The goal: date-ordered, numbered, titled episodes of Forward in my feed reader.
Here’s the settings I came up with –
Feed URL:http://forwardcomic.com/list.php
Type of feed source:HTML + XPath (Web scraping)
XPath for finding news items://a[starts-with(@href,'archive.php')]
Item title:.
Item link (URL):./@href
Item date:./following-sibling::text()[1]
Custom date/time format:- Y.m.d
The comic pages themselves do a great thing for accessibility by including a complete transcript of each. But the listing page, which is basically a series of <a>s
separated by <br>s rather than a <ul> and <li>s, for example, leaves something to be desired (and makes it harder to scrape,
too!).
I continue to love this “killer feature” of FreshRSS, but I’m beginning to see how it could go further – I wish I had the free time to contribute to its development!
I’d love to see a mechanism for exporting/importing feed configurations like this so that I could share them more-easily, for example. I’d also be delighted if I could expand on my
XPath rules to load pages referenced by the results and get data from them, too, e.g. so I could use an image found by XPath on the “item link” page as the thumbnail
image! These are things RSSey could do for me, but FreshRSS can’t… yet!
A year and a half ago I came up with a technique for intercepting the “shuffle” operation
on jigsaw website Jigidi, allowing players to force the pieces to appear in a consecutive “stack” for ludicrously easy solving. I did this
partially because I was annoyed that a collection of geocaches near me used Jigidi puzzles as a barrier to their coordinates1…
but also because I enjoy hacking my way around artificially-imposed constraints on the Web (see, for example, my efforts last week to circumvent region-blocking on radio.garden).
My solver didn’t work for long: code changes at Jigidi’s end first made it harder, then made it impossible, to use the approach I suggested. That’s fine by me – I’d already got what I
wanted – but the comments thread on that post suggests that there’s
a lot of people who wish it still worked!2
And so I ignored the pleas of people who wanted me to re-develop a “Jigidi solver”. Until recently, when I once again needed to solve a jigsaw puzzle in order to find a geocache’s
coordinates.
Making A Jigidi Helper
Rather than interfere with the code provided by Jigidi, I decided to take a more-abstract approach: swapping out the jigsaw’s image for one that would be easier.
This approach benefits from (a) having multiple mechanisms of application: query interception, DNS hijacking, etc., meaning that if one stops working then another one can be easily
rolled-out, and (b) not relying so-heavily on the structure of Jigidi’s code (and therefore not being likely to “break” as a result of future upgrades to Jigidi’s platform).
It’s not as powerful as my previous technique – more a “helper” than a “solver” – but it’s good enough to shave at least half the time off that I’d otherwise spend solving a Jigidi
jigsaw, which means I get to spend more time out in the rain looking for lost tupperware. (If only geocaching were even the weirdest of my hobbies…)
How To Use The Jigidi Helper
To do this yourself and simplify your efforts to solve those annoying “all one colour” or otherwise super-frustrating jigsaw puzzles, here’s what you do:
Visit a Jigidi jigsaw. Do not be logged-in to a Jigidi account.
Open your browser’s debug tools (usually F12). In the Console tab, paste it and press enter. You can close your debug tools again (F12) if you like.
Press Jigidi’s “restart” button, next to the timer. The jigsaw will restart, but the picture will be replaced with one that’s easier-to-solve than most, as described below.
Once you solve the jigsaw, the image will revert to normal (turn your screen around and show off your success to a friend!).
What makes it easier to solve?
The replacement image has the following characteristics that make it easier to solve than it might otherwise be:
Every piece has written on it the row and column it belongs in.
Every “column” is striped in a different colour.
Striped “bands” run along entire rows and columns.
To solve the jigsaw, start by grouping colours together, then start combining those that belong in the same column (based on the second digit on the piece). Join whole or partial
columns together as you go.
I’ve been using this technique or related ones for over six months now and no code changes on Jigidi’s side have impacted upon it at all, so it’s probably got better longevity than the
previous approach. I’m not entirely happy with it, and you might not be either, so feel free to fork my code and improve it: the legiblity of the numbers is sometimes suboptimal, and
the colour banding repeats on larger jigsaws which I’d rather avoid. There’s probably also potential to improve colour-recognition by making the colour bands span the gaps
between rows or columns of pieces, too, but more experiments are needed and, frankly, I’m not the right person for the job. For the second time, I’m going to abandon a tool
that streamlines Jigidi solving because I’ve already gotten what I needed out of it, and I’ll leave it up to you if you want to come up with an improvement and share it with the
community.
Footnotes
1 As I’ve mentioned before, and still nobody believes me: I’m not a fan of jigsaws! If you
enjoy them, that’s great: grab a bucket of popcorn and a jigsaw and go wild… but don’t feel compelled to share either with me.
2 The comments also include asuper-helpful person called Rich who’s been manually
solving people’s puzzles for them, and somebody called Perdita
who “could be my grandmother” (except: no) with whom I enjoyed a
conversation on- and off-line about the ethics of my technique. It’s one of the most-popular comment threads my blog has ever seen.
I wanted to play about with Listmonk and it’s available as a Docker image, so I figured I’d just install it on my Unraid box. It doesn’t have a recipe in Community Apps but it’s not usually hard to reverse-engineer an official installation guide into something that “just works” on Unraid. After a
first attempt failed, I looked around for a quick how-to guide online and mostly found… a mixture of people similarly failing to get it working or else having a kindly stranger offer to help… but not on the open Web where the rest of us can
benefit from their knowledge. Sigh.
So I resolved that when I figured it out, I’d document the steps so that the next person after me can have an easier job of it.
Installing Listmonk on Unraid
Install Postgres if you don’t have it already. I used the postgresql15 image from Community Apps.
Set up a role and database. To do this, log in to your Postgres database using your favourite Postgres client and run, for example:
CREATE USER listmonk WITH LOGIN PASSWORD 'my-listmonk-db-password';
CREATE DATABASE listmonk OWNER listmonk;
Create a Listmonk configuration file. I created a listmonk share and put it in there, calling it /listmonk/config.toml, but anywhere on your
Unraid server will do. There’s a sample configuration
in the repository. You’ll probably want to change:
[app] address: change to 0.0.0.0:9000 to listen on all interfaces so you can access it from elsewhere on your network (might not be needed if you
intend to proxy with a host-networked reverse proxy server)
[app] admin_username / admin_password: obviously change these – this is how you’ll log in to your Listmonk system
[db] host: if your Postgres container and/or Listmonk container is running in bridged networking mode rather than host networking mode, you’ll need to change this
to the name or IP address of your Postgres server
[db] password: set to the password you chose for the listmonk user on your Postgres server
Add a Listmonk container. In Unraid, on the Docker tab, click the Add Container button. A minimal configuration might look like this:
Name: Listmonk
Repository:listmonk/listmonk:latest
Network Type: consider using Host to simplify your [db] setup, above.
Add a Port with Name: HTTP and Host Port: 9000. Then fill in 9000 as the value (or
whatever port you want to run Listmonk on)
Add a Path with Name: Config and Container Path: /listmonk/config.toml. Set the Host
Path to wherever you put the Listmonk configuration file, e.g. /mnt/user/listmonk/config.toml.
Start the Listmonk container and watch it stop. When you click “Apply” the container will start, run for a few seconds, and then stop. If you want, look at the logs
and you’ll see what the problem is: it needs to be started in a different way in order to set up the database. Instead, what we’ll do is spin up a new Listmonk container just
for that purpose (and then throw it away).
Start Listmonk in “install” mode. SSH into your Unraid server itself and run, e.g.
docker run --rm -ti --net='host' -e TZ="UTC" -v '/mnt/user/listmonk/config.toml':'/listmonk/config.toml':'rw' listmonk/listmonk:latest ./listmonk -- --install
Substitute /mnt/user/listmonk/config.toml for whatever path your configuration file is at, if applicable. You’ll be prompted with the messages “** first time
installation **”, “** IMPORTANT: This will wipe existing listmonk tables and types in the DB ‘listmonk’ **”, and then asked “continue (y/N)?”. Press “y” and the installation will
complete.
Start the Listmonk container again. This time it’ll stay running and you’ll be able to access the Web interface via e.g. https://your-unraid-server:9000/
I must be the last person on Earth to have heard about radio.garden (thanks
Pepsilora!), a website that uses a “globe” interface to let you tune in to radio stations around the globe. But I’d only used it for a couple of minutes before I discovered that
there are region restrictions in place. Here in the UK, and perhaps elsewhere, you can’t listen to stations in other countries without
using a VPN or similar tool… which might introduce a different region’s restrictions!
Install this userscript;
it’s hacky – I threw it together in under half an hour – but it seems to work!
My approach is super lazy and simply injects a second audio player – which ignores region restrictions – below the original.
How does this work and how did I develop it?
For those looking to get into userscripting, here’s a quick tutorial on what I did to develop this bypass.
First, I played around with radio.garden for a bit to get a feel for what it was doing. I guessed that it must be tuning into a streaming URL when you select a radio station, so I opened by browser’s debugger on the Network tab and looked at what happened when I clicked on a “working”
radio station, and how that differed when I clicked on a “blocked” one:
When connecting to a station, a request is made for some JSON that contains station metadata. Then, for a working
station, a request is made for an address like /api/ara/content/listen/[ID]/channel.mp3. For a blocked station, this request isn’t made.
I figured that the first thing I’d try would be to get the [ID] of a station that I’m not permitted to listen to and manually try the URL to see if it was actually blocked, or merely not-being-loaded. Looking at a working station, I first found the ID in the
JSON response and I was about to extract it when I noticed that it also appeared in the request for the
JSON: that’s pretty convenient!
My hypothesis was
that the “blocking” is entirely implemented in the front-end: that the JavaScript code that makes the pretty bits work is looking at the “country” data that’s returned and using that to
decide whether or not to load the audio stream. That provides many different ways to bypass it, from manipulating the JavaScript to remove that functionality, to altering the
JSON response so that every station appears to be in the user’s country, to writing some extra code that intercepts the
request for the metadata and injects an extra audio player that doesn’t comply with the regional restrictions.
But first I needed to be sure that there wasn’t some actual e.g. IP-based blocking on the streams. To do this, first I took the
/api/ara/content/listen/[ID]/channel.mp3 address of a known-working station and opened it in VLC using Media
> Open Network Stream…. That worked. Then I did the same thing again, but substituted the [ID] part of the address with the ID of a “blocked” station.
VLC happily started spouting French to me: the bypass would, in theory, work!
Next, I needed to get that to work from within the site itself. It’s implemented in React, which is a pig to inject code into because it uses horrible identifiers for
DOM elements. But of course I knew that there’d be this tell-tale fetch request for the station metadata that I
could tap into, so I used this technique to override the native fetch method and
replace it with my own “wrapper” that logged the stream address for any radio station I clicked on. I tested the addresses this produced using my browser.
That all worked nicely, so all I needed to do now was to use those addresses rather than simply logging them. Rather that get into the weeds reverse-engineering the built-in
player, I simply injected a new <audio> element after it and pointed it at the correct address, and applied a couple of CSS tweaks to make it fit in nicely.
The only problem was that on UK-based radio stations I’d now hear a slight echo, because the original player was still working. I
could’ve come up with an elegant solution to this, I’m sure, but I went for a quick-and-dirty hack: I used res.json() to obtain the body of the metadata response… which
meant that the actual code that requested it would no longer be able to get it (you can only decode the body of a fetch response once!). radio.garden’s own player treats this as an
error and doesn’t play that radio station, but my new <audio> element still plays it perfectly well.
It’s not pretty, but it’s functional. You can read the finished source code on Github. I don’t anticipate
that I’ll be maintaining this script so if it stops working you’ll have to fix it yourself, and I have no intention of “finishing” it by making it nicer or prettier. I just wanted to
share in case you can learn anything from my approach.
My work colleague Simon was looking for a way to add all of the
upcoming UK strike action to their calendar, presumably so they know when not to try to catch a bus or require an ambulance or maybe
just so they’d know to whom they should be giving support on any particular day. Thom was able to suggest a
few places to see lists of strikes, such as this BBC News page and the comprehensive strikecalendar.co.uk, but neither provided a handy machine-readable feed.
Gosh, there’s a lot of strikes going on. ✊
If only they knew somebody who loves an excuse to throw a screen-scraper together. Oh wait, that’s me!
I threw together a 36-line Ruby program that extracts all the data from strikecalendar.co.uk and outputs an
.ics file. I guess if you wanted you could set it up to automatically update the file a couple of times a day and host it at a URL that people can subscribe to; that’s an exercise left for the reader.
If you just want a one-off import based on the state-of-play right now, though, you can save this .ics file to your computer
and import it to your calendar. Simple.
I swear I’m onto something with this idea: Scottish-Mexican fusion cookery. Hear me out.
It started on the last day of our trip to the Edinburgh
Fringe Festival in 2012 when, in an effort to use up our self-catering supplies, JTA suggested (he later claimed this should have
been taken as a joke) haggis tacos. Ruth and I ate a whole bunch of them and they were great.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good: if I did it again, it’d be haggis and clapshot with a thick whisky sauce… all in a taco.
In Scotland last week (while I wasn’t climbing mountains and thinking
of my father), Ruth and I came up with our second bit of Scottish-Mexican fusion food: tattie scone quesadillas. Just sandwich some cheese and anything else you like
between tattie scones and gently fry in butter.
These were delicious as they were, but I think there’d be mileage in slicing them into thin fingers and serving them with a moderately spicy salsa, as a dip.
We’re definitely onto something. But what to try next? How about…
Bean chilli stovies?
Arroz con pollo on oatcakes?
Carnitas and refried beans in a bridie?
Huevos rancheros with lorne sausage sandwiched between the tortilla and the eggs?
Kedgeree fajitas? (I’m not entirely convinced by this one)
Rumbledethumps con carne?
Caldo de leekie: cock-a-leekie soup but with mexican rice dumped in after cooking, caldo-de-pollo-style?
Something like a chimichanga but battered before it’s fried? (my god, that sounds like an instant heart attack)
Is there a name for that experience when you forget for a moment that somebody’s dead?
For a year or so after my dad’s death 11 years ago I’d routinely have that moment:
when I’d go “I should tell my dad about this!”, followed immediately by an “Oh… no, I can’t, can I?”. Then, of course, it got rarer. It happened in 2017, but I don’t know if it happened again after that – maybe once? – until last
week.
Last week I took our eldest up Cairn Gorm, a mountain my dad and I have climbed up (and/or skiied down!) many times.
I wonder if subconsciously I was aware that the anniversary of his death – “Dead Dad Day”, as my sisters and I call it – was coming up? In any
case, when I found myself on Cairn Gorm on a family trip and snapped a photo from near the summit, I had a moment where I thought “I should send this picture to my dad”, before once
again remembering that nope, that wasn’t possible.
My dad loved a good Munro: this photo of
him was taken only about a kilometre and a half West of where I took my most recent snap on Cairn Gorm, as he ice climbed up the North face of Stob Coire an t-Sneachda.
Strange that this can still happen, over a decade on. If there’s a name for the phenomenon, I’d love to know it.
The two most important things you can do to protect your online accounts remain to (a) use a different password, ideally a randomly-generated one, for every service, and (b) enable
two-factor authentication (2FA) where it’s available.
If you’re not already doing that, go do that. A password manager like 1Password, Bitwarden, or LastPass will help (although be aware that the latter’s had some security issues lately, as I’ve mentioned).
For many people, authentication looks like this: put in a username and password from a password safe (or their brain), and a second factor from their phone.
I promised back in 2018 to talk about what
this kind of authentication usually1
looks like for me, because my approach is a little different:
My password manager fills the username, password, and second factor parts of most login forms for me. It feels pretty magical.
I simply press my magic key combination, (re-)authenticate with my password safe if necessary, and then it does the rest. Including, thanks to some light scripting/hackery, many
authentication flows that span multiple pages and even ones that ask for randomly-selected characters from a secret word or similar2.
I love having long passwords and 2FA enabled. But I also love being able to log in with the convenience of a master
password and my fingerprint.
My approach isn’t without its controversies. The argument against it broadly comes down to this:
Storing the username, password, and the means to provide an authentication code in the same place means that you’re no-longer providing a second factor. It’s no longer e.g.
“something you have” and “something you know”, but just “something you have”. Therefore, this is equivalent to using only a username and password and not enabling 2FA at all.
I disagree with this argument. I provide two counter-arguments:
1. For most people, they’re already simplifying down to “something you have” by running the authenticator software on the same device, protected in the same way, as their
password safe: it’s their mobile phone! If your phone can be snatched while-unlocked, or if your password safe and authenticator are protected by the same biometrics3,
an attacker with access to your mobile phone already has everything.
If your argument about whether it counts as multifactor is based on how many devices are involved, this common pattern also isn’t multifactor.
2. Even if we do accept that this is fewer factors, it doesn’t completely undermine the value of time-based second factor codes4.
Time-based codes have an important role in protecting you from authentication replay!
For instance: if you use a device for which the Internet connection is insecure, or where there’s a keylogger installed, or where somebody’s shoulder-surfing and can see what you type…
the most they can get is your username, password, and a code that will stop working in 30 seconds5. That’s
still a huge improvement on basic username/password-based system.6
Note that I wouldn’t use this approach if I were using a cloud-based password safe like those I linked in the first paragraph! For me personally: storing usernames, passwords, and
2FA authentication keys together on somebody else’s hardware feels like too much of a risk.
But my password manager of choice is KeePassXC/KeePassDX, to which I migrated after I realised that the
plugins I was using in vanilla KeePass were provided as standard functionality in those forks. I keep the master copy of my password database
encrypted on a pendrive that attaches to my wallet, and I use Syncthing to push
secondary copies to a couple of other bits of hardware I control, such as my phone. Cloud-based password safes have their place and they’re extremely accessible to people new to
password managers or who need organisational “sharing” features, but they’re not the right tool for me.
As always: do your own risk assessment and decide what’s right for you. But from my experience I can say this: seamless, secure logins feel magical, and don’t have to require an
unacceptable security trade-off.
Footnotes
1 Not all authentication looks like this, for me, because some kinds of 2FA can’t be provided by my password safe. Some service providers “push” verification checks to an app, for example. Others use proprietary
TOTP-based second factor systems (I’m looking at you, banks!). And some, of course, insist on proven-to-be-terrible
solutions like email and SMS-based 2FA.
2 Note: asking for a username, password, and something that’s basically another-password
is not true multifactor authentication (I’m looking at you again, banks!), but it’s still potentially useful for organisations that need to authenticate you by multiple media
(e.g. online and by telephone), because it can be used to help restrict access to secrets by staff members. Important, but not the same thing: you should still demand 2FA.
3 Biometric security uses your body, not your mind, and so is still usable even if you’re
asleep, dead, uncooperative, or if an attacker simply removes and retains the body part that is to be scanned. Eww.
4 TOTP is a very popular
mechanism: you’ve probably used it. You get a QR code to scan into the authenticator app on your device (or multiple devices,
for redundancy), and it comes up with a different 6-digit code every 30 seconds or so.
5 Strictly, a TOTP code is
likely to work for a few minutes, on account of servers allowing for drift between your clock and theirs. But it’s still a short window.
6 It doesn’t protect you if an attacker manages to aquire a dump of the usernames,
inadequately-hashed passwords, and 2FA configuration from the server itself, of course, where other forms of 2FA (e.g. certificate-based) might, but protecting servers from bad actors is a whole separate essay.
Two years after our last murder mystery party, almost
three years since the one before, and much, much longer since our last in-person one, we finally managed to have another
get-the-guests-in-one-place murder mystery party, just like old times. And it was great!
Full credit goes to Ruth who did basically all the legwork this time around. Cheers!
D’Avekki’s murder mystery sets use an unusual mechanic that I’ve discussed before online with other murder mystery party authorship enthusiasts1 but never tried in practice: a way of determining at
random who the murderer is when play begins. This approach has a huge benefit in that it means that you can assign characters to players using a subset of those available (rather
than the usual challenges that often come up when, for example, somebody need to play somebody of a different gender than their own) and, more-importantly, it protects you from the
eventuality that a player drops-out at short notice. This latter feature proved incredibly useful as we had a total of three of our guests pull out unexpectedly!
Most of our guests were old hands at murder mystery games, but for Owen’s date Kirsty this was a completely novel experience.
The challenge of writing a murder mystery with such a mechanic is to ensure that the script and evidence adapt to the various possible murderers. When I first examined the set
that was delivered to us, I was highly skeptical: the approach is broadly as follows2:
At the start of the party, the players secretly draw lots to determine who is the murderer: the player who receives the slip marked with an X is the murderer.
Each character “script” consists of (a) an initial introduction, (b) for each of three acts, a futher introduction which sets up two follow-up questions, (c) the answers to those
two follow-up questions, (d) a final statement of innocence, and (e) a final statement of guilt, for use by the murderer.
In addition, each script has a handful of underlined sections, which are to be used only if you are the murderer. This
means that the only perceivable difference between one person and another being the murderer is that the only who is the murderer will present a small amount of additional information.
The writing is designed such that this additional piece of evidence will be enough to make the case against them be compelling (e.g. because their story becomes
internally-inconsistent).
The writing was good overall: I especially appreciated the use of a true crime podcast as a framing device (expertly delivered thanks to Rory‘s
radio voice). It was also pleasing to see, in hindsight, how the story had been assembled such that any character could be the murderer, but only one would give away a
crucial clue. The downside of the format is pretty obvious, though: knowing what the mechanic is, a detective only needs to look at each piece of evidence that appears and look for a
connection with each statement given by every other player, ruling out any “red herring” pairings that connect to every other player (as is common with just about the entire
genre, all of the suspects had viable motives: only means and opportunity may vary).
It worked very well, but I wonder if – now the formula’s understood by us – a second set in a similar style wouldn’t be as successful.
Our classic end-of-murder-mystery-party photo post makes a comeback. Extra-special hat tip to Kirsty, who ended up by coincidence being the murderer at her first ever such event and
did astoundingly well. From left to right: Rory (Major Clanger), Simon (Chef Flambé), JTA (Noah Sinner), Kirsty (Phyllis
Ora), Ruth (Dusty Tomes), Liz (Ruby Daggers), Owen (Max
Cruise), and me (Professor Pi).
That said, nobody correctly fingered the murderer this time around. Maybe we’re out of practice? Or maybe the quality of the hints in such a wide-open and dynamic murderer-selection
mechanic is less-solid than we’re used to? It’s hard to say: I’d certainly give another D’Avekki a go to find out.
It all started when I saw no-ht.ml, Terence Eden‘s hilarious response to Salma
Alam-Naylor‘s excellent HTML is all you need to make a website. The latter is an
argument against both the silly amount of JavaScript with which websites routinely burden their users, but also even against depending on CSS. As a fan of CSS Naked Day and a firm
believer in using JS only for progressive enhancement, I’m obviously in favour.
Obviously no-ht.ml is to be taken as tongue-in-cheek, but as you’re about to see: it caught my interest and got me thinking: how could I go even further.
Terence’s site works by delivering a document with a
claimed MIME type of text/html, but which contains only the (invalid) “HTML” code
<!doctype UNICODE><meta charset="UTF-8"><plaintext> (to work around browsers’ wish to treat the page as HTML). This is followed by a block of UTF-8 plain text making use of spacing
and emoji to illustrate and decorate the content. It’s frankly very silly, and I love it.1
I think it’s possible to go one step further, though, and create a web page with no code whatsoever. That is, one that you can read as if it were a regular web page, but where
using View Source or e.g. downloading the page with curl will show you… nothing.
I present: The Page With No Code! (It’ll probably only work if you’re using Firefox, for reasons that will become apparent later.)
I’d encourage you to visit The Page With No Code, use View Source to confirm for yourself that it truly has no code, and see if you can work out for yourself how it manages
this feat… before coming back here for an explanation. Again: probably Firefox-only.
Once you’ve had a look for yourself and had a chance to form an opinion, here’s an explanation of the black magic that makes this atrocity possible:
The page is blank. It’s delivered with Content-Type: text/html. Your browser interprets a completely-blank page as faulty and corrects it to a functionally-blank
minimal HTML page: <html><head></head><body></body></html>.
<body> and <html> elements can be styled with CSS; this includes the ability to add
content:::before and ::after each
element. If only we could load a stylesheet then content injection is possible.
We use the fourth way to inject
CSS – a Link: HTTP header – to deliver a CSS payload (this, unfortunately, only works in Firefox). To further obfuscate what’s happening and remove the need for a round-trip, this is encoded
as a data: URI.
The stylesheet – and all the page content – is right there in the Link: header if you just care to decode it! Observe that while 5.84kB of
data are transferred, the browser rightly states that the page is zero bytes in size.
My server-side implementation of this broke in 2023 after I upgraded Nginx; my new version doesn’t support the super-long Link: header needed
to make this hack work, so I’ve updated the page to use the Link: to reference the CSS file rather than embed it via a data URI. It’s not as cool, but it at least means you can
still see the page. Thanks to Thomas Bradshaw for pointing out the problem.
Footnotes
1 My first reaction was “why not just deliver something with Content-Type:
text/plain; charset=utf-8 and dispense with the invalid code, but perhaps that’s just me overthinking the non-existent problem.
Following their security incident last month, many users of LastPass are in the process of cycling
their security credentials for many of their accounts1.
I don’t use LastPass2,
but I’ve had ocassion to cycle credentials before, so I appreciate the pain that people are going through.
It’s not just passwords, though: it may well be your “security question” answers you need to rotate too. Your passwords quickly become worthless if an attacker can guess the answers to
your “security questions” at services that use them. If you’re using a password safe anyway, you should either:
Answer security questions with long strings of random garbage3,
or
Ensure that you use different answers for every service you use, as you would with passwords.4
In the latter case, you’re probably storing your security answers in a password safe5.
If the password safe they’re stored in is compromised, you need to change the answers to those security questions in order to secure the account.
This leads to the unusual situation where you can need to call up your bank and say: “Hi, I’d like to change my mother’s maiden name.” (Or, I suppose, father’s middle
name, first pet’s name, place of birth, or whatever.) Banks in particular are prone to disallowing you from changing your security answers over the Internet, but all kinds of other
businesses can also make this process hard… presumably because a well-meaning software engineer couldn’t conceive of any reason that a user might want to.
I sometimes use a pronouncable password generator to produce fake names for security question answers. And I’ll tell you what: I get some bemused reactions when I say things like “I’d
like to change my mother’s maiden name from Tuyiborhooniplashon to Mewgofartablejuki.”
1 If you use LastPass, you should absolutely plan to do this. IMHO, LastPass’s reassurances about the difficulty in cracking the encryption on the leaked data is a gross exaggeration. I’m not saying you need to
panic – so long as your master password is reasonably-long and globally-unique – but perhaps cycle all your credentials during 2023. Oh, and don’t rely on your second factor:
it doesn’t help with this particular incident.
2 I used to use LastPass, until around 2016, and I still think it’s a good choice for many
people, but nowadays I carry an encrypted KeePassXC password safe on a pendrive (with an automated backup onto an encrypted partition on our
household NAS). This gives me some security and personalisation benefits, at the expense of only a little convenience.
3 If you’re confident that you could never lose your password (or rather: that you could
never lose your password without also losing the security question answers because you would store them in the same place!), there’s no value in security questions, and the best thing
you can do might be to render them unusable.
4 If you’re dealing with a service that uses the security questions in a misguided effort
to treat them as a second factor, or that uses them for authentication when talking to them on the telephone, you’ll need to have usable answers to the questions for when they come
up.
5 You can, of course, use a different password safe for your randomly-generatred
security question answers than you would for the password itself; perhaps a more-secure-but-less-convenient one; e.g. an encrypted pendrive kept in your fire safe?
There’s been a bit of a resurgence lately of sites whose only subscription option is email, or – worse yet – who provide certain “exclusive” content only to email subscribers.
I don’t want to go giving an actual email address to every damn service, because:
It’s not great for privacy, even when (as usual) I use a unique alias for each sender.
It’s usually harder to unsubscribe than I’d like, and rarely consistent: you need to find a recent message, click a link, sometimes that’s enough or sometimes you need to uncheck a
box or click a button, or sometimes you’ll get another email with something to click in it…
I rarely want to be notified the very second a new issue is published; email is necessarily more “pushy” than I like a subscription to be.
I don’t want to use my email Inbox to keep track of which articles I’ve read/am still going to read: that’s what a feed reader is for! (It also provides tagging, bookmarking,
filtering, standardised and bulk unsubscribing tools, etc.)
So what do I do? Well…
I already operate an OpenTrashMail instance for one-shot throwaway email addresses (which I highly recommend). And
OpenTrashMail provides a rich RSS feed. Sooo…
How I subscribe to newsletters (in my feed reader)
If I want to subscribe to your newsletter, here’s what I do:
Put an email address (I usually just bash the keyboard to make a random one, then put @-a-domain-I-control on the end, where that domain is handled by OpenTrashMail) in to
subscribe.
Put https://my-opentrashmail-server/rss/the-email-address-I-gave-you/rss.xml into my feed reader.
That’s all. There is no step 3.
Now I get your newsletter alongside all my other subscriptions. If I want to unsubscribe I just tell my feed reader to stop polling the RSS feed (You don’t even get to find out that I’ve unsubscribed; you’re now just dropping emails into an unmonitored box, but of course I can
resubscribe and pick up from where I left off if I ever want to).
Obviously this approach isn’t suitable for personalised content or sites for which your email address is used for authentication, because anybody who can guess the random email address
can get the feed! But it’s ideal for those companies who’ll ocassionally provide vouchers in exchange for being able to send you other stuff to your Inbox, because you can
simply pipe their content to your feed reader, then add a filter to drop anything that doesn’t contain the magic keyword: regular vouchers, none of the spam. Or for blogs that provide
bonus content to email subscribers, you can get the bonus content in the same way as the regular content, right there in a folder of your reader. It’s pretty awesome.
If you don’t already have and wouldn’t benefit from running OpenTrashMail (or another trashmail system with feed support) it’s probably not worth setting one up just for this
purpose. But otherwise, I can certainly recommend it.
You don’t really see it any more, but: if you downloaded some media player software a couple of decades ago, it’d probably appear in a weird-shaped window, and I’ve never understood
why.
Mostly, these designs are… pretty ugly. And for what? It’s also worth noting that this kind of design can be found in all kinds of applications, in media players that it
was almost ubiquitous.
You might think that they’re an overenthusiastic kind of skeuomorphic design: people trying
to make these players look like their physical analogues. But hardware players were still pretty boxy-looking at this point, either because of the limitations of their data
storage1. By the time flash memory-based
portable MP3 players became commonplace their design was copying software players, not the other way around.
So my best guess is that these players were trying to stand out as highly-visible. Like: they were things you’d want to occupy a disproportionate amount of desktop space. Maybe
other people were listening to music differently than me… but for me, back when screen real estate was at such a premium2,
a music player’s job was to be small, unintrusive, and out-of-the-way.
I used to run Winamp in its very-smallest minified size, tucked up at the top of the screen, using
the default skin or one that made it even less-obtrusive.
It’s a mystery to me why anybody would (or still
does) make media player software or skins for them that eat so much screen space, frequently looking ugly while they do so, only to look like a hypothetical hardware device that
wouldn’t actually become commonplace until years after this kind of player design premiered!
Maybe other people listened to music on their computer differently from me: putting it front and centre, not using their computer for other tasks at the same time. And maybe for these
people the choice of player and skin was an important personalisation feature; a fashion statement or a way to show off their personal identity. But me? I didn’t get it then, and I
don’t get it now. I’m glad that this particular trend seems to have died and windows are, for the most part, rounded rectangles once more… even for music player software!
Footnotes
1 A walkman, minidisc player, or hard drive-based digital music device is always going to
look somewhat square because of what’s inside.
2 I “only” had 1600 × 1200 (UXGA) pixels on the very biggest monitor I owned before I went widescreen, and I spent a lot of time on monitors at lower resolutions e.g.
1024 × 768 (XGA); on such screens, wasting space on a music player when you’re mostly going to be listening “in the
background” while you do something else seemed frivolous.
Nowadays if you’re on a railway station and hear an announcement, it’s usually a computer stitching together samples1. But back in the day, there used to be a human
with a Tannoy microphone sitting in the back office, telling you about the platform alternations and
destinations.
I had a friend who did it as a summer job, once. For years afterwards, he had a party trick that I always quite enjoyed: you’d say the name of a terminus station on a direct line from
Preston, e.g. Edinburgh Waverley, and he’d respond in his announcer-voice: “calling at Lancaster, Oxenholme the Lake District, Penrith, Carlisle, Lockerbie, Haymarket, and Edinburgh
Waverley”, listing all of the stops on that route. It was a quirky, beautiful, and unusual talent. Amazingly, when he came to re-apply for his job the next summer he didn’t get it,
which I always thought was a shame because he clearly deserved it: he could do the job blindfold!
There was a strange transitional period during which we had machines to do these announcements, but they weren’t that bright. Years later I found myself on Haymarket station waiting for
the next train after mine had been cancelled, when a robot voice came on to announce a platform alteration: the train to Glasgow would now be departing from platform 2, rather than
platform 1. A crowd of people stood up and shuffled their way over the footbridge to the opposite side of the tracks. A minute or so later, a human announcer apologised for the
inconvenience but explained that the train would be leaving from platform 1, and to disregard the previous announcement. Between then and the train’s arrival the computer tried twice
more to send everybody to the wrong platform, leading to a back-and-forth argument between the machine and the human somewhat reminiscient of the white zone/red zone scene from Airplane! It was funny perhaps only
because I wasn’t among the people whose train was in superposition.
Clearly even by then we’d reached the point where the machine was well-established and it was easier to openly argue with it than to dig out the manual and work out how to turn it off.
Nowadays it’s probably even moreso, but hopefully they’re less error-prone.
When people talk about how technological unemployment, they focus on the big changes, like how a tipping point with self-driving vehicles might one day revolutionise the haulage
industry… along with the social upheaval that comes along with forcing a career change on millions of drivers.
But in the real world, automation and technological change comes in salami slices. Horses and carts were seen alongside the automobile for decades. And you still find stations with
human announcers. Even the most radically-disruptive developments don’t revolutionise the world overnight. Change is inevitable, but with preparation, we can be ready for it.
A few yeras ago, I wanted to subscribe to The Far Side‘s “Daily Dose” via my RSS reader. The Far Side doesn’t have an RSS feed, so I implemented a proxy/middleware to bridge the two.
If you’re looking for a more-general instruction on using XPath scraping in FreshRSS, this isn’t it.
The release of version 1.20.0 of my favourite RSS reader FreshRSS provided a new mechanism for subscribing to content from sites that didn’t provide feeds: XPath scraping. I demonstrated the use of this to subscribe to my friend Beverley‘s blog, but this week I figured it was time to have a go at retiring my middleware and subscribing directly to The Far Side from FreshRSS.
It turns out that FreshRSS’s XPath Scraping is almost enough to achieve exactly what I want. The big problem is that the image server on The Far Side website tries to
prevent hotlinking by checking the Referer: header on requests, so we need a proxy to spoof that. I threw together a quick PHP program to act as a proxy (if
you don’t have this, you’ll have to click-through to read each comic), then configured my FreshRSS feed as follows:
Feed URL:https://www.thefarside.com/
The “Daily Dose” gets published to The Far Side‘s homepage each day.
XPath for finding new items://div[@class="card tfs-comic js-comic"]
Finds each comic on the page. This is probably a little over-specific and brittle; I should probably switch to using the contains function at some point. I
subsequently have to use parent:: and ancestor:: selectors which is usually a sign that your screen-scraping is suboptimal, but in this case it’s necessary
because it’s only at this deep level that we start seeing really specific classes.
Item title:concat("Far Side #", parent::div/@data-id)
The comics don’t have titles (“The one with the cow”?), but these seem to have unique IDs in the data-id attribute of the parent <div>, so I’m using
those as a reference.
Item content:descendant::div[@class="card-body"]
Within each item, the <div class="card-body"> contains the comic and its text. The comic itself can’t be loaded this way for two reasons: (1) the <img
src="..."> just points to a placeholder (the site uses JavaScript-powered lazy-loading, ugh – the actual source is in the data-src attribute), and (2) as
mentioned above, there’s anti-hotlink protection we need to work around.
Item link:descendant::input[@data-copy-item]/@value
Each comic does have a unique link which you can access by clicking the “share” button under it. This makes a hidden text <input> appear, which we can
identify by the presence of the data-copy-item attribute. The contents of this textbox is the sharing URL for
the comic.
Item thumbnail:concat("https://example.com/referer-faker.php?pw=YOUR-SECRET-PASSWORD-GOES-HERE&referer=https://www.thefarside.com/&url=",
descendant::div[@class="tfs-comic__image"]/img/@data-src)
Here’s where I hook into my special proxy server, which spoofs the Referer: header to work around the anti-hotlinking code. If you wanted you might be able to come up
with an alternative solution using a custom JavaScript loaded into your FreshRSS instance (there’s a plugin for that!), perhaps to load an iframe of the sharing URL? Or you can
host a copy of my proxy server yourself (you can’t use mine, it’s got a password and that password isn’tYOUR-SECRET-PASSWORD-GOES-HERE!)
Item date:ancestor::div[@class="tfs-page__full tfs-page__full--md"]/descendant::h3
There’s nothing associating each comic with the date it appeared in the Daily Dose, so we have to ascend up to the top level of the page to find the date from the heading.
Item unique ID:parent::div/@data-id
Giving FreshRSS a unique ID can help it stop showing duplicates. We use the unique ID we discovered earlier; this way, if the Daily Dose does a re-run of something it already did
since I subscribed, I won’t be shown it again. Omit this if you want to see reruns.
Hurrah; once again I can laugh at repeats of Gary Larson’s best work alongside my other morning feeds.
There’s a moral to this story: when you make your website deliberately hard to consume, fewer people will access it in the way you want!The Far Side‘s website
is actively hostile to users (JavaScript lazy-loading, anti-right click scripts, hotlink protection, incorrect MIME types, no feeds etc.), and an inevitable consequence of that is that people like me will find and share workarounds to that
hostility.
If you’re ad-supported or collect webstats and want to keep traffic “on your site” on this side of 2004, you should make it as easy as possible for people to subscribe to content.
Consider The Oatmeal or Oglaf, for example, which offer RSS feeds that include only a partial thumbnail of each comic and a link through to the full thing. I don’t feel the need to screen-scrape those sites
because they’ve given me a subscription option that works, and I routinely click-through to both of them to enjoy their latest content!
Conversely, the Far Side‘s aggressive anti-subscription technology ultimately means that there are fewer actual visitors to their website… because folks like me work
to circumvent them.
And now you know how I did so.
Update: want the new content that’s being published to The Far Side in FreshRSS, too? I’ve got a recipe for that!
RSS
Spotify
Pocket Casts
Apple Podcasts
YouTube
![Browser debugger running document.evaluate('//li[@class="blog__post-preview"]', document).iterateNext() on Beverley's weblog and getting the first blog entry.](https://bcdn.danq.me/_q23u/2022/09/debugger-select-from-xpath-1024x256.png)
