@ryanc Interesting. My WiFi unit is in the middle of our 3 floor house. So I have half the antennae pointing up and the other half perpendicular to them. In the vague hope the vertical ones will cover the middle floor and the horizontal ones will send the signal upstairs & downstairs. It *seems* to work - but I've not done any serious testing.
🆕 blog! “How updates work in ActivityPub / Mastodon”
I didn't realise this, so I'm documenting it to stop other people making the same silly mistake that I did. Messages in ActivityPub have two distinct ID strings. Here's a (truncated) view of what happens when I send a new message on Mastodon: "id": "https://mastodon.social/users/Edent/statuses/1234567890/activity", "ty…
🆕 blog! “OpenBenches on the Volunteer Technologist Podcast”
I was delighted to be interviewed by the Volunteer Technologist podcast about our OpenBenches project. Huge thanks to Gene Liverman for having me on. It is available, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts.
@ryanc I'm noodling around in a demo database - nothing prod facing. But, this is to try and prevent an attacker producing a file with a specific hash.
@ryanc@retr0id Oh, sure, the sha256 of "b" and "e" both start with "3". But I'm sure I read something about manipulating the first and last 5(?) characters. It is entirely possible I dreamt it though.
On a related note, I'm *sure* I read a paper / post where someone proved that you could manipulate a file to produce a hash where the first and last few characters matched the hash of an unrelated file.
🆕 blog! “A simple(ish) guide to verifying HTTP Message Signatures in PHP”
Mastodon makes heavy use of HTTP Message Signatures. They're a newish almost-standard which allows a server to verify that a request made to it came from the person who sent it. This is a quick example to show how to verify these signatures using P…
🆕 blog! “Updates to ActivityPub in a single PHP file”
A few weeks ago, I built an ActivityPub Server in a Single PHP File. It's a proof of concept showing how easy it is to turn a website into a full-featured Fediverse participant. After a bunch of feedback and testing, I've added a some features to make it slightly more useful. A single PHP file […]
Longer hair than you.Got the ⏻ symbol into #Unicode.Open Standards / Source / Data geek.Known as @Edent on most social platforms.Did an MSc in using the Metaverse for analytics.Bit obsessed with #SolarPower but not quite a #SolarPunk.