Ari Sovijärvi

It's not #peertube 's day. I get a notification that 8.1.1 is out. The update script installs 8.1.2. I see no changelog for the .2. I check out the github and it lists this version's changes as mostly bugfixes, especially fixing the thumbnails.

The update goes through normally and I start Peertube. Now all the thumbnails are broken. Regenerate thumbnails does not fix them, but instead results in a lot of error messages about missing thumbnail files.

As there's no updated procedure available, I had to revert back to 8.1 that at least has the thumbnails working.

I'm slightly amused every time I receive an e-mail from some SEO or web design company, where they praise my company home page and offer to make slight adjustments for it to be more marketable.

The actual page in question is a pure ASCII text site with no CSS file and it just lists the company name, contact details and VAT ID.

Apparently #netflix support team has no concept of unactivated account that someone constantly attempts to create. Someone in Finland is using one of my private addresses to register a new Netflix account. It's a real Netflix account creation e-mail and since it shows the device name, it's very clear it's from a Finnish user too.

I wrote Netflix about this since it's been getting old and their answer was that they can not locate an account with that e-mail. Surely they can't as I'm not stupid enough to activate the account that obviously wasn't created by me. It seems they can not block this activity.

I swear dealing with complaints to big companies goes something like this:

I call them. No one answers, the recording tells to send them an e-mail or fill some form.

No one ever replies to the e-mail or form.

I give them a 1 star review. I'm almost instantly contacted by a customer service rep, whose mandate is to get me take that review down.

#ranting #dystopia

A lot of weird beliefs out there about coldness, usually coming from people living in warmer countries. I was just explained that if I cold start a car at -10°C and start driving before letting it idle until it's warm, the engine will blow up.

I'd just love that person to fire up a Diesel van in -20°C and try to let it idle until it's warm. A secret: it won't.

How do activitypub-based services such as #mastodon react if they are restored, say from a 2-3 days old backup? Save the missing local content from that time, is there something that would confuse the system by remote instances referencing to now missing local content or queued tasks getting replayed?

Vilkaisen silloin tällöin Ylen uutisten kommentteja. Näen että Ukraina, EU:n puolustus tai vastaava aihe on täynnä kommentteja siitä miten pitäisi laskea aseet ja aloittaa rauha. Suljen äpin ja ymmärrän ettei millään julkisella keskustelulla ole enää mitään mahdollisuuksia olla jäämättä bottien tulvan alle.

Makes me feel old thinking back when I got my first cell phone, we had to pay like 99 Finnish pennies to send an SMS and it was limited to 160 characters. It was somehow magical when Skype came to mobiles, especially its chat part which finally made text chatting free.

Thinking back, Skype used to be a thing. Everyone I knew was on it and it was finally the first time ever when I could chat with all my foreign friends when I was on the road. They also had a Linux client which worked pretty well, until some minor software company bought Skype out and magically the Linux version was starved out.

#sms #skype

I had a slight chuckle reading about Mastodon, as some random blogger announced that it's slowly dying out. Their backing for this claim was a list of Mastodon instances that had since stopped existing.

With that mentality I'd say the web is dead too, I know plenty of sites that have died out. If you ask a young person, they know there's Facebook, Google and Microsoft on the web and you you can access them all with a bookmark.

Personally I've been following Mastodon for a while now even when I wasn't here yet. As I suspected, it or some other Fediverse service might be the torchbearer for the moment when people are just so disgusted with commercial social media, that they just want to look for an out.

Looking at people's introductions, I can't help noticing how many people of my age are now joining here. People from maybe BBS ages or from the early web age when it wasn't shit yet. People, who know proper content and genuine co-operation and sharing of interests is possible without SEO'ing and engagement optimising it all into hell.

I truly hope #mastodon and the rest of Fediverse will make it.

I see Microsoft's quest to name everything the most brain-free way has finally reached the desktops too.

Before their RDP client was called Microsoft Remote Desktop. It's pretty obvious from the name what it was.

The new one? Windows app.

Let's repeat that. Windows. App.

What the hell is that name about? Is it a VM? Some Windows-related utility program? Who knows.

I feel it's a bit lackluster name, as they could've easily incorporated Copilot 365 into it somehow.

Let me run it by you:

Microsoft Windows Copilot 365 app.

Fonzie would go "Ayyy!"

#microsoft

I have an idea! Let's put a tablet locked into a browser and a remote web page as its content into grocery store and use a portable router as its Internet uplink. What can go wrong?

#fail

Looking at the Mastodon's image cache cleanup script results, I see 5-10 orphaned media files are produced daily. I wonder how that happens.

At least someone has acknowledged the possibility and it gets dealt with.

#sysadmin #mastodon

I moved my pinball and retro gaming account @apzpins@some.apz.fi over today. It was a nice stress test for this instance's hardware and I was glad to see it didn't even break a sweat when pulling all the old followers in.

I also examined the outcome from the #Mastodon image cache clean up script I made earlier. Looking at the picture storage usage graph, it does what I intended.

One curious thing caught my eye in the logs, which was a reaction to tootctl accounts prune:

Error processing 116064247286474491: PG::ForeignKeyViolation: ERROR: insert or update on table "account_stats" violates foreign key constraint "fk_rails_215bb31ff1"
DETAIL: Key (account_id)=(116064247286474491) is not present in table "accounts".

Postgre threw this one. I examined the database structure for some time and came to the conclusion this has to be a very corner case race condition. The referred did not exist and the error was also gone when I ran it again. 🤷

After some web searching I found an old bug report about this which apparently had come to the same conclusion. Seeing that for the first time made me wonder if this was the spot where I had killed the database with Glitch migration. 😆

After watching intra-Mastodon instance communication for a while, a surprisingly small amount seems to go over #ipv6. I haven't ran a Nginx log analyser on it, but I'd eye-ball it at 5-10% of IPv6 traffic max.

Day 3 of looking into my #Mastodon instance.

Did read a lot of Github and forum posts about Mastodon's development. There's so many features that I expected to be there but aren't automatically, such as purging the cache, or at least fine grained configuration of that in the GUI. I ended up making a shell script to nuke the surplus cached media and other fluff with some sane timeout values and run that as a cron job. So many blog posts about that out there!

As you can probably see, the 500 character limit has been defeated. It was only defined in two places, but when I started to dig around, I found other customisation stuff too that I wouldn't mind and instead of option to patch every upcoming version, I migrated into the Glitch-SOC variant. With its UI tweaks I'm calling this Good Enough™.

I haven't ran into the issue with the Glitch-SOC yet, but with vanilla Mastodon the mobile client experienced some kind of a rate limiting problem where it just started to give an error message about too many requests. That went away after a bit of waiting and there was plenty of talk about that exact problem after some web searching. But I'll see if those got changed with Glitch too.