Henlo fediverse, it's been a while. Happy March 185th.
I return from my MH protecting social media exile with the interesting mission to do silly things on my macbook pro with an additional USB keyboard, namely if I press a key on keyboard 2, how do I convert that into a certain key-combo/string of key presses?
I'm about to get elbow-deep in applescript, aren't I?
Today has been "a day" (noisy construction work outside all day), so I took a ten minute break from work this afternoon and did some internet searching, and turned up the correct incantations to have youtube-dl download things and save them to disk in a plex-friendly naming scheme.
Part of the incantations were some plex plugins to do what I can only assume is magic with the metadata and "suchlike".
This new skill, of course, comes with the added bonus of having to keep an eye on the available space on my NAS, because that is going to vanish, quicksharp, I reckon.
Why am I surprised that clicking through to link my trello account with Atlassian has resulted in me basically losing all of my trello boards...
As my 'long weekend followed by four days off work' plans to get away are obviously out of the window, so I have obviously started researching the current hardware market, because my gaming PC, which I built for a birthday a while back, is now pushing eleven years old, and I want something where the oculus software doesn't shout at me for having an unsupported CPU, or I can play Cities: Skylines and actually see things off on the horizon
This is getting pricey, and fast...
Bit of a rant about apple/dark sky, got longer than a short toot, so CW'd it
Under a week since my annual subscription auto-renewed, and #darksky goes and sells themselves to Apple, gives a three month notice that they're pulling the android app, and kills the API too.
I hate acquihires. I doubly hate it when they come with blog posts which have clearly come from the new owner's PR department.
"Our goal has always been to provide the world with the best weather information possible, to help as many people as we can stay dry and safe"
Right, sure, to help as many people as possible, you're removing both the android app *AND* killing the API, so that's both my mobile phone _and_ various integrations/automations.
Gah, this is why we can't have nice things.
I mean, yes, I am well aware that this is me taking out other frustrations on a silly little problem, compared to everything going on right now, but urgh.
If there's anything in particular that I'm learning about WFH with extensive video calls, it's that my ancient X220i laptop isn't quite machine enough for my green-screen adventures in making work video calls more entertaining.
And yes, I _am_ looking at small form factor/ultra small form factor refurb'd PCs on ebay, how did you guess?
OK, I'll admit it, the portable green-screen for the back of the chair has definitely made remote working more fun.
More than one colleague so far has been fooled for a moment by the youtube video of a coffee shop that I'm playing the the background, at least until they notice the green halo around me ;-)
Having had the "from Monday, it's mandatory WFH until further notice, please put your details on this spreadsheet so we can all contact each other if we need to" email, my current new number one priority is to get my VoIP number up and running again, so I don't have to give out my mobile number to $work
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of VPN endpoints suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced, followed by a shitload of sysadmins saying 'oh, sure, it's important *now*. Remember when we said it was? We told you so'"
It's probably just me, but the thought of a phone without any google apps is actually pretty appealing...
https://www.engadget.com/2020/03/10/huawei-to-unveil-p40-in-online-event/
After a big tick against the weekend project of finally sorting out my nextcloud crons and news updater, I thought I'd have a look at seeing if I could make the social app work.
The answer is that "it is still very alpha", so I might come back to it at a later date ;-)
I had totally forgotten about #syncthing, so with thanks to @ryen and @felix@radical.town for reminding me, and for linuxserver.io for having their ready-to-roll images, I just spent under ten minutes and now have my photos directory syncing from the synology to both HC2s.
Tomorrow = set up the remainder of my "need to sync" directories, wait for "some time", and then take the designated "off-site" HC2 to $secretDestination
Currently looking for the easiest way to #sync certain directories from my NAS to a pair of odroid HC2s, because this is digital data, where two is one, and one is none.
I'm torn between setting up #nextcloud everywhere and federating directories, using resilio sync and spending probably forever fixing up file permissions, and compiling minio on the odroids, and using the native synology cloud sync and use the "custom destination S3" endpoint.
Who has two thumbs and just wasted two and a half hours of his Saturday morning failing to connect to his instance of #homeassistant but only in firefox, not in chrome or safari?
Yup, this guy, who has the unfortunate combination of uBlock Origin, EasyList blocklist, and duckdns for his dynamic DNS.
Once I worked out that EasyList is blocking websockets to duckdns, it was easy enough to add a whitelist for my own hostname, but urgh, very annoying.
I was trying to find out when it was changed (I suspect in the last 12 hours, as this was working last night), but github is showing me unicorns instead of git blame for that particular file, and as I've fixed it, I don't care enough to dig more ;-)
Well damn. My favourite android app for the 'verse is showing an http/500 error for the "home" column here on hackers.town.
Anyone have any recommendations for shiny android apps for the fediverse? (because a change is always better than a fix, right? 
Well this is absolutely gorgeous, and I want one... https://www.the-diy-life.com/mechanical-7-segment-display-driven-by-an-arduino-mega/
I managed to turn off the computer before 3am!
This miracle brought to you by me installing a bad combination of C:S mods, causing the game to crash on start up, so instead of fixing that, I loaded up Rocksmith for the first time in almost five years, plugged in my bass, and tore my poor little fingers to shreds*
*or, you know, made them a little sore because it's almost five years since I played my bass...
Me looking around my flat: "I should do some chores"
Also me: "I haven't played any Cities: Skylines for a couple of weeks, and there's an update to traffic manager: president edition" that I'd quite like to try out..."
Me in about six hours: "Oh crap, it's 3am, why am I still awake?"
Successfully moved "add camera, tell it to record a video clip when motion detected" from my #homeassistant to-do list to the done list.
And now I'm going to have to add "write a #homeautomation blog post so I can refer back to what I did when it inevitably breaks in the future"
