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.
“An entire day dedicated to Warhammer 40,000? At Warhammer World, the official home of the hobby?! Sounds like an awesome …”
That Archeopter flying machine for the Mechanicus is the most Laputa-looking thing, and I love it.
Watching The Fellowship Of The Ring by the light of the Christmas tree 🎄
“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”
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…
Illumination 💡
Neon lights at the Christmas Village
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.
Despite my best efforts over the last week or so, I think I might have to accept the fact I am getting sick.
“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”
I’d need to spend some time looking into this to confirm either way, but my gut tells me you should be able to use the syn_link_mapping filter and a function to make these tweaks via your theme’s functions.php file, without hacking the plugin code itself.
I want to do something similar for my Mastodon profile link, so I’ll try to take a look into it in the next couple of days 😃
My employer has started blocking 1Password.com recently, breaking my ability to access my passwords and Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) details using the browser extension. I can still get these details on my phone, but typing a completely random 22-character password by hand is far from ideal, and a bit of a pain in the rump, to be honest. This isn’t their most egregious “security theatre” policy, but it is one of the most impactful (to me).
Cards on the table, I 💖 1Password, and have been a paying customer for several years. If my access and ability to securely login/sign-up to stuff wasn’t being impeded by another party, I’d happily keep chugging away without much further thought. Their software has been super useful, convenient, and improved how I approach my personal online security.
As it is though, I started thinking about migrating from 1Password to Bitwarden; the ability to easily self-host Bitwarden being the main attraction in this scenario. Between hosting costs and upgrading to a “Pro” tier account for in-app 2FA generation, it would work out about $15-20 a year more expensive than I pay for 1Password, but that’s not a huge amount in the grand scheme of things.
However.
The most immediate concern would be rebuilding my password vault accurately, complete with all the 2FA details I need – which is a lot. That’s going to take a lot of time and effort to move across, even with an export recreating everything – at the very least I’m going to have to check and verify everything imported correctly and that I’m not locked out of anything. And my digging into this hasn’t confirmed that all item types I use in 1Password can be exported across to Bitwarden.
However, part two.
Unless you happen to have an installation of the native applications for macOS or Windows (say, because corporate policy prohibits and prevents it, and you no longer run either of those OS’s at home…), there’s no way to export your data. At all. 1Password then becomes a silo you can’t easily get out of. The only way out is to manually recreate all of your data elsewhere. When your vault starts getting above more than a few dozen items, that’s a lot of work. Mine stretches into the hundreds.
It’s something I hadn’t really thought about before I started the thought exercise around potentially moving away. When we talk about silos, normally we’re talking about social media locking your posts and user data inside their networks. An everyday utility like a highly-convenient password manager rarely factors into it. And yet, here I am. I guess I forgot my initial misgivings about 1Password.com, and didn’t check ahead for an exit strategy.
I’m not certain how I’m going to proceed from here. 1Password themselves haven’t given me a reason to quit their service, but I’d be lying if I said this realisation of how “locked in” I am didn’t bug me and push me to migrating as an it’s-the-principle-of-the-thing “eff you” moment.
It’s something to revisit in the new year.
“From turkey tips to transgiving, the internet is helping queer and trans people survive the holidays.”