2fa firefox · 1 comment · 250 words
I'm big enough to admit when I make a mistake. A few days ago I had a bit of a rant on Mastodon about how PayPal was encouraging browsers to remember 2FA codes. I'd tried to log in to PayPal, went to enter my 2FA code and was presented with this: But, this isn't PayPal's fault! Let's take a look at the code behind each input: <input name="otpCode-0" id="ci-otpCode-0" …
Continue reading →HowTo php WordPress · 2 comments · 200 words
PHP has some pretty good error handling and logging, but I do sometimes find it confusing. For example, look at this warning message: [18-Oct-2023 12:34:56 UTC] PHP Warning: Something bad happened in /wp-content/something.php on line 123 OK, so we can go to something.php and scroll to line 123 and try to figure out what's gone wrong. But we don't know which page, post, or URl caused the error. …
Continue reading →Auth0 · 200 words
Grrrr. Auth0 have a nifty service to let users log in to your site using a social network. Users don't need an account with you, they can sign in with Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, etc. But there's a bug which is five years old. Auth0 doesn't show the screen name of Twitter users (e.g. @edent). There was a workaround using their "rules" product. But rules are being removed next month and we all…
Continue reading →bluetooth gadgets headphones review · 900 words · Viewed ~238 times
The good folk at Nank (Naenka) have sent me their latest waterproof Bluetooth headphones to review. Wear 'em while you're in the shower, swimming, jogging, or just on an endless sea of Zoom calls about quarterly budgets. Unboxing Bone Conducting??! Yup! Rather than sticking speakers in your ears, these literally rattle the bones in your head to produce sound. It takes a little getting used…
Continue reading →blogging HowTo php WordPress · 1 comment · 200 words
I have written a lot of blog posts. In some of those posts I link to other posts on my site. What's the easiest way of displaying those internal incoming links? Here's what it looks like: Code All we need to do is search WordPress for the URl of the current page. Loop through the results. Then display those links. $the_query = new WP_Query( array( 's' => get_the_permalink(), // …
Continue reading →audio HowTo WordPress · 2 comments · 450 words · Viewed ~222 times
If you use WordPress, you can get a fairly basic embedded audio player by using the audio shortcode: [audio mp3="/path/to/file.mp3"] I didn't particularly like how it was styled so - because WordPress is so hackable - I changed it! Now my embedded audio looks like this: 🔊 Location Based QR Codes - Introducing http://xmts.mobi/🎤 edent 💾 Download this audio file. It gets a nice…
Continue reading →CyberSecurity HTML linux · 4 comments · 250 words
Quite often websites will encourage you to copy and paste commands into your terminal. There are a variety of reasons why this is bad - not least because someone could hide malicious code. That's usually done with a bit of CSS to make the evil command invisible, or using Javascript to inject something unwanted into your keyboard. Here's method that I hadn't seen before. Copy this code and paste …
Continue reading →android AOSP bugs DarkMode LineageOS · 4 comments · 300 words
I don't know if this is a bug, or just the way the world works now. Several of the people who live in my phone use artistic black and white headshots. They look very cool. But my Android phone shows their image with inverted colours - so they look like pure shite. Here's what my very real human girlfriend looks like when I ring her to go for brunch: Come the evening, my phone switches to Dark …
Continue reading →Book Review hacking · 8 comments · 400 words · Viewed ~224 times
This book is outstanding. It's the mid 1980s, you're administrating a nascent fleet of UNIX boxen, and you are tasked with accounting for a 75¢ billing discrepancy. Naturally that eventually leads into an international conspiracy involving the FBI, NSA, and an excellent recipe for chocolate chip cookies. It is a fast paced, high-tension, page turner. There's also a sweet moral core to the story …
Continue reading →blogging command line HowTo WordPress · 450 words
This uses the wp shell command. It gives you an interactive prompt into which you can do various WordPress "things". One small annoyance is that it doesn't like multi-line entry. It treats every hit of the enter key as "plz run the codez" - so, at the end of this blog post, I've put the commands in copy-n-paste format. Once you've installed WP CLIP, go to the command line and run wp shell.…
Continue reading →HowTo jetpack php WordPress · 1 comment · 550 words
I like the JetPack related post functionality. But I wanted to customise it far beyond what the default code allows for. So here's how I went from this: To this: Documentation The complete documentation for related posts is pretty easy to follow. This is an adaptation of "Use Jetpack_RelatedPosts_Raw to build your own list of Related Posts". Remove the automatic placement You can turn…
Continue reading →AI · 6 comments · 500 words · Viewed ~1,302 times
There's a popular saying; "No One Wants a Drill. What They Want Is the Hole". It's a pithy (and broadly) correct statement. But I don't think it goes far enough. Let's apply the Five Whys method to the issue: No one wants a drill. What they want is the hole. No one wants a hole. What they want is a picture hook. No one wants a picture hook. What they want is art hanging on the walls. No one…
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