Paul Smith's Blog

I must admit, I’m starting to get a little buried under the number of features being added to Microsoft Edge. To the point where I feel they need to add a minimum-install option to counter some of the bloat. However, the cryptocurrency wallet is probably one of the better features, certainly better than searching the web for shopping vouchers. Hopefully come the next crypto cycle it’ll be ready and help drive cryptocurrency into the mainstream by bringing “web3” direct to the browser....

One of the new features in the development build of Edge at the moment is this Discover button, for some users its a purple star, for others its got the Bing logo, and as expected connects to a wide range of Bing services, including the new Chat AI. As it stands at the moment this will likely ship in version 111, i.e. the next big release. I imagine the behaviour of this button will annoy many users as it looks distracting and opens on a long hover aswell as left-click, no doubt prompting many accidental openings....

Please note: This entire article was written by Bing Chat AI assistant after asking it to write a blog post about itself and talk about some of its features. None of the grammer or spelling has been changed, all I did was add “Please leave a comment below.” to the very end of the article. Microsoft has recently launched a new version of its Bing search engine that features an AI-powered assistant called Chat....

Just some quick notes on this - as everytime I setup a new server I forget some steps! Stick the Hugo executable somewhere on the server. Use the following PHP deploy script from here, published below in case it ever goes offline. /** * Automated deploy from GitHub * * https://developer.github.com/webhooks/ * Template from ServerPilot (https://serverpilot.io/community/articles/how-to-automatically-deploy-a-git-repo-from-bitbucket.html) * Hash validation from Craig Blanchette (http://isometriks.com/verify-github-webhooks-with-php) */ // Variables $secret = getenv('GH_DEPLOY_SECRET'); # Paul note: Best to set environment variable - avoid setting here....

I’ve noticed a lot of new Mastodon server admins struggling to get Mastodon, either inside or outside of Docker, to properly work behind an Apache reverse proxy. A lot of them seem to be running into “ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS” or “403 Forbidden”. As the recommended configuation is behind Nginx there isn’t much documentation for getting this working with Apache. Although I run my main private instance through Nginx, I do run an a very small public instance behind Apache....

Tesco have introduced fees to use their electric vehicle chargers! I can finally get to the chargers on my Saturday morning grocery shop! I’ve had an electric vehicle for a couple of years now, back in the good old days there was myself and one other guy using the chargers every Saturday morning, we’d get maybe 4 or 5 kWh of electric for free while we were there doing the shop - enough for around 20 miles of range, not a big deal but nice to have every week....

This week I’ve been experimenting with getting a Mastodon instance up and running and the best way of doing this. One of the things I’ve wanted to do which very few instances seem to implement, is running the Mastodon instance on subdomain.domain.tld yet using name @ domain.tld for the usernames, that’s got to be possible right? Yes it is! If you edit the Mastodon env.production file and use the following:...

There’s been a fair amount of criticism directed at Elon Musk over potentially charging users for account verification on Twitter after he acquired it a few days ago. The current proposal going around is that users will pay $8 a month for their blue checkmark. At the moment it is free. However the problem with it today is that Twitter essentially decide who is worthy or not of having a blue checkmark....

I had the misfortune of stumbling upon a BBC news piece regarding Lithuanian’s illegal blockade of Kaliningrad. It went on for about five minutes, had plenty of footage of right-wing Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte blabbering on about how they’re just implementing EU sanctions, repeatedly, without the point being challenged. It also briefly mentioned how “Russia annexed Kaliningrad during World War 2”, I’ll ignore such a laughable simplification of history. Simonyte was quoted saying:...

I was doing a bit of work today on a couple of websites, including this one and noticed a drop in traffic from Bing. Initially I thought this might be related to the website re-design which was rolled out February 6th. However it looks like the problem goes back to November, when traffic suddenly dropped off. De-indexing looks like it started January 16th and was complete 4th of February with now no pages from dasmirnov....