Category: Fediverse

Spam fallout

Interesting thread on the unintended consequences of fighting the spam wars. [dead link] via @gcupc

I would personally like to apologize for the antispam movement of the late 90s and early 00s. We did more harm than good. Nothing we did reduced the amount of spam significantly, and we created the centralization of email…

Trying to use existing tools (Broken Link Checker plugin) to replace shortened URLs in a …

Trying to use existing tools (Broken Link Checker plugin) to replace shortened URLs in a test import of my birdsite archive to WordPress. “Fix redirect” works perfectly on plaintext URLs in post content (but not titles), and doesn’t alter anything else including timestamps in drafts.

Unfortunately, t.co returns a 200 OK to its requests, instead of the 301 redirect it’s supposed to, so it’s only working on the oldest tweets that predate the shortener.

Long-standing issue with the Broken Link Checker plugin…

Long-standing issue with the Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress. On some setups, it gets stuck processing the queue due to SQL transaction problems and you can fix it by commenting out the begin/commit/rollback statements.

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/link-checking-not-progressing-broken-transaction-handling/

Ads tracking users by putting up a hidden, fake login form…

Whoa: Ads tracking users by putting up a hidden, fake login form and reading the email address that the browser auto-fills.

Fortunately it only works on built-in auto-fill, not third-party tools like LastPass or 1Password.

If you save passwords in your browser, here’s one more reason to switch to something more secure.

Ad scripts track users via browser password managers

The hour grows late, and Los Angeles rises out of the palm trees for another night.

The hour grows late, and Los Angeles rises out of the palm trees, preparing for another night. 😉

Seriously, though, I was trying out different settings on a camera with a good zoom lens.

On Photog.Social

In response to KemoNine asking about the haze:

By LA standards, for 11 miles away, that’s crystal clear!

We’ve actually had some really clear days over the last month or so, especially after the winds have blown all the smog out to sea (before they bring all the dust out from the desert a day or two later), interspersed with smoggy days and days when the sky is full of smoke from wildfires in the mountains or canyons. The smoke from the massive fire raging in Ventura is mostly being blown the other way from here.

It’s a lot better than it used to be 20 years ago. A couple of years back on a visit to my parents’, I noticed that I could see the mountains from their front door. I had never noticed that the whole time I was growing up there!

And even that was better than their stories of LA smog in the 60s: outdoor school activities cancelled due to smog, being unable to see the end of a block, observing sunspots directly…

Air quality laws have made a huge difference!

Disinterested Seagull

Disinterested Seagull: “What, there’s a sunset behind me? Nah, can’t make me look!”

Last Sunday, after a hectic afternoon running errands through Christmas shopping crowds, I went out to the Manhattan Beach Pier to watch the waves and relax. This seagull seemed to have the “relax” part down already.

Disinterested Seagull

#beach #photography #seagull #sunset

IFTTT doesn’t know what tags are *new* on a Pocket bookmark

Last night I tested linking Pocket to Mastodon via #IFTTT to automatically share links when I add a certain tag. (See details). Today I discovered something else about IFTTT.

One of the links I used had an old tag to share it to Buffer, and Pocket cheerfully picked up that tag & sent it out again.

That means IFTTT doesn’t know what tags are *new* on a Pocket bookmark. It only knows that the bookmark has been updated, and what the current tags are.

On Mastodon.Social

The Worst IT-Related Jokes You’ve Ever Heard

Ask @Slashdot: What’s The Worst IT-Related Joke You’ve Ever Heard?

Some highlights:

“I like telling UDP jokes because I don’t care if you don’t get them.”

“A QA Engineer walks into a bar. He orders a beer. He orders 0 beers. He orders 9999999999 beers. He orders -1 beers. He orders a lizard. He orders asldkfjinw. He orders….”

On Mastodon.Social

Spoilers for last night’s #supergirl & building up to Reign…

Spoilers for last night’s #supergirl & building up to Reign

I liked the way her journey to Earth and discovering her past paralleled a mirror version of Clark’s, but i would have rather watched the fortress holo slowly convince her over several episodes to become a villain instead of just activating latent programming. Flipping the villain switch is boring.

It seems like such a waste of the build-up. Something like Morgana’s journey or even Anakin’s would have been a lot more interesting.