Sending messages to Pushover from PHP

July 24, 2023 | Comment

One of the things that I regularly bake into my own applications is notifications of when things go really bad and need my immediate attention. For this, I use the excellent and simple Pushover service which allows me to send a push notification to my mobile device. In this post, I run through how to set up your application in Pushover and then send a notification via PHP.

Setup Pushover

I am assuming that you have already created your Pushover account. You get a 30-day trial and after that, it is just $5 as a one-off purchase.

From your dashboard … Read the rest

Day One Encryption

July 19, 2023 | Comment

TL;DR the Day One local database is not encrypted.

After my last post on querying the Day One database, I was asked the question: what happens if you have your journals encrypted?

Before we get into that, let’s look at the Day One encryption options. You can turn on encryption on a journal-by-journal basis and it is on by default. This must have changed at some point as my original journal is not encrypted and newer ones are. Despite being able to choose which journals are encrypted and which aren’t selectively there is only one encryption key meaning that … Read the rest

The Move from LastPass is Complete

July 14, 2023 | Comment

In December 2022 LastPass announced to their users that they had been subject to a data breach. This led me to consider moving to another password manager which I did, settling on 1Password.

I transferred over 1,700 passwords and I calculated that changing an average of three a day was going to take me a year and a half to change them all. Well, it has been somewhat quicker than that as I have finished! In doing so I have reduced the number from 1,700 to 677.

I thought that it might be useful to know what I did … Read the rest

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 Debacletm 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:

  1. setting up your project and getting the keys you require to use the API
  2. 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 | Comment

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