No Coincidence that YouMe Social is starting to look much like Google+

The new look is starting to roll out (as well as some additional themes) and the site has a more familiar look to it now for Google+ users. Collections have also started to appear (Groups that only allow the owner to post but anyone can comment) and Categories have gone live too along with +1 on posts instead of a Like button.

Many changes are still to be rolled out and there are some glitches being attended to but it is good to see that from day one posts can be fully public (so you can reshare them to other networks and link back to them) and the owner is managing to keep up with daily feedback to everyone.

You can find me there at https://www.youme.social/-danievdm

#youmesocial #socialnetworks #google+

My other social media presences where I'm posting

This is a list of places where I'm actively posting:

* MeWe Groups at https://mewe.com/i/danie.van_der_merwe
* Youme Social Groups at https://www.youme.social/-danievdm
* Diaspora Profile at https://diasp.org/i/c2e5b936fed6
* Mastodon Profile at https://mastodon.social/@danie10
* Twitter Profile at http://twitter.com/danie10
* LinkedIn Profile at http://za.linkedin.com/in/dvdmerwe
* Friendica Profile at https://squeet.me/profile/danie10
* Tumblr Profile at http://dvdmerwe.tumblr.com/
* Blogger Profile at http://dvdmerweblog.blogspot.com/
* Facebook Page at https://www.facebook.com/gadgeteerza/
* My website blog at https://gadgeteer.co.za/blog
* Subscribe to my RSS feed at https://gadgeteer.co.za/rss.xml
* Subscribe to e-mail at https://mailchi.mp/8e13efeb48c4/gadgeteerza

Share up to 2.5GB of Files at Once (for Free) with Firefox Send

Yes, there are Dropbox and other file share services but this is pretty quick and simple, can work without registration (up to 1GB), will auto delete after a week, and is end-to-end encrypted. It works fine with other browsers too.

You'll probably want to bookmark the link to remembe rit.

See https://lifehacker.com/share-up-to-2-5gb-of-files-at-once-for-free-with-fire-1833232502 and you'll find the file share at https://send.firefox.com

#fileshare

New Firefox extension “fx_cast” in beta release lets you Chromecast videos from Netflix, YouTube, and more

For all the functionality that Google Chromecast brings to the table, casting content from browsers other than Google Chrome isn’t one of them. Google officially supports streaming content from Chrome’s browser tabs to Chromecast, and even makes it dead simple to do so. All you have to do is click the 3-dot Chrome Menu icon and select “Cast..” However, if your browser of choice is not Google Chrome, you were out of luck.

A new, open source, experimental Firefox extension called fx_cast brings the ability to cast from Firefox to Chromecast. The extension implements the Chrome Sender API and exposes it to web apps to enable cast support. You do need a bridge application on the OS (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to handle communication with receiver devices. Once both are installed, all you have to do is click on the new cast button that has been added to the toolbar, and you should be able to start casting content from websites as well as videos from YouTube and Netflix right from Firefox itself.

See https://www.xda-developers.com/firefox-extension-fx-cast-chromecast-videos-netflix-youtube/

#chromecast #firefox

My new automated social media replication process since Google+ RSS feed died

On Friday the RSS feed from my Google+ posts died and clearly, I took a lot for granted. I expected any replacement RSS feed (from Friendica, Blogger, my Drupal blog) to work the same. None of them did.

Mostly I will post with a title, content, a link and tags. Generally, the RSS feed previously recognised the link and subsequent posts included a thumbnail image of the link with an excerpt of the text. Well, that was truly gone now and it took me 24 hours or so to reach a compromise and to tune it.

Firstly most RSS feeds showed up with errors and the best I got was showing the linked article without any image. This does not translate well to Twitter and other sites that ideally wants to see an image to feature.

To cut a long story short, nothing was picking up the thumbnail image at all and eventually what worked was to use Friendica (my squeet.me node) to create a post as per normal but instead of adding the link, I would insert a URL to the photo at the remote article. That seemed to pull the photo reference through for the RSS and it now appears replicated correctly. Any social media that replicates/mirrors from RSS should now work but for now, I'm creating the source post manually in Friends+Me that replicates to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Tumblr. Friends+Me can also be triggered via IFTTT from an RSS link so I'll be trying this soon as the next step. If it works, my single post in Friendica will replicate to 6 other social networks.

I still have to post manually to MeWe and Youme.Social as they accept no mirroring.

#socialmedia #blogging

5 Linux GUI Cloud Backup Tools

I'm still using Spider Oak as a cloud backup service from my Linux desktop as it is well integrated, end-to-end encrypted etc but I was looking around at other options after they made some comment in an e-mail to me saying they were increasing prices as they had to buy American made hardware (ie. not Huawei I would guess).

Of the 5 reviewed though in the linked article not all state that you get end-to-end encryption and one or two are pretty pricey too.

I've been leaning towards CloudBerry actually as for home use it is a once-off perpetual license ($29.99) with end-to-end encryption and multiple cloud options and even offline options exist. It has incremental and block-level backup which is important for cloud as you do not want to keep re-uploading a 1GB updated file.

See https://www.linux.com/blog/learn/2019/2/5-linux-gui-cloud-backup-tools

#backup #cloudbackup #linux

The Feed Sanitizer wants your contaminated RSS or Atom feed and will sanitise it for you

The Feed Sanitizer takes any news feed and turns it into straight, normalized RSS 2.0 / ATOM 1.0. This comes in handy if you are confronting with tangled or messed or knocked up feeds that are barely well-formed and want to parse these with a not-so-solid piece of software. The Feed Sanitizer scrubs off the dirt and returns germ-free feeds.

I was having a lot of trouble with my Drupal feed aggregator rejecting my blog's feed. I ran it through this sanitiser and it seems to be working trouble free now. Just use the sanitised link this page provides, as your new feed URL.

Heiko Behrens built The Feed Sanitizer with Python and djangoappengine using several open-source libraries such as feedparser by Mark Pilgrimand SyntaxHighlighter by Alex Gorbatchev. RSS and ATOM icons were provided by courtesy of feedicons.com and blogage.de. The Feed Sanitizer is open source with its source code on Github.

See http://feedcleaner.nick.pro

#RSS #Atom

Civil servants 'Sir Humphrey' their way through grilling on UK.gov's digital transformation - MPs ask for specifics, get evasive umming and erring

The Whitehall officials running departments and agencies at the centre of efforts to boost digitisation, along with their political bosses, were yesterday quizzed by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee.

The MPs are trying to get to the bottom of the government's progress towards becoming 'truly digital', rather than just sticking a fancy front end on processes that are often manual. They've so far taken evidence from the founders of the Government Digital Service (GDS), industry and various Whitehall tech-watchers.

Among these concerns are that efforts to reduce vendor lock-in and bring IT in-house, kicked off by Francis Maude in 2011, have lost momentum – and that progress in ripping and replacing outdated kit risks grinding to a halt, with some departments falling further behind and GDS being increasingly sidelined.

My comment: Interesting to see politicians getting into the real specifics and holding departments accountable for the efficient (or not) expenditure of taxpayers money.

See https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/05/uk_digital_government_inquiry/

#digitalgovernment #UK #government

The Saints of Silicon at the Centre for Computing History have got hold of the original build of Sinclair's ZX Spectrum - Hopes to bring silicon back to life over next few weeks

The hardware had been in the possession of Nine Tiles, a company responsible for the BASIC ROM in the ZX80 and ZX81 and called upon to provide the new BASIC for Sir Clive's new colour computer. Judging by labels on the ROM chips, the computer dates from around July 1981.

The Register had a chat with museum curator and CEO Jason Fitzpatrick, who told them the hardware had been fired up at some point in the past, and that the museum hoped to bring it back to life in the coming weeks, if the silicon cooperates.

And the value? In world where a working Apple 1 board can fetch $350,000, it's difficult to put a price on the one-off. Fitzpatrick remarked "It's in the eye of the beholder."

Yes I behold this computer with awe. The ZX81 (its predecessor) was the second computer I owned and where I really cut my teeth on programming in BASIC and hex. The ZX81's and ZX Spectrums launched many a successful computer career back then by sparking interesting in young minds.

See https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/05/the_first_zx_spectrum_prototype_laid_bare/ and don't miss the video at the bottom of the article

#zxspectrum #retro #vintage