Instagram's New Feed
- 2022-07-27
Sounding like an exhausted parent, Mosseri agreed that Instagram’s new feed sucked and its recommendations might be bad and then told us it wasn’t going to get better. Instagram no longer cares about photos.
I don't know if people are just upset because something they're used to changes, but I'm not happy with Instagram showing me lots of videos and reels from people I don't know. For some reason, the algorithm has decided that I like watching baseball videos. No, I don't.
My usecase for Instagram is quite sepcific. I use it mostly to just look at pretty pictures of bicycles :) If you want to see pictures of a specific bike and you know the model and brand, it's a lot easier to find pictures from Instagram than from Google image search.
AWS RDS Automatically Starts Stopped Instances
- 2022-06-23
I just learned the hard way, that my old stopped AWS RDS DB instance had been automatically started. I started digging why my AWS bills had been increasing in the last two months, and I noticed that an old test instance had been started.
Yeah, there is a clear notification about the automatic restart, but somehow I had missed it. Now I learned the hard way and deleted the instance.
403 Errors Fixed
- 2022-06-23
It turned out my random 403 errors yesterday were caused by an incorrect KeyCDN configuration. The problem was the Block Referrer setting that was causing problems with Twitters t.co short URL's.
Twitter automatically shortens URL's using t.co domain, and on redirect to the original URL Twitter adds t.co as the referer header. This will cause KeyCDN to return a 403 Forbidden error if your Block Referrer settings are incorrect.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk - Dump Environment Variables to .env File
- 2022-04-14
I've been testing AWS Elastic Beanstalk for a PHP app that's loosely built on Symfony components. I've been using Beanstalk for some simple apps, but this is a bit more complex and I ran into trouble with defining environment variables and using .env files and accessing them from both web and the console.
Here's a longer article how to dump AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment variables into a .env file.
History of RSS and Atom
- 2022-03-21
I was trying to find some information on RSS/Atom feeds, and stumbled on this piece in WikiPedia: History of web syndication technology.
That's a good summary of the development.
Raspberry Pi as an iPad Accessory
- 2022-03-17
I've been thinking about getting a Raspberry Pi. I'd like to set it up as a Tor wifi router using Torbox or maybe as a bluetooth audio receiver to connect audio wirelessly to my old amplifier.
But this video from Tech Craft got me thinking, I could use Raspberry Pi as an accessory for my iPad as well! That seems like a cool approach for using the iPad for software development.
More Reasons to Run a .onion Site
- 2022-03-10
Earlier, I wrote of enabling a .onion service for clearnet websites. Here's (clearnet version) some more good reasons to offer an onion address for your regular website. Alec Muffett writes:
An onion address is a promise and a mechanism to assure that you are taking seriously the needs of the people who use Tor.
I couldn't agree more.
Enable a TOR Hidden Service for a Clearnet Website
- 2022-03-10
Russia's war in Ukraine has made it clear that there's a great need for bypassing state controlled firewalls to be able to access independent media. Yesterday Twitter announced that its service is now accessible using TOR. Twitter's onion service is available at
https://twitter3e4tixl4xyajtrzo62zg5vztmjuricljdp2c5kshju4avyoid.onion/
This is great news for anyone who's interested in privacy or lives under an oppressive regime.
I urge anyone running a website to make it available as an onion service.
Enable a Hidden Service for a Clearnet Website
Here's a great post by Jamie Scaife explaining how you can forward a hidden service to a clearnet website. It's surprisingly straightforward.
Obviously, this isn't for someone who's trying to hide their website completely. It's targeted towards people who want to offer an anonymous onion service for their clearnet website. Basically, it's using a hidden service as a kind of reverse proxy in front of the clearnet website.
Mainstreaming TOR
Usually, TOR and the darkweb has been linked to malicous and illegal activities like drug trade. Now that services like Twitter, Facebook, The BBC and New York times are available as onion services, I think it's clear that TOR is becoming more mainstream.
Do you have a website? Make it available as an onion service today!
CloudWatch Logs and Elastic Beanstalk
- 2022-03-09
Like I said yesterday I've been working on an AWS Elastic Beanstalk project. It's one of my favourite environments for hosting PHP web apps.
I think I got everything set up now. Today I got
- Application logs published to CloudWatch Logs
- Anonymize http logs (remove client IP addresses)
- Send email alerts of logging errors from the application
Next Steps
Nest step is to install a TOR Hidden Service in front of the application. I've followed this guide in another project. It's a cool approach if you just want to offer an .onion url for your clear web application.
Building a Server Side Rendered Symfony App
- 2022-03-08
Back to the roots. It's been ages since I've built a traditional server-side rendered web application, and oh boy does it feel good :)
No hassle setting up build processes or working with the latest JavaScript framework that gets replaced by a dozen new ones in the few days you've been building your app. I had totally forgotten how good developer experience Symfony offers. It's always been good, but DX has gotten a lot better in the last few years when I haven't been paying that much attention.
I think this is exactly what I've needed as a developer.