Paul Smith's Blog

As you may be aware I’ve been Mastodon for a while - I actually run two small instances, one will be closing shortly, hence this post. The Fediverse has much promise and still does, despite an ever-increasing tendency to larger and larger instances, made all the worse by the Mastodon app strongly encouraging you to sign up on the largest instance mastodon dot social. Back over two years ago I made a post, looking at some non-mainstream political accounts on the largest instance mastodon dot social, 75% were hidden or blocked....

When upgrading some of my servers to Ubuntu 22.04 earlier this year I noticed the Web UI for Glances was broken, didn’t do much investigation at the time, assumed it was a dodgy update or known compatibility issue that would be sorted in time. But noticed the same issue on Linux Mint 22.1 today, almost four months later. According to epsilon77 this is because: Hello! I am maintainer of glances in Debian, for Debian policy, the packages should not include prebult files, for this reason, we had to remove those js files from debian package....

Just my quick notes on installing Pixelfed using Docker Compose, long term I’d like to write this up into a proper guide. Important things to note - Pixelfed as of the moment doesn’t have an official Docker image, normally you’d pull it from Github and build it yourself. However since version 0.11.5 I’ve started using an existing image maintained by Murazaki. Web proxy Assuming you’re running Nginx on the web host you’ll need to setup a proxy by adding something like this to your ....

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:...