Author: n3wjack

Categories
geek internet opensource privacy society tips

why join mastodon

Mastodon, the federated social messaging platform so many people migrated to when things started to go sour on Twitter. If you haven’t joined yet, or you’re thinking about going to Bluesky, why should you join this Mastodon thing instead? You have to choose a server and all, sounds pretty complex right?

Well, it isn’t really. Here are some reasons why you should join over 11 million people (May 2023):

  • It’s here to stay. In fact, it has been here for a long time already, and it keeps going. It’s based on Open Source projects, and on the open protocol called ActivePub, and is spread over multiple servers. It can’t be taken down.
  • No ads. Seriously. NO ADS.
  • Picking a server doesn’t really matter. You can always move servers later on, and you can follow anyone from any server anyway. Just don’t pick a tiny one with only 10 people on it, unless they are your friends, and they own the server oslt.
  • You’ll be escaping the clutches of Musk, The Zuck and Jack.
  • Your feed is yours. No algorithm messing with what posts you see. It’s just who you’re following, in chronological order. Yes, that one guy really is posting a lot.
  • It has lists, bookmarks, favs, boosts, polls, video, images, all the stuff you know from the birdsite and more.
  • There’s more to it than Mastodon. Mastodon is part of the so-called Fediverse, and there are different types of servers out there that all speak ActivePub to each other. Some are specialized in video, others image sharing etc. But that’s all rather technical, and you shouldn’t worry about that to begin with. Just hop on, and check it out.
  • It has a lot of accessibility features. People tend to add alt text to images.
  • ​You will learn about the legendary John Mastodon.
  • It’s fun, like in the early days of Twitter.
  • There are a bunch of different apps for all platforms to choose from. So if you don’t like the stock one, or you miss a feature, just look for something else. I’m sure you’ll find something you like. On Android, I like Tusky.
  • You can post up to 500 characters by default. Even more on some specific servers.
  • If you don’t like how things work on your server, you can pack up your followers and move to another server. Something you couldn’t do on Twitter, unfortunately.
  • You don’t want to be part of yet another billionaire’s idea of a social network, who ends up selling out anyway.
  • You don’t want the next social network you join to be acquired by yet another billionaire and his crazy idea of how a social network should work. They aren’t even that social to begin with.
  • No ads, no tracking user data. OMG, can you believe it?
  • There are tons of cat pictures and the tag #caturday is booming in the weekend.
  • If you want to geek out, you can run your own server, or pay a hoster to host your own instance. Set up a small server for your friends, your company, your community, or just for yourself.
  • Porn is OK on most servers, as long as you hide it between an #NSFW content warning.
  • People will actually engage with your posts. Well, not always, but more than on that other site anyway.
  • You can join a server hosted in your own region. That way you keep your data out of US hands, and you can speak your own language with the locals. Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, the list goes on.
  • It’ll make you feel like a rebel, an anti-capitalist, giving big tech the finger. Yes, it’s that awesome.
  • More geek stuff: it has RSS feeds baked in for every user account and tags. Just add .rss at the end of the URL. Go nuts!
  • It has an API to write all the bots you want, for free. No paying for API access.
  • The website comes with a tweetdeck-like interface out of the box (see advanced mode in the settings).
  • It has advanced blocking features, muted words, hiding your social graph, the lot. Great for minorities.
  • You can import/export pretty much all your data.
  • Custom emoji per server. Want something special? Ask your admin!
  • No real name policy.
  • Piss off Elon by setting your Mastodon handle as your Twitter username.
  • Have fun, don’t take it all too serious. Follow lots of people, see your feed come to life.

Ready to join me?

Categories
geek programming software tips wordpress

highlight.js on WordPress without plugins

When you frequently post code in your blog posts, it’s nice to have that code syntax highlighted for readability. On WordPress, there was this plugin to do just that, using the JavaScript library highlight.js. However, that plugin is no longer maintained, and has a security issue. So it’s time to get rid of that.

Instead of looking for yet another highlighter plugin, I thought this would be easy to integrate without a new plugin. It’s just about including a JavaScript library on your site, really.

Here’s how I got it working.

1. The easiest no-fuss, non-optimized way.

In a way, it’s enough to include the highlight.js script and call the initialization code.
So if you basically drop the code below in a WordPress Custom HTML widget, you are set. It’s best to put this code in the footer block of your site, to avoid it from slowing down your page load.

<link rel="stylesheet"
      href="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/highlight.js/11.7.0/styles/default.min.css">
<script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/highlight.js/11.7.0/highlight.min.js"></script>
<script>hljs.highlightAll();</script>

This will get the code from CDNJS, and run the initialization.

Simple, but not optimized. It’s loading the script & CSS file from an external domain, which is slower than loading it from your own (HTTPS handshakes etc.). Privacy related, you might also not want to inform Cloudflare (CDNJS is theirs) about who visits your site either. Or any other external CDN you target for that matter.

You might also be missing some languages that are not in the default set. You can include the script for let’s say Go or Rust by adding another script tag, but the more of those scripts tags you add, the slower your page is going to become as more resources need to be loaded.

So let’s try the optimized approach, with a bit more work.

2. The more fuss and optimized way

First, head over to https://highlightjs.org/download/ and create a custom pack for your site by including all the languages you think you’ll need. By hosting those files on your own site, you’re taking away the external domain handshaking, making it load faster, and you avoid tracking. You’ll also have a single JS & CSS file to load, instead of multiple for the different languages you want, which is another speed increase.

If you have FTP access to your site, you can upload these anywhere you like. If you only have access to your WordPress instance, you can upload the files in your Media Library, and get the direct links from there. Use the Document format for that.
Once you have the links, you can again add them to your site’s footer with the Custom HTML widget. Set the path for the files to wherever they are hosted on your site.

Another way to add the includes in your site’s footer, is by using the Head & Footer code plugin. If you don’t have this installed, it’s probably not worth the fuss, but I’m already using this for other stuff, so I might as well use it here.
This puts the code lower in the HTML page than you can get it with an HTML widget.

3. Spend hours finding the right color scheme for your site

Yeah. You know how it goes. Once you start trying out all the color themes, you’re off for hours. :)

Categories
geek internet mystuff n3wjack opensource programming software tips tools

an open source web crawler

Being a web developer, it’s often handy to crawl one of your sites and see if any links are broken, or are given plain 500 errors because something is broken.

A classic tool to do this with, is Xenu’s Link Sleuth. That tool is old though, no longer updated and it’s a pure GUI tool. Since I couldn’t find what I wanted as a ready to use command line tool, I got down and wrote my own. It took a while, but recently it became functional enough to be released as a v1 and open it up to the world as an open source tool.

So by this I present *drumroll*, the Sitecrawler command line based site crawler (yeah, I know, naming is hard).

What can it do?

  • Crawl a site by following all links in a page. It only crawls internal links and HTML content.
  • Crawls links only once. No crawling loops please.
  • Possibility to export the crawled links to a CSV file, containing the referrer links (handy for tracking 404’s).
  • Limit crawl time to a fixed number of minutes for large sites.
  • Set the number of parallel jobs to use for crawling.
  • Add a delay to throttle requests on slow sites, or sites with rate limits.

It’s written in .NET 6, so it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. Check it out on GitHub for more details and downloads. It’s proven useful for me already, so I hope it does the same for you.

Categories
gadget gaming geek programming software tips

uninstall the HP Omen Gaming HUB

You don’t really need this piece of bloatware that comes with your HP Omen machine. It’s fast enough on its own to be able to run the latest games, and I doubt the HUB software makes an actual difference.

In fact, it might even hinder performance. I noticed something odd with it, and it turned out that every minute it was launching a PowerShell process to check if some other software was installed. Every. Minute.

This PowerShell session isn’t started with the -noprofile switch either, so that means your PS profile is loaded every time. This slows things down, certainly if you have a profile with lots of handy PS modules in it, like I have.

So I ended up uninstalling the HP Omen Gaming HUB and never looked back. That also fixed the annoying bug where the HUB disabled my Windows key, and didn’t switch it back on after quitting the game…

So, how do you install the HUB?
Pretty simple, you can use the built-in Windows settings tool to uninstall software, and search for “HP” to find it.
If you’d want it back afterward anyway, you can find it on the HP site to reinstall it.

If you do want some extra performance out of your machine while gaming, here’s a tip: close all your browsers and Electron apps. That’ll free up a ton of memory.

Use the Task Manager to see what is gobbling up memory and CPU on your PC, and close the apps. That’ll free up more resources than the Gaming HUB will ever be able to do.

Categories
geek microsoft programming software tips tools

home made progress bars and indicators in PowerShell

Sometimes you write this fancy batch script that does a bunch of stuff, and you want to have it print out some status information as it’s doing its thing.

Sometimes this fancy script is doing a lot and there’s going to be a lot of stuff printed, so it would be nice if you could overwrite the previous bit of text. Basically, you want a progress bar or progress indicator of some sort.

There are a few ways of doing this, and one involves manipulating the $Host.UI.RawUI.CursorPosition values. That needs “a lot” of code for something that you really don’t want to write a lot of code for.
There are also the oldskool typewrite control characters, however. Like the Carriage Return, `r in PowerShell, which does pretty much the same thing.

So this bit of code, for example, prints everything out on a single line, even though it’s doing that a hundred times:

100..0 | % { write-host "`r- Items to process: $($_)".PadRight(25) -nonewline; sleep -milliseconds 20 }

The magic is in this line:

write-host "`r- Items to process: $($_)".PadRight(25)

Note the “`r” at the beginning of the line. This will reset the cursor to the beginning of the current line, printing the text behind it over any text already present on that line.
Do this in a loop, and you keep writing over the previously printed text.

This also explains the PadRight() statement, which makes sure that there are spaces added to the end of the line to erase any characters left over if the previous line was longer than the current one.
This happens a number of times in this case, as we’re counting from 100 to 0. I know there are smarter ways to fix this, but this works just fine right here (KISS).

Here’s another example using the CR trick. An actual character based progress bar. Just copy-paste and run it in a shell to see the effect:

1..20 | % { write-host ("#"*$_ + "|" * (20-$_) + "`r") -nonewline ; sleep -Milliseconds 200 }; ""

The following example is a bit more complex. It displays a spinner for longer running operations using a set of characters.

# Animation object to keep state.
$global:animation = @{ Chars = "-\|/"; Ix = 0; Counter = 0 }

# Animate one step every 500 calls. Lower the number for a faster animation.
function Animate() {
    $a = $global:animation

    if (($a.Counter % 500) -eq 0) {
        Write-Host " $($a.Chars[$a.Ix])`r" -NoNewline
        $a.Ix = ($a.Ix + 1) % $a.Chars.Length
    }
    $a.Counter++ 
}

# Usage example. Call the animation in a loop. 
$largeImages = ls *.jpg -r | where { $_.length -gt 100000; animate }

There’s also the official Write-Progress PowerShell commandlet to show a progress bar on the screen. You might want to check that out too. I’m not a fan of it myself, because it tends to act strange when you scroll in your shell window, but for more complex status updates it can be really handy.

I hope this helps to make your scripts a bit more informative (or fun) when running long jobs.