Steve – Page 3 – Steve's Blog

A New England Wedding

On Saturday we attended the wedding of my wife’s nephew. The wedding was held at Butternut Farm Golf Course near Stow in Massachusetts .

But of course we had to get there first.

So at 04:45 on Thursday morning we left the house
At 05:15 we took the Coach from Cheltenham to Heathrow
From Terminal 2 we flew to Reykjavík where we changed planes
From Reykjavík we flow to Boston
Then from Boston we took the Concord Trailways bus to Portland
We were collected in Portland by Rick and taken up to Augusta…. arriving about 24 hours after our alarm had gone of.

On Friday we collected our rental.

The rental - we'd booked a car but got a free upgrade — The rental – we’d booked a car but got a free upgrade

Then we drove about 200 miles down to the Golf course for the rehearsal (Rick was one of the grooms-men).
After the rehearsal we drove over to the Embassy Suites in Marlborough and checked in – we were in one of the premiium suites on the the 6th floor.
Then it was over to The Chateau (which despite it’s name is in fact an Italian Restaurant) for the rehearsal dinner.
Then a final trip back to the suite where we collapsed!

So the day itself dawned.. it was sunny but cool (well what do you expect – it is November after all). We had breakfast – it was a help yourself buffet and was quite good, and there was unlimited coffee which was very good – and then went out and dropped Diane off for her hair appointment – we then tried to find the post office and somewhere that sold alcohol (its all rather restricted in Mass), before going back to the suites and getting ready for the wedding.

Then it was over to the Golf course for the wedding – luckily the weather had held as the wedding was being held outside.

Even though the sun was shining it wasn’t the warmest of days and most of the guests kept their coats on. However the wedding party just had to grin and bear it.

By this time the sun was down behind the trees and things were starting to cool off. Luckily the ceremony wasn’t a huge long drawn out affair – just a couple of readings and a nice little speech by the local Justice Of The Peace. But by the end Ashley was looking a little chilled in her wedding dress and she looked very relieved when she could head back into the club house and warm up.

The wedding reception was held upstairs in the club house where there is a very large room and a bar. Matt and Ashley had asked people to request songs to be played so whilst people got settled and relaxed those songs were playing in the background. There was an open bar with some great bar staff who once I’d ordered a couple of beers just knew what I wanted, and a candy bar (each guest had a small Kilner Jar to put candy in) and a impromptu photo booth.

Once food had been served and eaten the dance floor was opened up and after the traditional first dance, grooms mother’s dancw and brides father’s dance the floor was filled with guests dancing.

At 9:15 the courtesy bus turned up and took everyone back to the Embassy Suites where we basically took over the bar until the end of the evening.

Moving to HTTPS

Well I’ve moved the blogs over to https… it was a bit of a pain and I was really starting to bash my head against the wall with Lets Encrypt’s utilities.

But then I stopped trying to be clever and used

certbot-auto --manual certonly

I then provided a list of the subdomains I wanted to create certificates for and then had to create a response file for each subdomain which was used to validate that I owned the domains.

Once I’d done that and it had created the files I updated my configuration for the blogs and added:

SSLCertificateFile /ewibble/live/blogs.tty.org.uk/cert.pem SSLCertificateKeyFile /ewibble/live/blogs.tty.org.uk/privkey.pem SSLCertificateChainFile /ewibble/live/blogs.tty.org.uk/chain.pem

to the configuration file, and

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on RewriteRule ^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

to my .htaccess file

and this to the configuration file for the old non-https site:

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

Then I reloaded my apache config ….

and it all worked!

But of course it didn’t totally work – due to WordPress’s mad idea of embedding internal relative URLs as full urls in some versions of its software.

So I installed the Velvet Blues URL update for Wordress and then spent a happy hour or so going across all the blogs on the site replacing the HTTP based urls for links across the site to HTTPS versions as well

Another stupid set of spam emails

Yet more stupid spam arrived in my inbox today.

Lets just take two examples from the small tsunami that arrived.

What spammers forget is that sending TWO emails from different people to the SAME address with similar messages in it really does give the game away.

Then why on earth should someone send Security alert emails from an Ipad? They’d be system generated.

Finally why would Rentokil Initial be sending email from a personal address at smile-sumai.jp.

Really guys – are you really so thick you can’t even realise that the junk you are sending out is complete and utter shit?

Post Exporting and Importing

I’m planning on being on holiday later in the year (see Liverpool in the Autumn for more details ) and I’m planning on doing some blogging whilst we’re underway.

So I want to be able to write my posts on my laptop when I’m disconnected from the internet and then connect and push the post and its images up onto my live blog.

Normally you’d use an offline client of one form or another but I’m using my WordPress Plugin for Canalplan to easily add links to Canalplan places into my blog. So that means that I have to use a local copy of WordPress on my laptop and then move the post when its complete, and that is where the problems start.

There are lots of plugins for WordPress that allow you to do things like export whole blog or a post but many of them (including the Official WordPress ones) expect the source blog to be visible to the internet so they can pull the images over. or they rely on you exporting the whole database and re-importing it which would mean having a whole multi-site install on my laptop which is a bit OTT.

So I sat down yesterday and started coding and I’ve got something working pretty well already.

So I can export a post (along with all its attached media) from one blog into a zip file.
You then move that zip file to the new server
Then you import the zip file either into an existing post (so we overwrite the contents) or into a new post.

Its all working OK so far but there are a few issues to work through. As I have to do search and replace on the image urls then both blogs must have the same image sizes set up because WordPress appends the image sizes when it creates the different sizes:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data 7623937 May 8 14:31 IMG_1032.jpg -rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data 4483 May 8 14:31 IMG_1032-150x100.jpg -rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data 15115 May 8 14:31 IMG_1032-300x200.jpg -rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data 149647 May 8 14:31 IMG_1032-1024x683.jpg -rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data 59728 May 8 14:31 IMG_1032-619x413.jpg

So if those image sizes are different then the replaced strings in the new content don’t match the files that were created when we loaded the exported media files into the blog.

Also the exporter assumes that filenames are unique – its possible to have two files with the same name in two different upload directories on the source. But on the target system it puts all the files in the current upload directory. So what would happen here is the two original image urls would end up pointing at the single new object.

I’ve not tested it on anything but image files so far but its looking pretty good.

Zip file loaded up to new Server and ready to load into new post

If I like it I might submit it to the WordPress Plugin Repository.

Stupid pages that have paid Facebook to be forced into my Page feed

The mobile browser news feed for Facebook includes a section featuring “sponsored” pages which they think you might want to like. You can’t hide this section but their selection criteria is totally crap..

So lets start with this – I drive a Volvo…. A super car it isn’t and I’ve no real interest in cars like this

I’m married – so no I do not need “Dating Advices” Facebook seems to have decided to push dating sites (Russian Brides etc.) to anyone it can… which I think says a lot about the morality of the people running the company.

romantic — Hopeless Romantic – or just hopeless?

I’ve no idea what Ceramic Pro Marine is. OK I have a canal boat but its a rather long jump from that to this.

Radio controlled aircraft for the serious hobbyist. Nope – that’s not me… that’s another page that has wasted money paying Facebook to promote itself to the wrong target.

OK I said I was going to work on the electrics on the boat – but again one hell of a leap from there to this.

No – I have absolutely NO idea how Facebook even thought of this one..

Because Everyone needs a portable sawmill

Its a holiday destination. I’ve never shown any interest in going and even if I had maybe putting out a page in English might be more sensible

Dominican Repulic Page — Dominican Republic Page

The scum at Semalt are at it again

I got a lot of hits with a referrer of keywords-monitoring-your-success . com

Lots of different IP addresses – all in Brazil… And guess what : yes its the scum at Semalt up to their old tricks again.

Why can’t they just fuck off and stop pissing people off.

Re-write rules added to block them in future:

# Block access from semalt - its a rogue and serves no purpose RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} semalt\.com [NC] RewriteRule .* - [F] # Semalt under another name RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} keywords-monitoring-your-success.com [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} keywords-monitoring-your-success.com RewriteRule .* - [F]

Oh and they’re also running free-video-tool . com

Spamming Fuckwits

It’s pretty obvious that spammers (i.e. the people controlling the compromised machines that are doing the work) are a bunch of stupid fuckwits…

This site gets between 10 and 20 spam comments a day… None of them have appeared because I use Askimet :

But they obviously never check that its working – mind you I guess they don’t give a shit, they’ve taken the money off the people selling fake NFL jerseys and fake pharmaceuticals so for them its money for old rope (hey – that’s an idea : lets sell Old Rope to people!!)

But the morons pushing out email spam are as bad:

Come on…. sending email to an address called spambucket is obviously destined for just one location : my spam bucket followed by SpamCop. The attachment was a rogue program – not that I use Windows so it wasn’t going anywhere anyway.

Sometimes they almost get it right – apparently PC world have an order for me :

All I needed to do was log into my PC world account and confirm details .. yeah right…. I’m just like everyone in that I order over £600 worth of computer without remembering… how anyone could fall for this I do not know.

Then there is the downright stupid and useless:

Lets make up a totally stupid email address and then use the first part of it in the body of the message..

The craziest thing is that THIS post (along with all the other ones I’ve posted about spammers in the past) will attract more spam comments than my other posts…

Thanksgiving

The weather was good with temperatures in the low 50’s °F – its often much colder at this time of year.

There were going to be 13 of us for Thanksgiving Dinner and as we wanted enough left overs to go round we’d decided to cook two turkeys. But how do you do that with only 1 oven? The answer is that you don’t

Instead you use two gas burners, two large “kettles” and more than 6 gallons of Peanut Oil.

Take your two “kettles” and having worked out how much oil to put in (by using water and your turkey) you fire up the gas and heat the oil to 350°F.

Once the oil is hot you carefully, and slowly, lower the turkey into the kettle:

You keep an eye on the oil temperature and adjust the gas flow as appropriate making sure it doesn’t go over 350°F

And cook for 3.5 minutes per pound.

So after 60 minutes we lifted the turkeys out and let them drain for a new minutes.

Then you take them inside, let them rest for 30 minutes and then carve and eat!

Toshiba Dual Boot recovery

A few notes on how to restore dual boot after a Toshiba BIOS update.

Toshiba released 2 updates to my Satellite Windows 10 laptop.

One reset the power settings so that shut down got set back to quick boot and the other changed the order of the UEFI boot so that I could no longer boot into Linux.

Resetting the power options wasn’t a problem but getting Linux back was a little more problematical.

At first I feared that they’d trashed the UEFI boot settings totally so I got a Linux UEFI USB ready to go.

From Windows I took the option to reboot and pick an alternative boot device and restarted.

That was when I found out that things were not as bad as I feared because when I got to the Device selection I had two options:

USB
ubuntu

So I booted into ubuntu and everything was fine.

I searched the internet and found that the efibootmgr command was what I needed to use … and this is what it showed me:

As you can see the Timeout is set to 0 but the boot order has been changed so that 0002 (Windows) is the first option.

So I did the following:

efibootmgr -o 0001,0002,2001

and then checked the boot menu again:

I then rebooted and everything worked perfectly.

So if you’ve lost your boot menu then you might be able to get it back extremely easily….

Coming to America

We’ve got a pretty good routine working for flying to America.

It starts with driving down to Heathrow the night before the flight and staying in a hotel close to the airport – usually the Park Inn as it does park and fly deals where you can get a room and 15 days of parking for under £120. Doing this has several advantages:

Doing it by coach on Saturday morning would mean leaving Cheltenham at some very silly time in the early morning.
If there are travel delays you are pretty much screwed
An early morning start doesn’t fit well with a day that involves landing in Maine at 5pm EST (so 10pm UK time).

So instead we leave town after an evening meal, and after the commuter rush has cleared, and if there are delays on route it doesn’t really matter. We still have to get up early but 5am is a lot less ridiculous than 2 or 3am. We then hop on the Hotel Hoppa and it’s 10 minutes to the terminal with no major dragging of luggage down miles of corridors.

The only real gamble is the airlines… usually they’re pretty good but this time United Airlines let us down a little – UA 922 on Saturday was a tired plane, and apart from the wifi streamed movies via their app or browser it was like flying in 2001… a fixed set of movies running on a fixed cycle on a tiny seat back display and pretty uninspiring food (chicken curry or a pasta dish) and they’d managed to heat the butter up so you got a pot of melted butter rather and a portion of butter … However the cabin crew were friendly and were very pro-active in providing soft drinks throughout the flight and the legroom wasn’t bad for economy class.

New Yotk Liberty has a slightly odd layout – you arrive at the International Terminal (B) and go through immigration and customs.. then you drop off your luggage before getting on the Sky Train and going to another terminal (A) where you go back through security to get to the departure gates. But when you fly the other way you get a shuttle from A to B and don’t have to go through security again… seems very odd but that’s how it is.

The 50 seater plane to Portland Maine was basic as you’d expect and the turbulence that had wobbled the Boeing on the way down through Maine shook the smaller craft round quite a lot and the final approach into Portland was a bit of a roller-coaster ride.

But now I’m here for the next couple of weeks: