A hand holding threads with the Fediverse behind it

WordPress.com and the Fediverse

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

I keep seeing articles and posts about how WordPress is on the Fediverse now via the plugin. This is half true. You can write blog posts and they will appear on the Fediverse. What they fail to mention is that those blog posts can have comments, on the Fediverse, but not on WordPress. If you see a post, and you comment once, then that comment cannot be answered via wordpress, but it can’t be interacted with via WordPress. To interact with an interaction on WordPress you would need to create an account that has two way synching.

At the moment Fediverse/WordPress integration is unilateral. It works more like RSS or an atom feed than a full fledged Fediverse instance.

Frustration

I would love for WordPress to be a fully functional blogging instance on the Fediverse where we can post and have conversations like we do with a full fledged mastodon server. The reason I pay for a Fediverse instance, and am experimenting with a Raspberry Pi and Mastodon is that I want to integrate a long form blogging instance, with the option to have conversations. Some Mastodon instances allow us to write one thousand character posts. Others allow long form blogging, and micro-blogging in a single package. This is interesting. It allows people to be short and succinct, or verbose and long winded.

A Quick WordPress.com Test

I ran a quick test to see if WordPress.com blogs react the same way as privately managed blogs do and they do. You can read a comment, but if you comment to a comment on WordPress blogs they will not be seen in the Fediverse. I see this as a big limitation. This requires you to have your blog account, and a second account to comment to what people have said about your blog, or thoughts.

And Finally

What I loved was the potential. What I see is that the project has fallen short by not getting commenting to be two way yet. This would place WordPress in league with Mastodon, Firefish and other fediverse instances. For now it needs some embellishment.

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From One Culture To Another Through Podcasting

Byrichard

At the moment I’m listening to a lot of podcasts. Probably 5-10 a day on average. I go through one collection of podcasts and once that one is finished I move onto another. As a result of this, the culture of those I am listening to is sinking through.

Yesterday I listened to four or five of NBC’s meet the press and I found them interesting. I wasn’t always paying attention to what they were saying but it did make a change. I recently listened to the whole of the Net@night series and the previous series on the RSS feed as well. As a result, I’ve learned quite a bit about new technology. It’s been fun. It’s about web 2.0 and how everything is “innovative” although ten years ago people were doing the same it was called differently. It’s all O’reilly’s(sp?) fault.

Today I listened to something quite interesting. It’s the Mac break weekly recorded in Dolby headphone surround or some similar tech. It’s interesting because it does paint an auditory landscape. Leo Laporte was in front whilst the girls on that podcast, Justine and Kendra were to the right, and the guests, whilst two others were to the left.

Walking to the shops with that sound was a little disorienting at first but I grew used to it and it’s more fun. I want to hear more podcasts recorded with that technology.

I am going through a phase of cultural assimilation. I watch and listen to all these podcasts that are coming from the US and as a result, I’m starting to absorb the culture. I’m telling myself that I should move to SFO where municipal wifi is a reality rather than a dream. We’ll see what I do once university is finished and I have the rest of my life in front of me.

We may find that the work experience module teaches me to think more creatively about getting a job. If it does then it’s truly worth writing up tomorrow when I get up.

I’m rambling so I’ll leave you to wait for the next post.

Ciao ciao

Experimenting with Home Assistant
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Experimenting with Home Assistant

Byrichard

For a long time I wasn’t tempted to play with Home Assistant or the Apple Home app. I don’t have smart light bulbs, or a smart fridge, or a thermostat that I can control remotely. I don’t have solar panels that are feeding a battery. In essence I thought that if I played with Home Assistant I would not be able to do anything. Now I see that this idea was wrong.

Mobile Device Info

With home assistant you can track your phone. You can see graphs of floors climbed and descended, battery level, storage, average active pace, the distance you’ve walked, whether the phone is charging, whether you have one or two sims in the phone, connection type and more. I have only run home assistant for a few hours so I will get a better idea of what home assistant is capable of telling me about my iphone activity. For every device that has the app installed you will get information about location and battery status.

Aranet

I get pressure, temperature, Co2 readings and humidity. I suspect that with the history function on Home assistant I will be able to see history over a period of weeks or months, rather than days.

Forecast

By default Home assistant will provide you with weather based on your location from a centralised source according to the location you give it.

Netatmo Weather Stations

Netatmo is easy to connect to. Within two clicks you have access to Netatmo weather data. If you have just one weather system then this works very well. It’s easy to see weather info for the indoor and outdoor weather modules from the dashboard.

If family or friends are sharing their weather stations with you then you need to figure out which ones are yours, and which are those of others. I had to guess which devices were mine, and create different rooms for the devices of other people. I then made my devices visible and order was restored.

Apple TV

It is easy to turn it off and on again but aside from this there is no control. I couldn’t see how to change channels or apps, or do anything interesting. Turning it on is good, but usually you want to do more than turn on a tv device.

Network Storage

in the settings tab you have the option of using Home Assistant as network attached storage. You have the primary disk on which Home Assistant runs but you also have the option of adding an NFS or Samba disk (CIFS) storage option.

Traccar

Google Map, iCloud, Suunto, Apple, Garmin and others track your location, either for sports, or for other reasons. If you have family sharing enabled on iCloud you can follow people as they move from one location to another. You don’t need to ask “where are you?” because you can check with ease. Of course this works for a person or three, depending on the size of your “family” group.

traccar is an open source alternative that allows you to track people using your own personal computer, rather than cloud services. While you’re out for a walk it will buffer the data locally, and when you get to your home wifi network it will allow you to see where you’ve been, as well as tracks, and more. I will spend more time experimenting with this.

Home Assistant Integrations

If you would like to see what integrations are possible with Home Assistant so far follow the link and you will be able to search for devices and how well they interact with Home Assistant. In some cases it’s a matter of simply logging in to Netatmo for example, after clicking a button. In other cases, such as with traccar you install the app, and use it as a secondary app on the Home Assistant server.

And Finally

Home Assistant provides us with a different user interface for Aranet devices. Instead of having to look at the app we can easily check for information in browser. In theory we could setup a Pi with an Aranet nearby to provide real time co2 monitoring for an office building or other.

One of the key benefits of the Home Assistant App is that once you add Netatmo, traccar, your mobile devices, Aranet and more you have one app available for plenty of information. Instead of having to open the Aranet app or the Netatmo app you can check within seconds. If you want to look at your walking or other history you can also use the same app.

Initially I thought it would be a waste of time for me to experiment with Home Assistant but now that I have I see that there are a number of interesting features to continue experimenting with.

Instant translation with Google Chrome

Byrichard

One of the best features of google chrome at the moment is it’s instant translation function. The idea is simple. You surf to a page, it automaticaly detects the language and then presents the content in a language you understand.

With such a feature the advantage is that it opens up a whole new batch of knowledge and information. Surf to a Polish page about Kabanos, a Polish/eastern European speciality and the content is instantly available in English.

As a second example if you’re in Switzerland and surf to a swiss page the content may originaly be presented in English but the software will translate it. As a result there is no longer the need to hunt for that language switching part of the page.

The big picture insinuates that whatever the language you speak you will be able to read the content in many more pictures. As a result language will become transparent.

The Eleventy Learning Curve

The Eleventy Learning Curve

Byrichard

I have spent several days playing with Eleventy and trying to get it to behave as I would like to and over the last day or two I succeeded, to some degree. Eleventy, like Hugo, is a static website generator. Whereas Hugo is built on Go Eleventy is built on Javascript. In so far as I can tell they’re both working at around the same speed.

Appearance

This blog post is written, first for Hugo, then transferred to my wordpress blog and maybe, in third place it will be added to my eleventy blog experiment. One of the key differences that I see between eleventy and Hugo is how themes work. With Hugo you choose a theme and it is applied to the entire site. With Eleventy you can create a specific layout for each website section along with it’s own css and more, so it is more modular. Yesterday I was experimenting with CSS and eventually I got it to work, but following the instructions for a css file called “bundle” rather than “style” or similar theme name.

Plugins

If you’re used to Wordpress then you’re used to having plugins that you install and everything is done for you. I tried two key plugins. The first is a plugin that allows you to see the reading time for a post. For this you need to npm instal the plugin and once that is done add a snippet of code in the right place in the layouts, and the change will be propagated to all the relevant pages.

With the YouTube plugin it’s even more interesting. You install the plugin and prepare the eleventy.js page, as with the previous plugin. That plugin will then look for youtube urls and automatically generate a div for the video to play in. The div is given a specific name and that’s where, in the css file, you can tell eleventy how to layout the video player. By default it goes full screen but with a little css you can get it to look good within your blog post or web page.

SASS, SCSS and More

If you’re comfortable with SASS or SCSS rather than CSS you can setup the site to convert from SASS and SCSS to CSS automatically. It gives you the freedom to use the one that you are more comfortable with.

Eleventy From Scratch

For part of the learning journey I used Eleventy From Scratch until I got to the gulp section. From then on I looked for manuals for specific features, like converting from SASS to CSS and other tutorials.

Eleventy Plugins

With Eleventy plugins you extend the functionality of your site without having to spend hours writing your own code. Read the instructions, follow them, apply them, check that they work, and experiment with the next plugin.

And Finally

If you want to change the layout of a wordpress blog you need to learn php and understand how everything behaves with everything else. You need to understand themes and child themes, and how to get everything to work without breaking. With Eleventy you find the instructions for what you want, tinker for a little bit and you achieve your goal. Nunjuk makes website layout as simple as adding html where you want it, and markdown makes adding headings and paragraphs simple.

When I tried adding youtube embeds to Hugo I needed a shortcode to make it work. With Eleventy the url is enough, and the rest is done when generating the site.

In summary, although the learning curve for Eleventy, to create pages automatically is steep, once you understand it, you gain in flexibility. You focus on the html, css and appropriate plugins and it does the rest.

Pi Hole Morality
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Pi Hole Morality

Byrichard

After several days of playing with a Pi-Hole I both enjoy using it and feel guilty. I feel guilty about blocking adverts from certain websites and sources because I don’t want to impact their revenue streams. At the same time I really want to block ads from two specific sources. Pre-roll videos for Plex, YoUTube and other sites, and video adverts from iOS games.

Blocking Pre-Roll

I want to block pre-roll adverts, especially from Plex now, because it’s Christmas themed. As a single person I don’t want to be reminded of the family life that is not mine directly. I don’t want to suffer from ROMO (Reminder of Mission Out) as I’m about to watch a program about people flying DC-3 and DC-4 aircrafts in the North West Territories.

With YouTube I want to block pre-roll ads, more than other ads, because sometimes you decide that content is not worth watching after ten seconds. When you’re browsing like this you give up when you have to watch 30 seconds to two minutes of pre-roll. It’s too much, especially when you always see the same advert, or the same three adverts.

Stop Seeing the Same Ads All The Time

A decade or two ago I said that the problem with satellite broadcasting is that we see the same four or five adverts at every break. If you watch three programs you might see the same adverts five times. That’s several minutes wasted, for the consumer, and a waste of money for the advertiser. I remember seeing an ad after seeing it once. Forcing me to see it five times just gets me to tune out and stop watching tv, and youtube, and podcasts.

Awful Ads for Crap Games

With iOS games I want to block adverts because it’s always the same crappy games. It’s adverts for pay to win games. If the game maker stopped making crappy games he wouldn’t need to make crappy adverts, and then make people pay for crappy games. He would just make crappy games, and people would play them. How much of the cost we pay for some app games is to pay to be overloaded with bad adverts?

Arcade and Premium

I hear you say “but just use Apple arcade. It’s 6 CHF per month and you have a choice of games and no adverts. This goes back to the topic I mentioned in other posts. If you pay 25 CHF per month for Switch online, 6 CHF per month for Switch, and x amount for another service then it quickly becomes hundreds of francs per year. In this context it’s cheaper to get a console and buy games when they’re reduced in price due to Christmas or other promotions.

With YouTube you can pay for premium and stop seeing ads too, but do you want to pay to see user generated content via a company that demonetised your content because their celebrities poisoned homeless people, for views?

An Ad Guard Interlude

I experimented with Ad guard locally, and I also looked at the app on iOS. 5 CHF per year for the iOS version. The price of installing it on a Pi locally. I stopped using Ad Guard locally because it seemed to be blocking 192.168.1.1 and I want access to that IP. I also found that the UI was less fun. No interesting graphs and less active oversight of what the app is doing.

Political Blocking

Right Wing Media like to spread hate and disinformation. These sites are usually inundated in ads. By using ad blockers we make sure that if, by accident, we visit their sites we do not help them generate revenue from adverts.

It would be nice to whitelist websites, from which adverts are accepted, and blacklist websites from which I refuse to see ads. At the moment the closest you get to incremental blocking is to disable blocking for five, ten, 15 or more time. This is a workaround but not a solid solution.

White List Specific Sites

I would like to white list quite a few magazines, news sites and personal websites, without getting ads from sites that I have blacklisted. I want ads from my blog, and the Guardian to show up, for example, but not from The Times of England, or The Sun, or the Daily Mail and other such sites.

Ad sources

When you block Google Ads you block ads on large websites and small websites. Small legitimate websites suffer when we don’t see ads, so that’s why we need the option to whitelist Google ads on this site and that site, but not those other sites.

Web Browsing on Low Ram Machines

Anyone who has tried web browsing on a feature phone or low ram Raspberry Pi has experienced how slow websites can be. Part of the reason for the sites being so slow is the volume of ads that need to be downloaded, but also displayed. A website that is a few lines of text and one or two images loads fine. Commercial websites inundated with ads do not.

In low bandwidth areas, or places with machines that have limited RAM it makes a lot of sense to use a Pi Hole, to make the web more accessible.

And Finally

Ad blocking can be about quality of experience, for example in trying to block pre-roll on video streaming services or video ads on iOS games. In other cases it can be about seeing what certain news sources are writing, without contributing to their business model. News organisations that spread disinformation can be visited without helping fund yet more disinformation.

We need Pi-Hole to be like web browser plugins. “White List this site, and that site”. We could support the newspapers, blogs and magazines we like, without supporting those we do not. When ads are not obnoxious I don’t mind seeing them.

Ads make the web functional. By blocking them we are affecting content creators. We should use ad blockers sparingly. My site has too little traffic for ad blockers to make a difference but other sites do, and it’s a shame to see sites that we appreciate fail, because we used ad blockers when visiting them.

Self-Hosted Problem

Self-Hosted Problem

Byrichard

Yesterday I was already out when I noticed that I forgot to restart the audiobookshelf instance on my server before the run. I could either go home, start the server, and run, or I could just go for my run and use the normal app instead.

By normal app I mean using Audible’s app rather than Audiobookshelf. Luckily I have books that I am reading on both apps so I can listen to either one or the other, without having to sync the player to the right place.

One of the issues that I come across, after installing the apps on so many instances is that I do some things so that it boots with every boot on one system but not the next. The result is that if I reboot to move the Pi from one place to another I need to restart the services. If I had not moved the app I would have no issue. Starting audiobookshelf takes a few seconds. It’s just a matter of remembering.

On the other side of things I was worried that playing books or podcasts via Audiobookshelf would be complicated by the lack of a car app but this isn’t the case. If you’re parked somewhere with a phone or wifi signal you can queue the podcast or book you want to listen to, press play and it will play through the sound system. It’s more fiddly than using a car play app, but not by much.

And Finally

Audiobookshelf is a great app that I like to use daily, for podcasts and audiobooks. Once it is set up it works very well. It’s great that it keeps track of what we have listened to and downloads recent podcasts. It doesn’t have a way to automate the importing of books but that will come with time.

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