I learned something new about Google Photos. I can examine the photos taken between two dates by entering #date_range:YYYYMMDD-YYYYMMDD in the search box.
I have images going back more than twenty years in Google Photos so a way to view a selection of those images is really useful!
I haven’t been using Google Photos as much since they added space limitations, but this search will still be useful!
The great Oli Frey created the cover for Zzap!64 issue 68, 1990. It was the last picture in the Zzap!64 2022 calendar. It celebrated the release of Chase HQ 2. I don’t remember playing that game, but I must have. I definitely played the first game and it wasn’t great. Here’s a play through of it. Are those Dick Tracy adverts at the side of the road? Oh dear!
Time to put the calendar away but I guess I can use it again in 2033, 2039, 2050, 2061, 2067, 2078, 2089, 2095, 2101, 2107, and 2118. I wonder if people will still use paper calendars in 2118?
You might not be on Mastodon yet, but your blog could get a torrent of traffic from Mastodon, or other Fediverse network if it’s shared there.
If your website is mentioned there, it might be the “victim” of an inadvertent denial of service attack, as hundreds or thousands of servers request the URL in the 60 seconds or so afterwards. That is precisely what JWZ blogged about last month when his site was taken down by Mastodon servers.
Every time I do a new blog post, within a second I have over a thousand simultaneous hits of that URL on my web server from unique IPs. Load goes over 100, and mariadb stops responding.
JWZ on Mastodon Stampede.
JWZ has over 8,000 followers. Every time he shares a post on Mastodon, the instances (servers) where those followers live will send a request to his blog to generate a preview. Actually, two requests will be sent:
Eventually, he blocked the Mastodon user agent. That stops previews of his website showing up on Mastodon posts, but resolves the problem for his website.
Yesterday morning, I decided to see what effect sharing a link on my Mastodon account would have on my server. My Mastodon account has 1.8K followers. A far cry from the number of followers JWZ has, but still enough to test my server.
I wanted to test several scenarios:
My server is at Linode. I pay an average of $24/month to run this site and my photoblog is on it too where I share a daily photo + link on Mastodon. It’s not a heavy-duty server that can withstand a huge amount of traffic.
If you’d like to skip the details, my server coped fine with sharing a URL from here to Mastodon. The load average went up for about 20 seconds, topping out at the max for about 5 seconds before things calmed down. It was responsive the whole time. Install a full-page caching plugin like WP Super Cache, Jetpack Boost and WP Rest Cache and your site will probably be fine. Jetpack Boost and the Jetpack Image Accelerator will help when human visitors arrive.
The first test resulted in:
The page was cached by WP Super Cache, but I had set the garbage collection TTL to 60 seconds and I believe it expired halfway through the test, so it had to generate the cache again. Once I adjusted that, and set the TTL to 600 seconds, the second test performed better. The page remained cached throughout:
The main points of my Apache configuration:
When I reduced the start and minimum spare servers to 1, the next test took longer to complete, and the load average rose to 1.24, even on a fully cached page. This was expected as the server didn’t have the spare capacity to deal with the sudden traffic.
After reverting the changes to Apache, I disabled caching on my blog and shared another URL. The load average only rose to 1.12 for a very short time. I was pleased with that. While caching does help, my server could cope with that traffic.
I suspected that there was one hit per Mastodon instance on my site. I checked my logs and was proved right. For all the accounts that follow me on mastodon.social, only one request was made. That does mean the onslaught of requests isn’t as bad as it might be. Instead of 1,800 requests for a page, there were far fewer. I did notice that a Friendica instance requested one of my test URLs several times.
Mastodon and other Fediverse servers will start requesting a preview within a second of you sharing your post on the network. It helps if your server is running some sort of caching.
If you have many Mastodon followers or if you’re worried about a DDoS from Mastodon, the following will help:
This problem has existed for a long time. Popular blogs had the same issue when they published new content and people following their blogs (through RSS feed readers, remember them?) hit the server looking for the new post. At least with Mastodon, you can load the post in a private browser window and cache it before sharing it. I want to write a WP Super Cache add-on plugin that allows the site owner to preload a new post as it’s published. That will ensure the new content is ready for sharing. I haven’t started work on that yet, so don’t ask when it’ll be done. Maybe someone else will beat me to it and claim all the credit!
All the kids are gone bananas about computers. There’s approximately 1,000 Commodore 64s in Irish schools. In 1983.
Gay Byrne on the Late Late Toy Show in 1983 interviewed nine year old Oric whizz kid, Mark Feldman who has been playing games since he was six, and thirteen year old Johnson McEvoy who does programming and games and creates graphics.
Nice demo of the Commodore 64, playing some sort of typing tutor game too! I had no idea the C64 was ever on the Late Late Show!
Better think of your future Time you straighten right out Creating problems in town Rudy, a message to you Rudy, a message to you
What an earworm. Once you listen to it, you’ll be humming it all day long. RIP Terry Hall.
Today I learned that “rudy” is slang. I always thought it was about a specific person!
A ‘Rudy’ (or rudi or rude boy) is a 1960s Jamaican slang for a youth who is out of control. The term became popular in England in the late 1970s, referring to teens who listened to ska and their fashion of the time.
https://genius.com/2215187
While you’re here, take a look at my photo tour of Coventry Music Museum. There are lots of Specials memorabilia, a signed guitar, and even the car they used in the Ghost Town video!
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.
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. 🙂
If you don’t know, “Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon” by Queen, you’re in for a treat. Absolutely lovely song and one of my favourite songs. Just over 1 minute of perfection.
Jai on the Recovering Queen Podcast did a great cover of it too!
When you’ve listened to that, follow it up with Seaside Rendezvous. Another delightful song!
If you’ve never heard either of those songs, you should run, without hurting yourself, to the nearest record store and purchase a copy of Queen’s 1975 album “A Night At The Opera”. A stupendously good album, and I guarantee you have heard at least one song from it. There’s no way you haven’t heard this song I’m thinking of. (it’s also on any music streaming service, if you must have instant gratification.)
When I shared this on Mastodon yesterday Stephen Tures replied, linking to this documentary on the making of the album. I’ve only watched 17 minutes of it, but listen with headphones as they play snippets from the songs too!
Yes, of course, PLAY QUEEN LOUD!
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:
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.
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.
Yesterday would have been Charles’ 100th birthday. He is the creator of the Peanuts cartoon strip, you know, the one with Snoopy and Charlie Brown! Charles passed away in 2000 at the age of 77, but yesterday the Charles M. Schulz Museum featured comics by syndicated comic artists on their site as a special tribute to the great man.
There are some great strips there and if you’re a Peanuts fan you’ll love them. I must find my Peanuts books and have a look at them again.
