More Twitter API Shenanigans

July 4, 2023 | Comment

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter things have been, how can I put this politely, a little unstable. Then, last Friday, the platform started to limit the number of Tweets that you can view. At the same time that this change was implemented my calls to the API stopped working returning the following:

stdClass Object (
   [errors] =Array (
      [0] =stdClass Object (
         [message] =Sorry, that page does not exist
         [code] =34
      )
   )
)

Searching online turned up nothing much about this specifc error message and nothing recent either. I spent a bit of … Read the rest

Querying the Day One Database

June 14, 2023 | Comment

WARNING! Make a copy of your database before trying any of this!

Why do it?

I have been using the Day One journaling app to keep a daily personal diary for many years now. I have been recording my mundane thoughts there for over seven years and have transcribed five paper diaries too giving me a total of 14 year held there.

That’s currently 4,267 entries and counting of which I know very little about other than the text itself. I wanted more detail than Day One offered and had ideas of how I could mine my entries in … Read the rest

Transitioning from Twitter API v1.1 to v2 (Part 2)

June 7, 2023 | Comment

In the first part of this post, I showed how to set up your Twitter dev account ready for using v2 of the API. In this post, I will show you how to access that API and post a tweet.

Goodbye Codebird

I am moving from Codebird which has been great but only supports v1.1 of the API. I looked at all the PHP libraries that I could find and decided on TwitterOAuth which styles itself as the “most popular PHP library for use with the Twitter OAuth REST API”. I toyed with this package but couldn’t get it … Read the rest

Transitioning from Twitter API v1.1 to v2 (Part 1)

June 1, 2023 | Comment

As part of The Twitter Debacle^tm I have spent the last few weeks trying to get my Twitter bot working again which has taken quite a bit of effort.

I thought it might be worth looking at what I did to get my bot working again once access to the API was cut in February. As there is so much in this I have broken it down into two parts:

setting up your project and getting the keys you require to use the API
calling the API from PHP

Getting the keys

I struggled to find which keys to … Read the rest

The Twitter Debacle

May 26, 2023 | Comment

Ever since Elon Musk took reluctant control of Twitter he has been walking a tightrope as he balances bringing Twitter into the black with not losing the core base of users. That includes laying off a large number of staff.

One decision that I think he might yet come to regret is the change to the API access moving from free access to a freemium model. Where you used to be able to post an unlimited number of tweets this is now restricted – 1,500 a month for the free account, 50,000 a month for $100 and so on up.… Read the rest

Changing the Default PHP Version in MAMP

May 2, 2023 | 5 comments

When doing any development on my laptop I use the very useful MAMP to give me an xAMP (Apache, MySQL & PHP) environment.

I recently upgraded and found that the free version offers two versions of PHP: 7.4.33 and 8.2.0 which would be fine but my production server is still on 8.1 and so I needed to match that. I could have upgraded to MAMP Pro but £90 just to switch to PHP 8.1 seemed a bit much, although, I do appreciate that by doing so I would be supporting the developers.

Changing the PHP Versions in MAMP Free Edition

… Read the rest

Hyper Local Weather Part 2 (It’s not that)

April 27, 2023 | Comment

A while ago I wrote this article about the box installed on a lamppost down our road. I surmised that this was a local weather station providing hyper-local weather, but that is not the case. Read on to find out what it actually is…

Hyper Local Weather

I was surprised to see someone up a ladder tending to the contents of the box this week and so I decided to go and find out exactly what it was all about. The person was happy to chat and explained that he was from the Transport Research Laboratory, contracted to the … Read the rest

Hyper Local Weather

April 19, 2023 | 1 comment

I’ve spent years not really considering where our weather forecasts have come from. Other than having a vague sense of awareness that Cray Supercomputers are involved, that the forecasts themselves covered too great an area to be of any use and we’re frequently inaccurate. If you want to know the weather look out the window was my mantra.

Recently though apps have started sending notifications for weather warnings, such as rain starting in 10 minutes, for your “local” area. It’s unclear what area the warning covers and what they consider to be local but here in the UK you … Read the rest

Bringing Robbie the Robot back to life

April 9, 2023 | Comment

A job that I never look forward to is mowing the lawns. Don’t get me wrong I love being in the garden and gardening in general. I think gardening is great for one’s mental health, but that does not extend to lawn mowing. So, a couple of years ago I bought a robotic lawnmower – a Flymo Easilife 250 – which we dubbed “Robbie”.

In order to get the mower to know where to mow you have to lay a wire around the boundary. This is a pretty straightforward job and you can either peg the cable down (in which … Read the rest

The LastPass Debacle

March 13, 2023 | Comment

You will probably have read about the LastPass security incident(s) that took place last year and, perhaps, have seen the belated response from LastPass. Turns out a bad actor got access to an employee’s laptop by exploiting a weakness in the Plex media server software – something that had long since been fixed but the employee hadn’t felt the need to apply the update.

I am a long-standing LastPass user (since 2013) having long recognised the need for somewhere to securely store my passwords. Unsurprisingly I have accumulated quite a few passwords in those ten years – over 1,700 … Read the rest