Notices by Terence Eden (edent@mastodon.social), page 5

Aha! There's a way to cheat!

The old Twitter embed API lets you manually specify colour scheme - and is easy to screenshot.

For example: https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=true&id=1420704988825800704&lang=en&theme=light&width=550px

Hopefully I can replace all the Twitter embeds on my website with images (and, yes, I will add alt text).

Thanks @samir for giving me the inspiration.

Boring technical question which neither the documentation nor ChatGPT can answer.

I want to automate screenshots using #Python's #Selenium Webdriver with #Chrome.

This works - but the non-logged in experience of Twitter forces dark-mode.

I want a light-mode screenshot.

I can't find a way to set SEC-CH-PREFERS-COLOR-SCHEME in Selenium. Nor can I find a light-mode toggle for non-logged in Twitter users.

Any clues gang?

(I want to automate replacing my Twitter embeds with a screenshot.)

Parents and Quotes are just <blockquotes> within <blockquotes>. So that was easy!

Spite-Driven-Development continues.

I now have a scrap of semantic HTML which adequately replicates an embedded Tweet.

TODO:

* Add images
* Add entities (hashtags, mentions, links)
* Add parent of thread
* Add quoted tweet
* Add ... whatever else

Should be able to hijack the embed API to get most metadata (no number or replies / retweets though).

Someone complained that an image with decent alt text wasn't accessible.

So now I'm practising Spite-Driven-Development to create a semantic HTML embed.

Doesn't look *totally* accurate - but not bad for a dozen lines of CSS.

OK gang! This is ready for you to test.

python tweet2html.py --css 1234

That will take a Twitter ID and return HTML and CSS for you to embed in your website with no calling back to Twitter.

Features:
🗣 Avatars inlined as Base64 WebP
📸 All attached photos inlined
🎥 Video poster inline, <video> to original source
🔗 Hyperlinks don't use t.co
#️⃣ Hashtags and @ mentions linked
🕰 Semantic time
♥ and 🗨 counts

Try it out at https://github.com/edent/Tweet2Embed

Feedback and pull requests very welcome!

I think that's good enough for the basics.

This code will (eventually) convert all your embedded Tweets into proper semantic HTML without any tracking back to Twitter.

Rough code at:
https://github.com/edent/Tweet2Embed

@simon Ooooh. Possibly. I used to do epic things with their threading API. Not sure if it's still possible - but I'll put it on the roadmap.

Next step is quotes and replies.

If I can get that working, then it *should* be possible.

🆕 blog! “The Limits of Organic Growth for Startups and Social Networks”

Many years ago, when I was younger and more foolish, I worked for an advertising startup. Things seemed to be going pretty well! The office was expanding, the sales team was screaming into phones, the budget for servers was rising. Growth had been healthy, but now looked to be pl…

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/08/the-limits-of-organic-growth-for-startups/
⸻
#capitalism #fediverse #mastodon #startups

These aren't the final numbers - but are pretty indicative.

In the last 12 month, having 5kW of solar panels, and a 4.8kWh battery, has saved us a massive two-thirds of our electricity bill!

And that isn't even taking into account how much we sold back to our neighbours.

#Solar

Doing some maths on our solar panels and battery.
Last month, we only paid for 10% of our electricity!
I'm now crunching the numbers to see just how much the 4.8kWh battery has saved us.

🌞 + 🔋 = 🥰

#Solar #SolarPower

@DamonHD physics, mostly.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/07/why-we-cant-have-an-air-source-heat-pump/

More maths!

Over the last 12 months, we purchased about 1.2MWh from the grid.

Across the same time, we sold 1.2MWh back to the grid!

I think that means our #solar panels and battery have got our domestic consumption down to #NetZero!

It also knocked about £750 off our electricity bills.

Now I just need to find a way to replace our gas boiler. Sadly can't have a heat pump.

Is there anywhere I can buy a *hand-painted* painting of a #BSOD?

Not looking for something just printed on canvas. A literal human applying paint onto a service.

UK / EU ideally. Further afield if shipping isn't too high.

(I can't find anything that doesn't reek of CGI.)

Plucked completely out my arse, let's assume 6 billion total URls in goo.gl

That's about 6TB total.

Of course, lots of those will be duplicates. And text compresses really well.

So call it a 3TB database. Obviously, it would probably be a different data structure which could make it more efficient.

I don't understand why they can't just release a static copy - or searchable version - so that people can easily and quickly deference all the goo.gl links printed in papers and books.

Some back-of-the-fag-packet maths.

goo.gl URls are 6 characters long, a-Z,0-9. That's a total of 62^6 combinations - about 56 Billion.

The realistic max length of a URl is 1,024 bytes.

That gives an upper-bound on the size of the database as 560TB.

Various sources reckon the average length is about 80 chars. Let's call it 100. So 56TB.

goo.gl only lasted 10 years (ancient for Google!). Bit.ly claimed to shorten 600 million links per month. I double Google was doing those numbers.

So…

Hundreds of thousands of books with irrevocably broken links.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22://goo.gl%22&sca_upv=1&sca_upv=1&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:2010,cd_max:2024,bkt:b&tbm=bks

So that's a million academic citations deleted.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=90&q=%22https://goo.gl/%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5

I've been shouting that URl shorteners were a bad idea for a *long* time.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/11/the-perils-of-url-shortners/

Now it looks like Google is finally killing off goo.gl. Still, it lasted longer than some of their products!

https://social.kernel.org/notice/Ak4Ij3NuRdr6mJEhu4

🆕 blog! “DMCA as a vector for pornographic spam?”

There's a law in the USA called the DMCA - Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Amongst its myriad provisions is the ability for copyright holders to send takedown notices to service providers. If someone has ripped off your content, you can send them a legal letter saying "take that down". People often send DMCA re…

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/07/dmca-as-a-vector-for-pornographic-spam/
⸻
#copyright #DMCA #firefox #google