Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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What is Matrix?
I am working on bringing Matrix to the WordPress community (see also the WP Tavern post) and part of this is also to explain what Matrix actually is, so I wrote up a few paragraphs that I’d like to share here: Matrix is an internet-based chat system like Slack or Microsoft Teams with a few…
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Checking out a Github Pull Request on the command line
Loving this alias (requires brew install gh): It will switch to the right git branch based on the PR number like this: pr 45 will switch to the branch of pull request 45 of that github repo
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Keeping Family History with WordPress
One thing that I like very much about my family is the anecdotes and stories. One thing that I am bad at, is reciting them. So I had this idea to create something like a private Wikipedia for my family, where each person has their own page and family members can contribute to the stories,…
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Old News but still true as ever: Facebook and Instagram are harming the Open Web
A big motivation for building the Friends Plugin is to be able to follow what my friends and family are up to. Probably the most important “follow technology” is good old RSS. While mostly used for public posts, there are many examples of how it can deliver posts not meant for the public: the solution…
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We’re all using RSS Readers all the time…
… we just don’t realize it. If you think about it, most of the social network services are specialized RSS Readers that combine consuming with creating. (Just to be clear, these social networks don’t provide RSS feeds, what I’m saying is that what they do could be done with RSS feeds.) Take Facebook, for example:…
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Using Jetpack Blocks without a connection to WordPress.com
Recently I wanted to use a Jetpack block for the WordPress Gutenberg editor, specifically the Slideshow Block, which I think is very slim and elegant compared to other Slideshow blocks on the WordPress.org plugin directory. The one thing I didn’t want to do, though, is to connect my site to WordPress.com. For the most part…
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Reducing Our Dependency On Third-Party Platforms For Our Online Activity
There is something that I feel is not right with today’s web structure. We, as the population of the web, create so much content that ends up on servers of large companies. We could own our data. Therefore, I’d like to help reduce everyone’s dependency on third party platforms for their online activity. Vision You…
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Pocketbook Color
I read a lot of web articles on my e-reader (often using Push to Kindle which is fantastic). I left the Kindle ecosystem a while ago and Pocketbook (a TouchHD 3) has been a good home so far. Since my content is often a mix of text and non-text, I was appealed by a color…
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WordPress Meetup Presentation: Decentralized Social Networking with WordPress
This is the presentation I held yesterday, November 7, 2018, at the WordPress Meetup Vienna about the Friends Plugin. I created this presentation with Deckset which allows to generate the presentation from a Markdown file.
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Decentralized Social Networking with WordPress
Over the past year, I’ve been working on the side on a WordPress plugin that implements an idea that has been growing in me over the last couple of years. Decentralized Social Networking. The plugin that does it is called Friends. Starting with the frustration that there are few alternatives for people who use Facebook: if…
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Fixing WhatsApp image dates after Android Migration
Recently I've had the issue to have a completely unsorted Photo Library in Android after migrating to a new phone. The reason is that WhatsApp images are copied into internal storage and end up with the last modification date when they were copied, thus conglomerating together when they should be spread out over time. The…
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WordCamp Europe 2016
This year, 2016, the Vienna WordCamp team (which includes me) was able to get WordCamp Europe to come to Vienna. So may I present to you: WordCamp Europe 2016 in Vienna from June 24-26 Unfortunately it is constantly sold out, but there is a waiting list, should you still decide to come. Looking forward to…
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Presentation: My WordPress is up, what now?
This is the presentation I held at the WordPress Meetup on October 7, 2015. Download the PDF
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WordPress.com Community Translator
Amongst other things, this is something that I have been working on in the last months: Web Publishing for All! Introducing Community Translator Tools
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Bookmarklet: Add URL to Links
A quick one: If you need a website text for copying it as plaintext, you can prepare this by using this bookmarklet: add URL to links (drag to your bookmarks bar) add URL to links with CSS: text cannot be copied (drag to your bookmarks bar)
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Buchhaltung für EPUs: Bookamat
Eine Sache, die man als EPU nicht gerne macht (zumindest alle, die ich kenne), ist die Buchhaltung. Auch wenn man den ganzen “Rechnungskram” an einen Buchhalter auslagern könnte, so finde ich es für den alltäglichen Betrieb wichtig, die Finanzen im Blick zu haben und die Erfassung der Belege selbst zu übernehmen. Eigentlich könnte man seine…
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Little Snitch und Freewave
Inspiriert von der Anleitung von Freewave, die zeigt, wie man in einem unverschlüsselten WLAN (wie Freewave es an vielen Orten in ganz Österreich anbietet) dafür sorgen kann, dass nicht unabsichtlich Apps mit dem Internet sprechen, habe ich hier ein paar Anpassungen zusammengestellt, um das Gleiche mit SSH und SOCKS zu nutzen. Wenn man Zugang zu…
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SSL Certificate Expiry Warning Script
With the increasing trend of SSL on the web, where Google values SSL sites higher and you can have your site be added to the HSTS preload list (the browser will first try HTTPS before trying HTTP), it is a good idea to start using SSL yourself. The downside: you need to get a certificate…
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Stack Overflow: Ways out of the negativity
This is in response to the Stack Overflow Meta question: Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late? In my opinion the problem that Stack Overflow is currently facing is caused by a lot of new users that are characterized by user Mysticial as "help vampires". They care nothing for the site and just want…
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Fix qTranslate with WordPress 3.9
When updating a blog of mine to WordPress 3.9 the page wouldn’t load anymore because of qTranslate not able to cope with the update. In the error log it says: PHP Catchable fatal error: Object of class WP_Post could not be converted to string in ../wp-content/plugins/qtranslate/qtranslate_core.php on line 455 The error is caused by this…
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Add a Rate Limit to Your Website
Suppose you have a ressource on the web (for example an API) that either generates a lot of load, or that is prone to be abused by excessive use, you want to rate-limit it. That is, only a certain number of requests is allowed per time-period. A possible way to do this is to use…
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Thinkery API launched
Just a quick note, we made the Thinkery API public. If you don’t know thinkery.me, it is a simple yet powerful tool for storing both notes and bookmarks. The contents of the saved page is stored in your Thinkery which you can keep even if the webpage goes down. With #hashtags you can easily categorize…
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munin smart plugin: ignore error in the past
As a hard drive in my server failed, my hosting provider exchanged the drive with another one which obviously had some sort of error in its past, but now seems to be fully ok again. I would have wished to receive a drive without any problems but as my server is RAID 1, I can…
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Genial Daneben Analyse
Zur Abwechslung mal ein Post auf deutsch. Ich bin Fan der (inzwischen abgesetzten) Fernsehsendung Genial daneben. Es gibt da eine Genial Daneben Datenbank mit (nahezu) allen Fragen, die in den Sendungen vorkamen. Ohne konkreten Nutzen habe ich diese Daten aus der Text-Form in eine echte Datenbank konviertiert (Script hier) und bin zu folgender Tabelle gekommen.…
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Android WebView: Web page not available
Just a quick note in order to save someone else searching for a solution to this problem. When you want to display HTML content in an Android WebView do it like this: String html = “my >b<HTML content>/b<. 100% cool.”; WebView webView = (WebView) findViewById(R.id.myWebView); webView.loadData(“>?xml version=\”1.0\” encoding=\”UTF-8\” ?<” + html.replace(“%”,”%25″), “text/html”, “UTF-8”); If you…
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