Music

Keith Jarrett – The Cologne Concert

I’d heard of the troubles Keith Jarrett had when he played in Cologne but forgot to find out what his music sounded like until I came across the incident again this morning while listening to Cautionary Tales. Jarrett was due to play in the opera house there and requested a particular type of piano. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find the one he wanted and provided him with a beaten up rehearsal model. It was out of tune, the pedals were sticky, and it was in a terrible condition. He refused to play at first, but after the promoter, an 18yo woman […]

WordPress

Gimme all your cache!

Today saw the release of updates to two plugins I work on. The first, unsurprisingly, is WP Super Cache, and it’s a bug fix release. It fixed a PHP8.2 warning, adjusted some labels on the settings page, solved a problem with “late init” and POST requests, and some other changes, but the major news I want to share is not about that plugin at all. I’m on the Jetpack Boost team in Automattic, and for the last month or so, we’ve been working on adding a full-page cache to the plugin! Jetpack Boost is already a pretty remarkable plugin, with […]

Ireland

You’re voting today in the referendum?

Here in Ireland, we are holding a referendum on changing two sections of our constitution. If I were to summarise the changes, I’d say: On this, International Women’s Day, many of the woman I know are voting NO to both changes. Here are the main objections I see: I’m still not sure how I’ll vote. It will probably be no-no, but I may vote yet to the family one, as any ambiguity about the definition of “durable relationship” may be less trouble than the positives of having more relationships recognised. That’s up to the courts, however, which makes voting for […]

Android

Resize Images with Tasker

Motivated by the change in Google Photos that stopped offering “free storage” I worked on a script that would resize images on my Android phone and released the first version in November 2022. The script requires Tasker to run. There were a couple of problems with it, however. I wasn’t entirely happy with the workflow. I put up with these downsides for quite a while, occasionally researching how to fix the disappearing image problem, but I couldn’t find any good answer until last month. I found out that Tasker must run the “Media Scan” command when it creates a new […]

Email

“Verify this email is yours” spam

Yesterday I got an unusual email spam. It hit my inbox on Fastmail, coming from my Google account. The spam link was embedded in the actual email address, using the plus notation that Gmail supports. On Fastmail, the link wasn’t clickable, but on Gmail it was. When I checked Gmail, the email had been moved into Spam, so I guess they were dealing with many copies of this. Surprisingly, the link is still clickable, even with the email in the Spam folder. I thought I hadn’t received spam like this before but looking at it again, I think I did. […]

Web

When you move IP, move all the IPs

I recently moved the server hosting this site and my photoblog to a new Linode. About time too as the old one was full of cruft built up over a decade of upgrades. It had finally reached the point where I had trouble finding new dpkg files for software that wasn’t as ancient as my installation. Updates would stop in the next year or two as well, which was a huge problem. When I did move, I pointed the DNS at my new server and all seemed fine. That is, until I saw an email from Google on Friday saying […]

Email

A Mastodon account is an email to spammers

This morning I received a spam email where the spammer accidentally CCed everyone, instead of BCCing them. They also seemed to have spammed many people named Donncha, so hopefully none of them reply-all asking to unsubscribe. It’s not the first time, but they included an “email address” that isn’t an email address. They used my @donncha@mastodon.ie Mastodon account. They also included my Gmail address, which is how I received the email. I started receiving email to this blog’s @donncha@odd.blog address and to photoblog’s @donncha@inphotos.org address too, but I’ve blocked them already. If you publish the address of your self-hosted Mastodon […]

Fediverse

View at Home 0.1

View at Home is a simple Tampermonkey script to make interacting with Mastodon (and probably other Fediverse services) easier. When you open a Mastodon post, it’s not possible to comment or favourite it unless it’s on your own home instance. The usual way of dealing with this is by copying the link into the search box of your own instance and clicking the resulting link. This script will add a “View at home” button to the top left of the page when you look at a Mastodon site. By clicking on this button, it will search for that page on […]

Health

F***ing Kidney Stones

The pain I’ve felt in the last few days because of a tiny little stone inside in my body is worse than anything I’ve ever experienced. Absolutely excruciating and uncomfortable. It’s weird drinking lots of water only for my mouth to be dry moments later. I’m feeling ok right now, at this moment, but I doubt that it’s over yet. I’ve been to the doctor and following his advice. Yet again, feeling so lucky to be married to a wonderful woman who takes such good care of sick ol’ me.

Ireland

Blarney is Frozen

Schools are back this morning, but temperatures are staying around 2ºC (feels like -3ºC) which would be manageable except it rained around 4am this morning. Local roads are lethal, with vehicles already skidding and crashing. A double-decker bus skidded on black ice at one end of the village and blocked the road completely. Twenty minutes later, two delivery trucks jackknifed after coming down the hill coming from the opposite side of the village. I live on a hill, and watched cars come down it very, very slowly. Thankfully, no incidents there yet. Pictures come from the Blarney Blog on Facebook. […]