'something boring' from AlisonW

2025

2025-01-02 21:57:36 - by AlisonW Meta Comment

Yes, really, it is an actual quarter of a century since we partied like it was 1999.

There are some years which feel significant. 1984. 1999. 2001. 2025 is sortof another one. Shocking to realise that's now where we all are. And at some point I'll update this site with some meaningful content.

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Bye bye birdie

2023-05-06 17:26:20 - by AlisonW Meta Social

With the loss of Twitter API access the previous sidebar of recent tweets has now gone for good.

I stopped using the bird app earlier this year anyway, with my Social Media focussed on the Federation, mostly Mastodon. At some point I'll find the time to make an API to bring that here to the sidebar, but until then enjoy the grey stripe down the left of the page.

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A Mastodon backup script

2022-11-12 19:42:32 - by AlisonW Hacks Software

It's always good practice to backup your services, both automatically (eg /etc/crontab) or on an ad-hoc basis. Preferably both. This is a simple script for a Mastodon instance.

#!/bin/sh
if [ "$(id -u)" != "0" ]; then
echo "This script must be run as root"
exit 1
fi

mv /wkspc/mastodonbackup/ /wkspc/mastodonbackup-1/

mkdir /wkspc/mastodonbackup/
mkdir /wkspc/mastodonbackup/env/
mkdir /wkspc/mastodonbackup/redis/
mkdir /wkspc/mastodonbackup/system/
mkdir /wkspc/mastodonbackup/system/accounts/
mkdir /wkspc/mastodonbackup/system/custom_emojis/
mkdir /wkspc/mastodonbackup/system/media_attachments/
mkdir /wkspc/mastodonbackup/system/site_uploads/
mkdir /wkspc/mastodonbackup/postgres/

chown postgres:postgres -R /wkspc/mastodonbackup/postgres/
runuser - postgres -c 'pg_dumpall -f /wkspc/mastodonbackup/postgres/pg_dump'

cp -R /home/mastodon/live/.env.* /wkspc/mastodonbackup/env/
cp /var/lib/redis/dump.rdb /wkspc/mastodonbackup/redis/
chmod 644 /wkspc/mastodonbackup/redis/dump.rdb
cp -R /home/mastodon/live/public/system/accounts/ /wkspc/mastodonbackup/system/accounts/
cp -R /home/mastodon/live/public/system/custom_emojis/ /wkspc/mastodonbackup/system/custom_emojis/
cp -R /home/mastodon/live/public/system/media_attachments/ /wkspc/mastodonbackup/system/media_attachments/
cp -R /home/mastodon/live/public/system/site_uploads/ /wkspc/mastodonbackup/system/site_uploads/

echo "Mastodon Backup completed."

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A Member of the Federation

2022-11-06 23:22:53 - by AlisonW Tech News People

Whether it is Star Trek, Blakes 7, Star Wars, or somewhere else, "The Federation" is a thing to be acknowledged, and maybe respected too. In this case though I'm referring to the Mastodon network, where many people are signing up as a Social Media site which isn't Twitter but is similar.

I'm running an instance myself, in part to learn, in part because data protection and privacy rules matter. The data is protected by being on hardware which I have direct personal and physical control over, and not off in someone else's datacentre.

This doesn't mean I'm _leaving_ Twitter immediately, but I'll be massively cutting down there and replacing my 'tweets' with 'toots'. To add me I'm at @AlisonW@fedimon.uk - hope to see you soon!

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