to fix. Open up the Security & Privacy settings in System Preferences. Go to the Privacy tab.

Click on Files and Folders and scroll down to your terminal programme.

You’ll see a new checkbox there for Dropbox. Click the lock to authenticate and click the Dropbox checkbox.

Go back to your terminal, and you’ll be able to see what’s in ~/Dropbox once again.

Lightroom Classic does not have access to some Standard folders.

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.

Unfortunately, the “Learn More” link goes to a URL that quickly changes to https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/help/allow-permissions.html which shows a 404!

It appears the entire https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/ directory is showing a 404 now. I guess they really do want to get rid of Lightroom Classic.

Anyone know how to fix 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.

Bye Bye Relics of 1999

It’s about time I dumped some of this stuff. Two of my machines have a CDROM drive but I don’t use either of them. I haven’t had a 1.44MB floppy drive in well over a decade, or more likely fifteen years!

I recently found the binder with these items, the motherboard manual and other things. They were stored away in a dark corner of a cupboard for more than 20 years. Safe in their dark spot but ever so slowly decomposing. The machine they belonged to has been long disposed of.

Sound Blaster 16 Value PnP CDROM
CD-ROM Drive Installation Disk
Ethernet LAN DRive Diskette

When was the last time you installed software from a CDROM or a floppy disk? I ripped the DVD box set of “All Creatures Great and Small (1978)” last December. It was on my ageing Macbook, but I do not remember the last time I used a PC floppy disk at all.

February 2012 was the last time I used a C64 disk. I archived as many of my C64 disks as I could then. Those disks are still in the attic. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to throw them out. I guess they’ll be disposed when I’m gone and they’re an ancient artefact of a bygone era.

Google Photos ends free storage tomorrow

That photo taken today is a helicopter rotor

Google Photos will start counting your uploads against a storage limit from tomorrow. Make sure you upload anything you’ve been meaning to upload in the next few hours!

Also go into your shared albums and click the “Save photos” button if you want “local” copies of any photos shared with you.

I’m sticking with Google Photos. The ease of sharing photos and AI search make it worth while, but I will be disabling automatic upload off my phone. I take too many snapshots that I don’t care enough about to pay for them.

Firefox: bookmark all the tabs

Browser tabs. We all love them, and then we hate them when there are too many. Sprinkled among the litter of blog and Facebook posts, Twitter and Reddit threads, are the nuggets you want to keep.

Too many things

You could just close them, you probably won’t miss them but my brain rebels against the thought. Instead I’d like to bookmark them somewhere so at least in some distant future I can review them at my leisure. Thankfully it’s easy, in Firefox at least. It looks like it’s even easier in Chrome!

First of all, right click on a tab and click on “Select all tabs”.

All your tabs will be highlighted and “Bookmark Tab” helpfully changes to “Bookmark Tabs”.

Clicking that will bring up a familiar bookmark window. I opted to put the my browser windows into different folders. I had a lot of tabs open..

But now I’m back to one window and a handful of tabs related to my current project. Out of sight, out of mind! 🙂

BXS-HD1 True Wireless Stereo Earphones

I don’t know much about audio, and my hearing has been damaged by too many noisy nightclubs in my twenties but I do listen to a lot of podcasts using earphones.

In the past I preferred to use wired Apple earpods and I still use them. I bought Urban 1 wireless earphones back in September but then I remembered why I hate those earphones that stick deep into your ear. They’re never comfortable. My ears got sore, and they would always fall out with the slightest movement if I wasn’t wearing a hat against the cold.

So, last November I read about the BXS-HD1 True Wireless Stereo Earphones from Onesonic. There were glowing reviews from Irish tech journalists, and similar reviews by people on Twitter. At €59.99 they’re not too expensive either.

I must say I’m very happy with them. Podcast audio is crystal clear. Music is too. They’re reasonably good at dealing with bass.

They sync with my Galaxy S9+ when I lift them out of the case. Double tap pauses the audio usually, though sometimes that gets temperamental and I need to unlock my phone to pause. Volume controls (single tap) worked fine.

I wasn’t too impressed with the microphone. I tried it twice. Once while out for a walk on a cold morning. The hat I wore rubbed against the earphones and the other party could barely hear what I was saying. Back in my office on a Zoom call my team reported my voice sounded low.

Besides that I recommend them. They’re shipped from Ireland so if you’re in the EU you won’t have to worry about extra customs fees due to Brexit.

(This is not a paid review, I’m just happy with my purchase.)

Just use Signal

Just use Signal, the privacy first messaging system.

What’s in it for Signal? They’re a non-profit. Money isn’t their main goal. Read about their very interesting history on Wikipedia.

(But if they ever break that trust I’m going back to SMS texts!)

Update a few days later: This post was obviously prompted by the move WhatsApp made to change their privacy policy and ultimatum they gave users to “accept it or go away”. They have since announced the changes won’t take effect until May this year.

This Gizmodo post is the best yet at explaining what changes are to come. It’s a long article worth reading but in summary (and I’m open to correction if I get this wrong), your messages to friends and family were never in danger of being revealed to Facebook. Businesses who use WhatsApp have a special way of using the platform (a business API) and they may use an outside agency to help them deal with this messaging. As soon as that happens the outside agency can see the messages back forth between you and the business so the messages could in theory be stored by that agency. Someone else can see those messages then.

What I’m left wondering about is if companies have been doing this for years already why is a change in the privacy policy required now? Is it because a business can manage this messaging through Facebook.com?

I checked and I didn’t opt out of WhatsApp sending “anonymous data” (which is never really anonymous) to Facebook in 2016 for whatever reason. Maybe I didn’t start using WhatsApp until after this date. I wonder if the GDPR stops this data transfer?

Unmount USB drives from a script in macOS

I have a number of external drives hanging off my laptop, but sometimes I want to disconnect them. I used to go into Finder and click the eject button but I have five drives now so that’s getting unwieldy.

There are a few different ways of doing this. I wrote a small BASH script based on information here.

I created a shell script on my Desktop, added the following, changing DRIVE to the volume path for each of my external drives:

osascript -e ‘do shell script “diskutil unmountDisk /Volumes/DRIVE”‘

After creating that script I made it executable with chmod +x and as I use iTerm2 as a terminal I associated .sh files with that (Finder, right click on script, Get Info->Open With).
Every time I double click the script a new tab opens in iTerm2 and I see the progress of the unmount commands!

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.