Posts

Apple restricts AirDrop in China

· Apple

I think this has been greatly underreported.

Apple purposely disables a feature on your phone during unrest.

Anti-government protests flared in several Chinese cities and on college campuses over the weekend. But the country’s most widespread show of public dissent in decades will have to manage without a crucial communication tool, because Apple restricted its use in China earlier this month.

AirDrop, the file-sharing feature on iPhones and other Apple devices, has helped protestors in many authoritarian countries evade censorship. That’s because AirDrop relies on direct connections between phones, forming a local network of devices that don’t need the internet to communicate. People can opt into receiving AirDrops from anyone else with an iPhone nearby.

Kagi

· Software, www

It's now been roughly 6 months I've switched from DuckDuckGo to Kagi. I started paying right away after roughly the one month trial.

I had not been very happy with DDG; mostly the results were very low quality (having to switch back to Google one too many times; results often lagged behind by months of publishing), many search bugs, and there's been that thing with Bing advertising, and generally not seeing many improvements over the ~2 years I tried to use it full-time.

Japanese produce lumber without cutting trees: Daisugi

· Misc

[...]

Shoots from the base of the tree are pruned so that the trunk stays straight.

[...]

The technique results in a harvest of straight logs without having to cut down the entire tree. Although originally a forestry management technique, daisugi has also found its way into Japanese gardens.

Daisugi

Not the most exciting narrators, but… Quite cool!

Would this scale and can we use this elsewhere to avoid cutting down trees?

Mastodon server: R2

· Software, www

This is a very short post because to be honest, I didn't figure much out myself.

My uploads/static files are now saved in R2 under its own URL (part of my enterprise zone) so that my normal caching rules and other settings are applied.

Add these to your application.env file:

3_ENABLED = "true"
S3_BUCKET = "<bucket name>"
S3_ENDPOINT = "https://<some-id>.r2.cloudflarestorage.com"
S3_ALIAS_HOST = "<connected domain>" 
S3_PERMISSION = "private"
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID = "<access_key>"
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = "<secret_access_key>"

The token/API key is a bit hard to find, but it's on the top right.

Free speech

· Misc, Software

I specifically disagree with his stance on free speech, because I think that it depends on your interpretation of what free speech means. If you allow the most intolerant voices to be as loud as they want to, you’re going to shut down voices of different opinions as well. So allowing free speech by just allowing all speech is not actually leading to free speech, it just leads to a cesspit of hate.

Heads we win, tails he loses

· Software

Regardless of what happens to Twitter, Elon Musk is without a doubt the most interesting man in the world right now. He's positioned himself at the intersection of so many trends and topics that it's hard to keep count, and through it all, he's tweeting memes. It's the greatest show on earth, no work of fiction could ever hope to compete.

It's also incredibly divisive. Not since Trump has a single character managed to invoke such extreme levels of love and hate on the world stage for weeks at the time. Nor has anyone been able to play the media like a fiddle with such virtuosity.

Using Mastodon with Cloudflare

· Errors, Software, www

If you're using Mastodon with Cloudflare CDN/protection and minify turned on, you'll notice the site may look broken (after a few visits, when hitting Cloudflare cache).

Yeah, that's not how it's supposed to look.

And you'll notice errors in the webdev tools similar to Failed to find a valid digest in the 'integrity' attribute, with computed SHA-256 integrity:

Failed to find a valid digest in the 'integrity' attribute for resource 'https://mastodon.yeri.be/packs/js/common-997d98113e1e433a9a9f.js' with computed SHA-256 integrity 'YgEhHmwjKL88zKfUOMt/qRulYurIuHzhn4SZC9QQ5Mg='. The resource has been blocked.
@yeri:1 Failed to find a valid digest in the 'integrity' attribute for resource 'https://mastodon.yeri.be/packs/js/locale_en-f70344940a5a8f625e92.chunk.js' with computed SHA-256 integrity '1VgpQjY/9w/fgRLw1QH2pfzqr36p3hINvg9ahpBiI2U='. The resource has been blocked.
@yeri:1 Failed to find a valid digest in the 'integrity' attribute for resource 'https://mastodon.yeri.be/packs/js/public-a52a3460655116c9cf18.chunk.js' with computed SHA-256 integrity 'onh6vHxzykkVgJkiww+OCPk0tKC48KMUD9GVJ8/LKJQ='. The resource has been blocked.

Basically, the sha256 hash doesn't match the js or css static files.

Mastodon server: email

· Linux, Software

Always a hassle to get mail delivery to work.

Had a similar problem with a VoIP (Nexmo SMS/call forwarding) tool that just refused to work using local mail servers without a valid cert. Gave up and started using Mailgun. 

Long story short: use something like Mailgun or another provider.

Using localhost SMTP server support seems to be limited if you don't have working certs. The documentation is also lacking as to what does what. Didn't figure out how to have it ignore SSL.

Feed2Toot

· Linux, Software, Virtualisation

Started looking into a service to auto-post from this blog onto my Mastodon feed. Feed2Toot fit the bill perfectly.

I wanted to run the whole thing from a Docker container, though, so I'll quickly write a how-to.

This whole thing runs from a Raspberry Pi, as root. No k8s or k3s for me. The path I use is /root/git/feed2toot/, so be sure to modify that to whatever you're using.