David Gardiner - Media

Hello Mastadon, not quite goodbye Twitter

2022-11-05T18:00:00.000+10:30

Twitter has been going through a great upheaval over the last few weeks, with a new owner and now 50% less staff. Hopefully, it can survive this difficult time, but just to put an egg in another basket, I've created an account over at Mastodon.

My account is https://mastodon.online/@DavidRGardiner, which can also be represented as @DavidRGardiner@mastodon.online

Mastodon is kind of like Twitter, but kind of isn't. The most obvious difference is that it is distributed. In fact, in many ways thinking about it like email (where there are lots of email hosts that all talk to each other) rather than a single centralized, commercial social media company like Twitter, can be helpful. The account names even have an 'email address' look about them.

I could go into more detail, but there's already a great introduction over at https://github.com/joyeusenoelle/GuideToMastodon/#an-increasingly-less-brief-guide-to-mastodon

I'm not sure if I'll stay on the mastodon.online server. I've noticed quite a few Australian folks are choosing aus.social, though probably because of that, the server is struggling a bit under load. The nice thing is that it is possible to move your account between servers and I believe it redirects everything to your new location.

If you're thinking of signing up, you might like to use instances.social to help you choose the best server for you. I only found out about this today, otherwise I might have used it myself! Having said that, I don't see aus.social on it, so I'm not sure how comprehensive it is.

Verified

There's no 'blue tick' in Mastodon, but you can verify that a website you've added to your account profile is actually owned by you by adding a rel=me link. I've done this to my blog in a couple of ways:

In the <head> section I've added <link rel="me" href="https://mastodon.online/@DavidRGardiner" />
In the footer, the links to my social profiles now include Mastodon, and links to <a rel="me" href="https://mastodon.online/@DavidRGardiner" title="DavidRGardiner">

Mastodon recognises the rel=me and shows a tick when you view my profile:

I was never verified on Twitter (I'm not that important, so wasn't really bothered!), and am unlikely to pay for the privilege, given it sounds like Twitter will be charging for that going forward.

Finding my Twitter friends

Finding people on Mastodon is complicated by the fact that if they're not on the same server as you, there's no built-in way to figure out where they are. The best you can do is by looking at the profiles of people you do know, and see who they are following, but that only gets you so far.

There are a couple of free services that I've utilised that can help with this:

Moa

Head over to Twitodon and sign in with your Twitter and Mastodon accounts. Moa keeps a record of other users who have already done this and then lets you download a CSV of any Mastodon users it knows about that are in your list of Twitter following.

You can go back later to see if any new folks have signed in to Twitodon that you know.

Fedifinder

Fedifinder will search all your Twitter following and looks for specific text in their profiles that is likely to be a Mastodon account. To make this work so that others can find me, I added my Mastodon account to my Twitter profile.

Cross-posting

I really hope Twitter hangs in there. You can keep a foot in each camp with a 'bridge' like Moa. I've set it up so anything I post to Twitter will be also posted to Mastodon. I've chosen not to enable the reverse.

Conclusion

So as long as Twitter remains useful I'll stick with it, but I'm now also on Mastodon and I'm curious to see how this alternate social media site pans out. Maybe I'll see you there!

Famous again?

2009-03-21T11:25:00.001+10:30

My parents actually noticed this photo on the front cover of the “Belair line renewal” brochure (Broken link, was originally 210.247.132.180/alt-host../../assets/pdf_file/0003/36165/A4_brochure.pdf) (PDF), and then my son happened to notice the brochure and asked “Why are you in this photo Dad?”

Passengers boarding train at Blackwood Station (Broken link, was originally 210.247.132.180/alt-host../../assets/image/0005/36176/blackwood_08.jpg)

Have a close look at the tallish guy closest to the left of the train. Yes, I reckon that might be me! You may recall, as a regular train commuter this isn’t my first brush with fame. Moving to ABB Grain (who are on South Tce) I did stick with the Belair train for a while (hopping off at Unley Park station to transfer to a bus down King William Rd), but then realised that the 218 bus is generally quicker.

The Belair line is being fixed up this year, however it’s the only line that isn’t being electrified, which is just ridiculous. I’ve heard that “it’s tricky because the Belair line runs next to an existing freight line and also goes through some tunnels”. Give me a break! These are simple engineering problems that can easily be solved.

The Belair line has never been the same since the government sold off one of the lines to become a standard-gauge freight line. Reducing it to a single track has meant that trains now need to wait on sidings to pass each other, and as a consequence the trains virtually never run on time.

What I would love to see is they fix up the line, electrify and standardise the gauge and lease back the other line so that services could finally return to normal. That seems sensible and logical to me, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

Embedding a Silverlight video in a webpage

2008-07-27T10:00:00.000+09:30

When most people link to YouTube videos, it ends up embedding a still image of the first frame of the video. You can then click on it to start playing.

I linked to my demo video in my demo competition entry post, but I couldn’t figure out how to do the same thing. I personally prefer not to force someone to start downloading a video if they didn’t want it. Is there a simple way to do this? (Apart from having to manually save the first frame out as a jpeg).

Ziova CS505

2008-03-18T10:57:00.001+10:30

I don't think my next-door neighbour Phil would mind me describing him as a videophile. He was one of the first people I know to get a digital settop box (and confirm that it made a huge difference to the quality of the TV reception in our area).

Phil doesn't have Internet access, but he'd heard about the Zensonic z500 high definition network DVD media player, and asked me to print out some specs for him to review. While doing that I discovered that Zensonic had changed their name to Ziova, and also had released a new model, the CS505.

So yesterday Phil dropped around and told me he'd gone ahead and bought a CS505. He still had a couple of questions though:

Can you save videos to a hard disk via the USB port?

It looks like the answer is "No". You can use the USB port to upgrade firmware (more about that shortly), or you can play movies from it, but it looks like the CS505 is only a player, not a recorder.

Can you update the firmware?

"Yes", though it is a little involved.

After reviewing the device settings, Phil's machine had shipped with firmware version 1.1.1. To get access to firmware updates, you need to register your device (I did this on Phil's behalf). First register with the Ziova Support Forums then use the same login for My Ziova, where you need to enter your device details (make sure you get the serial number and both MAC addresses correct!)

Once that is done, you'll see that there's a firmware upgrade to version 2.0.1. Don't be fooled by the text that says "use the recovery CD" though! The only way to upgrade from version 1 to version 2 is to use a USB 2 device (flash drive or hard disk). Trust me, I tried to use the CD, and (like others found), that doesn't work.

I was a bit worried (especially as this wasn't my device!), and I didn't have a USB2-capable flash drive on hand (they are quite specific that it needs to be USB 2). Then I realised that I'd recently received a 75Gb external drive from Microsoft (with lots of training material for the 2008 product launches). 10 minutes later, I'd copied all the content onto my home PC. Follow these steps to get the external drive setup correctly:

Download and extract the Recover Version 2.0.1 zip file.
Remove the external drive.
Run RecoveryUSBMaker.exe
Re-insert the external drive
RecoveryUSBMaker.exe should now detect the external drive and offer to reformat it.
Wait for it to finish, then you're good to go.

You can then plug the drive into the CS505 and restart the player to being the firmware update process. It does take a few minutes, so give it a while.

Did it make a difference?

The first thing we noticed was that the menu "theme" had changed. It seemed a bit smaller, but as I said to Phil, that might be because they've added more options to the screen. It all seemed to be ok, so I said goodnight and we left it at that.

This morning Phil dropped by again. Had something gone wrong? No, he was over the moon! He wanted to thank me for my help, as he assured me he could see a noticeable improvement in the video quality and was now extremely satisfied with his purchase.

It's nice to have a happy ending :-)

Fix it Pat (part 2)

2007-11-05T10:21:00.001+10:30

As we arrived at Church on Sunday, I was greeted by a number of people saying, "We saw you in the paper today!"

So while I didn't get a mention from Thursday's interview on the day, apparently my mug is in the paper edition, along with along with some of my comments (down under the Belair sub-heading).

To be fair to the Sunday Mail, they are being pretty open about the fact that they were the ones handing out the badges, and I think I've been quoted accurately, which is reassuring.

(Photo from Sunday Mail, 4th November 2007)

Fix it Pat

2007-11-02T11:13:00.001+10:30

Today at Blackwood Train station, I was interviewed by a Sunday Mail journalist.

Apparently they are running a campaign to encourage more investment in public transport, particularly after the problems the trains had yesterday with the computer system failing completely.

I didn't make the copy in the final article - oh well.

Looks like I will need to get Owen's autograph after all (he's the guy on the left). I was sitting just out of shot behind the guy standing up near the door on the right :-)