One of my top music discoveries of 2019 was the soul singer Laville from North London. He performed at a concert I went to that also featured Carlton Jumel Smith, and The Soul Steppers of Brighton. I had bought the tickets based on Songkick's supreme concert notification service telling me that Carlton Jumel Smith was playing. His debut album, 1634 Lexington Avenue, is worth checking out if you are into the R&B/soul sound of Daptone Records. I thought Carlton Jumel Smith was appearing as the headline, but it was of a showcase of soul performers put together by Global:Soul, and it was Laville who closed out the night.

I know absolutely nothing about Laville, except that he had great stage presence, was really friendly, and you could tell he loved what he was doing, and that he felt at home at the Camden venue where he performed, The Jazz Café. His voice and lyrical qualities speak for themselves when you listen to his music. 

His debut album "The Wanderer" came out earlier this year on the Acid Jazz label (Thirty One is the single), and it's an album well worth a listen. Besides his own original songs, it features a great rendition of Bobby Caldwell's "What you won't do for love".

#music

One of the perks of paying for a Flickr Pro account is that you get a limited free account with Pixsy, a service that scours the web for photos from your Flickr account, to see if they are being used anywhere.

If you find a that your photos are being used without your permission then Pixsy offers, by just one click, to send a Takedown Notice to one or more sites. Besides requesting that your picture be taken down, the takedown notice also requests the site to amend the article that was using the photo, to include a paragraph saying that the photo has been removed due to copyright infringement.

I gave it a spin, and a few of my photos had been used without my permission. Most prominently these two pictures of MF DOOM from a concert in Dublin in 2010, were being used by wellknown websites:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/voss/5079060535/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/voss/5079060937/

So I hit the Takedown Notice button in Pixsy, and here's what came out of it.

I've sent out a total of eight takedown notices at the end of October through Pixsy. Seven was to commercially run websites with global reach and recognition, and the last one was to a personal website with no obvious commercial scope.

In terms of full compliance to the requests in the takedown note, only 1 of 8 was 100% successful. The 100% successful one was an American university newspaper, that besides using my photo uncredited, also allowed visitors to buy printed copies of my photo, through their website. Nice.

Another prominent website's legal counsel replied that they genuinely didn't know that I was the copyright holder of the photo, and claimed that in those circumstances, using my photo without crediting me was within the fair dealing doctrine of UK copyright law. Guess what, it isn't.

It is true that you can use orphaned material on some ocassions, but photos are specifically omitted from this clause. It's also true that you can use material without crediting it for news reporting, but photographs are specifically omitted from that clause as well.

One of the websites that I sent out two takedown notices to (for two separate photos), removed the image mentioned in one, but didn't remove the one mentioned in the second. I'm looking at you, factmag.

All 'n all, I guess a 87.5% success rate on the initial purpose of the takedown notice, to make these sites stop using my photo without my persmission, is not too bad. The question is: Would I have had the same success rate if I had simply written my own requests for them to take down my photos, without all the legally binding text included in the ones from Pixsy? I might have to test that, as I still have a few photos being used without my permission.

Anyone else out there tried the takedown service from Pixsy and are willing to share their results?

I like everything about this episode of ITV's information technology program, hosted by Tony Bastable.

• Aired in 1984
• The program features a transmission of data for owners of home computers, specifically owners of home micros, at the end of each episode
• Features the reply "I haven't been caught yet" by Pete Perkins, to the question on whether it's legal to copy the functionality of the Apple II and IBM. He also refuses to have copied it, btw, rather they are compatible
• Talks about amateur radio enthusiasts, one of the first generation of hackers
• Cold war references to Afghanistan resistence buying Z80A Central Processing Unit chip in Tokyo, while you can't even buy Sinclair computers in the duty free section in Heathrow, out of fear that it falls into the wrong hands
• A request for british high street computer retailers to not only sell the hardware, but also offer classes on how to use it, in their retail buildings, because that's what the Japanese do.

At IWC in Dusseldorf in May, I managed to break my old website. I broke it, while I was trying to fix it, so that I could export all my old posts, and import them into Known that runs this site. Turns out updating a site with code written in 2003-6 from PHP 5.x to 7.2 can result in a number of things. The main thing being that the site doesn't work any longer.

Not long after IWC I went to one of the meetups in HWC where Calum and Neil were kind to lend me some of their coding and troubleshooting expertise, and guided me to find what had broken. The main issue was that some mysql functions had changed names altogether, and Neil also managed to figure out that variables no longer had global scope, so everything had to get an overhaul.

After the overhaul, the site was loading, but wasn't displaying any posts, and I didn't manage to get that sorted, and I wasn't sure where to start, to be honest. Today, I decided to see if I could fix it, and it turned out ereg_replace doesn't exist anymore, and I use it for some god awful function that converts the plain text of my entries stored in the database, into marked up paragraphs. I didn't manage to figure out how to get that function to work again, so instead I removed it altogether.

The downside is that the text of my posts on my old blog has no paragraphs, but that can be fixed later. The considerable upside is, that my old site is available again, and that I can now focus on figuring out how to get all the entries imported into this site, so that all my old entries can get indiewebified.

#iwc #php #known #hwc #indieweb

Tried to activate an American Express credit card, via the American Express Android app today. Turned into a field study of assholedesign. I wonder if anyone from their customer service team, or their developers ever tried to follow the sign-up flow themselves.

Issue #1 - Secret rules

The fields the user needs to fill out, has no guidance on what qualifies as a valid input. I put in a username, and a password I deemed safe to use.

The app told me the following:

"User ID must contain at least one number."

Ok. I add a number to my login and that worked. It wasn't clear I had to from the beginning.

Issue #2 - More secret rules

I then type in a password. It's 11 characters long, and includes one number, and one special character. That mix usually works.

The app tells me:

"Password not valid, please refer to Terms for details."

What's wrong with writing the requirements in the error message or, and I know or it sounds a bit crazy, right next to the field you need to fill it into (like the Norman Nielsen Group has told us since 2015). At least they could have included a link to the "Terms" where these sacred details can be found. Anyway, I ended up getting a generated one from KeePass, but I still don't know what they rules are for their password.

Issue #3 - Dark design pattern

For the final example, this is how their marketing box looks like:

Notice how the promotions opt-in checkbox is next to the text saying:

"Your email address will not be shared with other companies to market their own products and services. You can update your preferences later if you wish."

This gives the impression that by checking the box, you agree to them not giving out your email address to other companies, while checking it opts you in, to receiving email promotions from American Express.

If you are designing a sign-up form for anything, please don't make me guess what I can put into the fields. It's a bad user experience that, with just a modicum of thought and testing, could be turned into a great experience. 

#darkpatterns #ux #rant 

I watched both of the Fyre Festival documentaries, and found them fascinating. The way social media was used, the way they were selling it as a unique experience, that by participating in it, would make you unique and special as well.

Well, the best festival to deliver on this concept is in my opinion, Goulash Disko.

It's a festival taking place on the island of Vis in Croatia, and although they can't market it as an island formerly belonging to a drug trafficker, it was allegedly used by Tito as a hideout in the early 1940s, when he was hiding in a cave on the island.

Goulash Disko has been happening every year since 2013, and the unique part of the festival is, that it's 100% crowd funded. The funding run just started this past week, and it's already over 100% funded.

I participated in the one in 2013, the first one, and it was a great experience. From what I know, it has only gotten better. I recommend it, if you don't have any plans for mid-September yet.

Lineups to be announced I believe, but you can check out the lineups from previous years on their website on the link above.

Here's a 1st world problem of mine.

The maximum number of items you can have on My List on Netflix is 500. This seems to be a legacy policy from when Netflix was DVD based, and was shipping items to people.

When you hit this limit, you have to remove titles from your list to be able to add new ones. This was not something Netflix told me, I had to figure it out when app/website wouldn't allow me to add new titles to my list. It didn't say what the issue was, it would just say it couldn't be added. I've later had confirmation from Netflix, that this was the case.

I didn't know about this limit until I hit it, and it's not something the UI makes you aware of in any way. There's no counter of how many titles you have on your My List. There's no indication when adding a title to My List how many are in there now. There are zero clues about this.

After reading online about this legacy policy about 500 items being the limit, I contacted Netflix support to ask if I could have the 500 items limit lifted. I was told that was not possible, and I would have to manually remove items from My List one by one.

If only My List had some kind of functionality to order the data on that list. Say, sorting by date added, watch length, whether you watched it or not. Over time I've not been the only person frustrated by this, judging from the results of searching online, and a number of people have written Greasemonkey scripts, user scripts, etc, to address this shortcoming. Unfortunately, none of the scripts I've tried are working anymore, because Netflix keeps changing their API making it impossible to get the data from them in an effective way.

I just have a single feature request for Netflix. They don't have to build any sort of functionality into My List itself, but if they could create a button for your account, which with a single press removed all watched titles from My List, that would really make my day. It would also not waste my time removing them one by one from their web interface which, at best, is as enjoyable and rewarding as watching paint dry.

#netflix #rant

Trying the location feature in indigenous to see how Known handles it.

Had the pleasure of seeing Session Victim play at Jazz Cafe in Camden, London on Saturday. The video doesn't do it justice, it was a very lively performance, with excellent music of course. You should definitely go check them out if they are playing near you in the future.

I've been looking for a different way of consuming Instagram. Facebook has introduced more and more features in their neverending quest to wrestle users from Snapchat and onto Instagram, and I don't care for those. I like Instagram, the photo sharing part, not so much the TV and Stories part. The other reason is that whole privacy thing, of course. Turns out big social media players weren't quite the stewards of our personal data we were hoping for, and spending less time on actual social media websites seems like a good thing.

Except for some musicians and photographers, I don't follow brands on Instagram. I mainly follow people I know. Family, friends, and tags. Being a camera and photo enthusiast, I enjoy looking at photos taken with a variety of cameras and film, and a lot of people use Instagram to show their analogue makings.

For a while I used an app called Hermit on Android. Hermit is a wrapper that turns mobile web versions of websites into apps. It has ad blocking, and a bunch of other nice features. Using Hermit helped me get rid of ads on Instagram, and their algorithm somehow works differently on there as well. I liked the ordering better, it seemed to be more chronological. Only downside: I had to consume it on my phone. It was good, but not great.

Granary.io and Atom to the rescue

Thankfully, people much smarter than me are creating tools for consuming silo'ed social media in different ways. One such tool is Granary.

To be able to get the feed of your friends, and not the feed of your own damn self, you need to find your sessionid cookie value from Instagram. Do the following:

Edit: There's actually a much easier way to do the below, by using https://instagram-atom.appspot.com/ - thanks to Ryan for pointing it out.

• Open the Chrome Browser
• go to instagram.com and login with your account
• after logging in, open the developer console of your browser, and reload the page
• find the "Application" tab and click it
• in the left hand panel there's a "Cookies" item, click the chevron to the left of it to expand it
• click on the line that says https://www.instagram.com
• in the list of cookies like csrftoken, ig_cb, mid, and rur, there should also be a cookie called "sessionid"
• copy the value of sessionid

Next, open Granary.io, and click on the Instagram logo. Granary will load up this url, and then you have to fill out some fields. You need to fill in your Instagram username, select @friends from the dropdown, select "atom" as your format, and paste the cookied ID you gathered above, into the last field where it says sessionid cookie (for @friends) and hit the GET button.

When Granary has done its thing, you'll end up with a link below the form. With the cookie value removed, mine looks like this:

https://granary.io/instagram/l3traset/@friends/@app/?format=atom&cookie=

This link holds your liberated Instagram photo feed. I plugged mine into my Feed Reader and into Aaron Parecki's Aperture and now I can read my Instagram feed on my phone using Indigenous, and on my desktop, all with no ads and no stories. Glorious!

Is anything lost?

Besides losing the ads and stories, you also lose the ability to favourite a post on Instagram, and to add comments to a post. However, I don't necessarily see this as a loss. If I want to Like a post, I can just do it on my own personal feed, and it ends up looking like this. Sure, if it's a post from a friend of mine, they won't know from their post, that I liked it. But you know how you can fix that? Write them an email. If your feed reader lets you email a post, you can email your friend saying you liked their picture.

Not being able to comment might be the biggest loss, but if you can live with that, then I think you should do it, go forth and liberate your Instagram feed.

This will definitely be the way I will consume Instagram until we've all moved over to Pixelfed.

P.S. I'm not sure how long the sessionid cookie lives for, so you might have to reconstruct the link in Granary once in a while, but that should be about it. Also, don't share that sessionid with anyone. I'm pretty sure it can be used to log into Instagram as you.

Holiday is on, and apart from relaxing with the family, I aim to look into a bunch of stuff before I'm back at the factory in January.

My Indieweb life is coming on well, thanks to Known, and the #indieweb community in London. I attended my first couple of Homebrew Website Club meetups in town in 2018, and although my contributions to the community so far is non-existant, I'm very glad to have met a handful of people to talk indieweb stuff with in person, on a regular basis. I've also logged onto the Indieweb slack/IRC channel where I'm a regular lurker.

One thing I'd like to do is, to import all the posts from my homegrown CMS into Known, so they get equipped with all the indieweb goodness which is part and parcel of Known. I've had comments turned off on my own CMS for years, because I gave up dealing with the deluge of spam coming in through the comments form. I'd like to have comments back. Known has an import feature which will let me import Wordpress RSS-feeds (which my old blog produces), so it should be possible. I did try a few weeks ago and wasn't successful, but I gather with a bit of tinkering I can make it work.

On the selfhosting front I'm very happy with my current inventory (bookmark service from Shaarli, Tiny Tiny RSS for reading feeds, dokuWiki for documenting/notes), but I also want to host more stuff. In particular, I'd like to try to run my own instance of Mattermost. With my current hosting provider, that option is a bit limited. As long as whatever service I want to selfhost has very standard requirements, such as PHP and MySQL, to run, then I'm fine. But I find that more and more of the things I would like to try to selfhost, requires a bit more, such as artisan, go, docker, and a bunch of other things that I either a) never heard of before or b), have heard of before, but have no clue about.

I will sign up for a month of VPS with one of the providers in the field, and try out a few things. It might be overkill, but then at least I'll know I'm in way over my head, and I can return to my shared hosting, and whatever that allows me to install.

Happy holidays (: