Went to try a live image of the latest Ubuntu. WiFi didn’t work “out of the box.” WiFi issues on almost every software update is one of the reasons I’m looking to switch distro, so it looks like Ubuntu might not make the shortlist. Fedora is next to try. If WiFi doesn’t work on that I might need to get a dongle instead of using the onboard adapter.

The death of Boromir in Fellowship of the Ring is a more poignant moment than any of the Frodo/Sam scenes in the rest of the trilogy. Don’t @ me.

Inspired/spurred by gRegor’s post, I finally posted on Facebook something that’s been on my mind for a long time. Like, years long:

I’m going to be deleting my accounts on all Facebook-owned apps/websites on the 31st December. Facebook, Instagram, Messenger/WhatsApp… the whole shebang. I encourage you to do the same, but realise many people have compelling reasons to stay. You do you.

The downside to this is that some of you I don’t have any other way of keeping in touch/up to date with (not that I’m a particularly chatty person…), but at the same time, I don’t want to assume you’d like to continue to have a way of doing so outside the Facebook ecosystem. Unlike Facebook’s surveillance of you, here you can opt-in.

So, if do you want to stay in touch – however infrequently – drop me a message before the 31st with another way to contact/keep up with you – email, alternative social media, blog/newsletter, or whatever. If appropriate, I’ll send you a response so you’ll have my details. If you have an old profile/email/whatever of mine, don’t assume it still works.

I’ve been putting off getting rid of Facebook for so long… mainly from a mixture of laziness, complacency, and FOMO. But with the start of a new year/decade approaching, something in me decided it was now or never. Now I have a set timeline to stick to, and public posts to help keep me accountable to it.

💬 Replied to: A manual tweak for icons in the Syndication Links plugin

“I’m not sure why I had never manually done the fix before, but I’ve had issues1 2 with the Syndication Links plugin showing icons for the reading.am service and my old chrisaldrich.wordpress”

BoffoSocko

My gut was right 😃. You can add extra icons without editing the plugin, by adding something similar to this to your theme’s functions.php file:

function wp4632_extra_site_icons( $return, $url) {
	$sites = array(
		'chrisaldrich.wordpress.com' => 'wordpress',
		'www.reading.am' => 'book',
	);
	$parsed = parse_url( $url );
	$return = false;
	if ( false !== $parsed ) {
		$host = $parsed['host'];
		if ( array_key_exists( $host, $sites ) ) {
			$return = $sites[ $host ];
		}
	}
	return $return;
}
add_filter( 'syn_link_mapping', 'wp4632_extra_site_icons', 10, 2);

For maximum upgrade safety, I put modifications like this into a child theme.

Without similar code in my theme, this post doesn’t display the (test) Mastodon syndication link… but with it the link and icon are displayed. The $sites array can be modified with any URLs you want mapped to a suitable icon in the set.

Hope this helps you out!

So… that didn’t go so well. All the login items were there after the import, but easily 60% plus of the data was parsed incorrectly – usually one or both of username and password were imported as “custom fields” instead of actual login details. There was no pattern I could discern about why some logins imported successfully and the rest didn’t.

Two-Factor Authentication (TOTP) details were also imported as a custom field, instead of the “correct” one. I tried manually fixing a couple of accounts, for testing purposes, but the TOTP codes generated by Bitwarden wouldn’t work on the sites.

There is a format I can manually massage the data into, to get it to import properly (apparently), but this is starting to look like the major hassle I feared it might. And I doubt reformatting the export will fix the TOTP codes. That’s usually a time-skew/clock settings thing in my experience, but every device I tried from had the correct time.

If I do decide to migrate, I’ll revisit this – by necessity – but it’s a job for another time. For now I’ve purged my Bitwarden vault.

On the plus side, the encrypted notes imported just fine…

Something’s broken on my site at the moment, and I’m not sure what. Syndication links haven’t been displaying or updating reliably, and I’m not sure Webmentions are reliably being sent all of the time either.