Category: technical notes

Inspired by @Edent I am trying to making this blog part of the fediverse – meaning posts would be viewable on mastodon etc and you could follow it like you follow @tomstafford@mastodon.online.

To do this is installed the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, which should have worked out of the box, but – possibly because the blogs is installed at /notes – did not. I checked the plugin status at wp-admin/site-health.php (thanks @abeorch@fosstodon.org for suggesting), and it seemed fine, which means I had some set up problem.

For ActivityPub to work you need a file which is root_domain/.well-known/webfinger (thanks @petrichor) for making this clear to me).

This file needs to have well formed content (which you can check with webfinger.net). I added the file using ftp (and chatGPT for prompting – something it did really well, given this is a niche technical topic).

Now I ran out of things to check and try and fix – the blog *should* have an account on the fediverse, but it (currently) isn’t visible on mastodon. @abeorch reports he can see it from Frendica, but not mastodon (and his follow shows up on the blog dashboard), so either it is some kind of setting is malformed in a way that offends mastodon-specifically, or there is some delay in federation (it has been less than 12 hours so far).

By publishing this blog post I keep a note of my progress so far, and will update when/if I make some progress. Feel free to contact me with suggestions!

Update 2024-09-18: Well, I got it working. It turns out my webfinger file was malformed. I copied the format of the one for the PsyArxiv blog and now it works – this blog is visible from mastodon

In retrospect, I think the ActivityPub plugin did everything right *except* put the webfinger file in the root domain (not the /notes domain where the blog is hosted). If I had just copied across the webfinger file made by ActivityPub to the correct location I suspect it would have worked immediately.

Anyway – like, comment and subscribe, as they say

After many years with Positive, I’ve switched the hosting to Webarchitects. Webarch are a cooperative, using green energy to power their servers and have been great in helping me move this site to their servers. They are also based in the great city of Sheffield, England

Thanks to Dan for the recommend

I run Ubuntu 16.04 Linux and use vpnc for my vpn (which runs at the command line, rather than through the network manager). This link tells you how to run vpnc at startup, but really I wanted to have the vpn monitored and automatically restarted if it drops. Here’s how I did that.

Following, James Coyle’s instructions, but changing the location of the script (because of this thread):

1. Make a script which checks vpn status and restarts it if necessary

1.1. Create file (at the terminal enter)
sudo nano /usr/local/sbin/checkvpn.sh
1.2. Copy and paste this into the file
#!/bin/bash
if ifconfig tun0 &> /dev/null; then echo "---VPN active---"; else sudo vpnc; fi
Save and exit. The first line marks the file as a script. The second does the work, which I stole from here
1.3. Make this file executable (at the terminal enter)
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/sbin/checkvpn.sh

2. Now create a cron job to run this script every minute
1.1. Open root cron jobs list (at the terminal enter)
sudo crontab -e
1.2. Add this line to the end
*/1 * * * * /usr/local/sbin/checkvpn.sh
Save and exit

And we’re done. You can also worry about where your crontab logs are, and how to check they are rotated daily (so don’t grow infinitely in size). This should be set up as default, so you don’t need to worry about it.

If you are trying to fix the brightness on a Samsung NC10 running under Ubuntu linux (actually Xubuntu in this case) then you need to know this:

“Maximum brightness may be quite low if you don’t disable the “auto” brightness feature in the BIOS (F2 at start-up). “

From Ubuntu NC10 support forum

Also, whenever I fix anything with my linux installation, I feel like some sort of MAGICIAN-GOD

That is all

…then you are looking at a page hosted by positive internet

1. Sidebar Widgets

2. Freepress Recent Comments plugin

And, how to make the time of posting appear on the frontpage: modify the time tag in index.php

I have moved this blog from Moveabletype to WordPress. As well as being a world of open-source goodness, WordPress is far easier to use, at first impression, and I’m hoping that I’ll have more luck defending myself against comment spam.

How i did this:

After, as a precaution, exporting my Moveabletype MySQL database, using PHPmyadmin. I then enjoyed the Famous WordPress 5-Minute Install and it was easy. Thank’s to Mike for advice and encouragement.

Comments are now back open, so say hello, or let me know if any old posts were broken by the move and need fixing.

This code takes a random entry from my movabletype blog archive and diplays it. You can see it working here http://idiolect.org.uk/notes/random_entry.php

I screwed up my email because, using Thunderbird, i didn’t compact my inbox folder regularly. Combined with an old version of TB which didn’t prompt me to do this, it was all a bit disasterous. Anyway, I wrote this Matlab script to take all the deleted but not removed mails from a mailbox file and make them undeleted/visible again. If this doesn’t make sense, either read about disappearing mail and recovering corrupted folders in Thunderbird or just be grateful that you don’t need to know

%use this at your own risk!
fid=fopen('In_box'); % In_box is my mailfile
fid2=fopen('In_box_new', 'wt'); % In_box_new is the new mailfile
key=['X-Mozilla-Status:'];
while feof(fid)==0
tline = fgetl(fid);
if ~ischar(tline), break, end
if isempty(regexp(tline,key))==0;
tline=['X-Mozilla-Status: 0011'];
end

tline=[tline '\n'];
fprintf(fid2,tline);
end
fclose(fid);
fclose(fid2);

I’m looking for an app that will display random lines from from a .txt file in a pretty way – something like a screensaver, or a webpage which I can customise with my own text file. The text file will be around 20,000 lines long. I like to imagine the sentences swimming across the screen. Maybe the smaller ones float nearer the top, the longest ones crawling along the bottom. Or maybe not. I don’t really care as long as at any one time some of the lines are disappearing and some are appearing, so that you are visited with a cloud or swarm of a selection of all the possible lines at any one time.

I’m sure there must be such an app out there. I don’t really want to have to learn flash to getting it working and looking nice. Surely someone has done the work for me. Can anyone provide any pointers please?

This is related to previous posts (one, two, three) if you are not interested in managing academic references or document preparation: turn back now

I’ve started using Latex, and although it hurt to get started, i think i’m now converted. The logic, and power, of it makes it infinitely preferable to Word if you’re doing things more complicated than a one page letter. It’s a mark-up language, so not What You See Is What You Get (like MS Word), but more What You See Is What You Want. I swore after the last paper I submitted that i would never use Word for longer documents again, and I think it’s a promise i’ll be able to keep.

One nice thing with Latex is that if there’s anything you can think of doing with a document then someone else has already thought of it and written an add-in to let you do just like that. Like psfrag which lets you modify the labels (content and font etc) of figures from within latex, so your figures always look compatible with the rest of your document.

Although one idiosyncrasy of the programme, which i wish I’d been told earlier, was that you need to compile your document a couple of times before you get a good output. This is to do with Latex needing a couple of passes through to pick up all the cross-references, page boundaries etc (or something). In practice it means that you have a look at the end result and it doesn’t seem to take account of your changes, but if you just had another look (ie ran latex on your document for a second time) it would work. I learnt this here

Latex does automatic inclusion of citations (ie in line mentions) and references (ie the compiled list at the end) with bibtex. Although bibtex is powerful and comes with lots of tools (one, two) available, I can’t find a nice front end with which to manage my references. So although i’m going to use it (have to use it) to put references in Latex documents, I’m going to keep using endnote to manage my references. I was using biblioscape which is nicer in lots of ways, but a bit flaky when talking to MS Word (and that’s something i’m going to keep having to do, if only because not all the people i work with are going to start using Latex).

So, problem: using Endnote with Latex (one, two). All I need to do is when I start on a document, is to move the references I want from Endnote to Bibtex. How hard can it be to get Endnote to export properly? Answer: harder than you think. Currently the easiest way I can see to do it is to export references from Endnote to Biblioscape (Biblioscape 6 and Endnote 8 talk to each other fine, I couldn’t get earlier version to be compatible) and then export from biblioscape to bibtex format. Not very elegant. Can anyone suggest a better way? (and yes, i have tried the Endnote bibtex export style. It’s broken).

Hmmm….I think i’ve changed it so that the entries in this blog are saved by name instread of number. Or at least, by name as well as number (look). But I can’t get the front page to link to the entries by their names rather than their numbers…

Problem.

What little i did achieve was thanks to this post at Learning Moveable Type

I have turned on anonymous commenting on the site, so you can comment without leaving an email address. Ideally i’d have it so you leave an email address, but it doesn’t get displayed on the site – but i haven’t worked out how to do that yet (if anyone who knows MT can provide clues i’d be grateful).

Previously it only displayed your email if you didn’t put in a website, but since not everyone has a website this isn’t ideal.

Update: Aha! I’ve fixed it. I’ve turned anonymous commenting off, but now if you only leave your email address it isn’t visible on the website (although i should get to see it so i can reply to you personally if need be).

Here’s how i did it had to edit the ‘Comment Listing’ template (through the web interface) so that

Before it was set to spam_protect=”1″ but it evidently wasn’t working.

Thanks to Matt for advice and to the MT support forums (here and here) for getting me started

So how do you go about finding a good host for your website? A google search turns up a million people and i’ve no real way of choosing between them. I want lots of space (250 MB +), Unix hosting (with PHP, Phython, MySQL) and preferably the ability to run at least 2 domains…And decent technical support would be nice too. Can anyone recommend a company in the UK who could do this for me please?

I’ve further restricted commenting on the site. You can now only post comments on entries which are less than 2 days old. (And I am feeling a variety of very negative emotions towards the people who design bots to spam my site).

As of now it is harder to comment on my site. If the post is from more than 7 days ago and no one has been commenting on it then you won’t be able to add any comments. You’ll have to email me instead. Sorry folks, but the comment spam is getting too annoying.

Redesigned and updated my photo gallery, didn’t I.

It has captions, and sections, nows. And doesn’t use any javascript, just PHP (and not too much of that either). Lovely

Here’s how to tell if your browser supports Microsoft’s Web Embedding Fonts Tool (WEFT). Mine (Mozilla Firefox) doesn’t. If this page looks special, then you are seeing embedded fonts:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/demos/3/demo3.htm

There’s an image of what it should look like if WEFT is working here

Just updated my cuttings page to include some scans of two articles I wrote for the ecologist last year, something on Greenmaps and a scan of my article about social influence/milgram. There’s also my article about tv addiction, but it’s too annoying to read really.

Speaking of self-publicising, there’s an article I wrote about the Sheffield Social Forum on sheffieldbase.com Democracy is not a spectator sport.

The Greenmap Atlas e-book has just been published and, gosh, who is that eminently sensible young man quoted on page 3 of the introduction…?

In a cold technical sense, this weblog was brought to you by…

Moveabletype, for the blogging software and Low Cost Names for the hosting and for selling me the domain name.

Notetab Light is the king of text editors, and for FTP i used Leech (although normally i use Terrapin, but i couldn’t find a obvious way to set file security attributes).

I’m using Webmonkey and The Web Design Group for on-going guidance on web-authoring. This and this (via) inspired me to learn about CSS. Wondering what CSS is? Look here for something brief and useful from the WDG.

I didn’t use OpenOffice much to design the site – apart from some spell checking – but i still think it’s fantastic that you can get for free a word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, etc office software suite – which is fully compatible with Microsoft products but approximately ?200 cheaper than MS Office – so i’m going to link to them as much as possible.