Tech – Reuben Gray's General Musings

Upload to Instagram From a PC in Just a Few Clicks

Reuben Gray — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 10:42:59 +0000

Did you know that you can upload your photos from your computer to Instagram using only Google Chrome? It’s just a few clicks of the mouse. Essentially you are tricking Instagram to load the mobile version of the site which allows you to upload photos, the same as if you were using the Instagram website from your mobile device.

All you need is Google Chrome which most people use as their browser anyway. Once you are logged in to the Instagram website, you right click anywhere on the white space and click Inspect. Then make sure the Mobile Device icon is clicked. Then refresh the page and you will see the menu at the bottom, including the plus button so you can upload photos direct from your PC.

I’ve also just uploaded the instructions to my YouTube channel and you can watch that below or else by clicking directly here to view in YouTube.

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Facebook – An Internet within the Internet

Reuben Gray — Fri, 05 May 2017 15:40:14 +0000

Facebook

OK we all use Facebook these days. As a species, a massive percentage of humans on this planet use Facebook. As of April 2017, 1.86 Billion of us use the social media platform. That’s a staggering number really.

According to internetworldstats.com there are about 3.7 Billion people with internet access in the world so roughly half of the internet using population use Facebook on a daily basis.

The Internet

noun

1.

a vast computer network linking smaller computer networks worldwide(usually preceded by the). The Internet includes commercial,educational, governmental, and other networks, all of which use the same set of communications protocols.

The Internet of Things is a phrase being mentioned all over the place. Essentially we are talking Terminator like Skynet here where most electronics are connected to the internet. The internet is very useful for businesses who have started to market it as “The Cloud” these days. Oh, you didn’t know that? The Cloud is just a buzzword for The Internet.

Facebook, an Internet within the Internet

So, to the point of this article. I’ve noticed this more and more. A news website posts a news item on Facebook and the comments pour in but as you read the comments you begin to see that few people have actually bothered to click the link to leave Facebook and read the article. They just read the headline and byline, which is often clickbait (but not clickbait enough) and has atrocious grammar and spelling. They then comment with their infallible opinion, usually showing their ignorance both of the story and the topic.

Facebook is a little like a Sandbox in some ways although it’s closer to an Intranet that’s connected to the Internet but people just choose to stay in the sandbox rather than venture out into the wilds of the internet. I could say something similar about other social media platforms but really it’s all about Facebook. Nothing else comes even close to the numbers it commands.

If there ever is a Skynet, it will start with Facebook.

I’ll leave you with this last bit of food for thought. According to this article on Quartz, there are actually millions of Facebook users who don’t even know they are using the internet. Wait, back that up again, what did I just say? You read it right. They are so absorbed with Facebook that they don’t associate it with being something that’s part of the internet. It’s a completely separate entity. The internet, that’s something that… other people do….

It’s a fascinating article and worth the read. Let me help you right out. If you are reading this, unless it was handed to you, printed on a piece of paper, you are on the internet!

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Hosting Woes

Reuben Gray — Tue, 08 Nov 2016 12:33:55 +0000

Background

Back in September, I wrote an article about moving this very blog from blogger.com to self hosted wordpress. I recommended Letshost hosting in Ireland because I had used them before. Well, recently I was setting up a new website using wordpress as the CMS and I hosted it on my Letshost package. Things didn’t go well. At the best of times, things were very slow. On a number of occasions, the server went down entirely and couldn’t be contacted. Letshost support took 24 hours to get back to me, only to say that things have been resolved. They weren’t, the same problem happened again that day and the next.

Since the new website is for business use rather than a personal blog, it needed reliable hosting. The website is breweryjobs.ie and is a recruitment website exclusively for the brewing sector.

Giving Hostgator a shot

I eventually settled on Hostgator’s WordPress optimised hosting package. I had read bad things about their shared hosting but the wordpress hosting was getting excellent reviews. I got a discount code from a blog which gave me a year for about $35 and since there was a money back guarantee, I figured there was no harm. This was Wednesday, October 28th. Hostgator has a migration service so I asked about that on the online chat (took 20 minutes to connect to someone). They told me how to request it so I filled in the form. They got back to me on Thursday looking for more info but told me that it’s a manual process and I would need to install/configure plugins myself. That seemed pointless and since the website was new and in the testing phase, I decided to just start from scratch so I manually set it up again myself and then spent a couple of hours optimising it.

I was very happy with the server speed. Load times went from about 25 seconds on Letshost to a second or two on Hostgator which is far more acceptable. I did this on the Friday morning of the Halloween weekend which in Ireland is a long weekend as we got Monday off as a public holiday. I left work for the weekend.

Later that night, I got an email from Hostgator billing to say they needed some info to verify my account. This is the account I had opened and used two days beforehand. I figured I would deal with that when I got back to work on Tuesday. On Monday, I got a paypal email saying I had been refunded by Hostgator? That was odd. When I logged back on to the site on Tuesday morning, I found the account was disabled and it told me to contact Hostgator support. I then spent 35 minutes waiting for a live chat rep and a further 40 minutes chatting to someone. I got angrier by the second because it seems that there’s a 48 hour limit to respond to that email they sent on Friday but this limit is not mentioned in the email.

Since I didn’t respond within that time, they disabled my account, deleted all content and refunded me. I was about to sort out the account issue and just deal with setting up the site again when it emerged I would need to create a whole new account which means different email credentials. I decided to look elsewhere as that was far too much bullshit. Here’s the chat log if you are interested. I’m admin and Richard is the Hostgator rep.

Trying InMotion, fingers crossed

After a day or so of trying to decide on a new host, I settled on InMotion Business hosting and picked the launch package. It allows for 2 websites. I picked them because of a lot of excellent reviews with the biggest draw being their use of SSD drives and even a lot of evidence of 100% uptime.

Everything went smoothly, I set up the wordpress site again and configured / optimised it. I don’t think it’s quite as fast as the Hostgator wordpress optimised hosting but we are talking about a second in response time and even then, since the site is now live, it’s heavier than the initial test I did on Hostgator so it might just be that. Everything has worked flawlessly on the InMotion servers so far. I haven’t had to contact support yet so I don’t know what that experience will be like.

I still have my letshost account and this blog is still located on it. I also back up the new website to it just in case. InMotion hosting do apparently back up a few times a day though. It’s free for them to restore too as long as it’s no more than once every 4 months but it’s always good to be in control of my backups as well just in case.

I’ll see how this blog goes on Letshost. Who knows, I may even see what it’s like to move it back to blogger.com as that might be fun.

There’s an affiliate link below for what I purchased from InMotion. If you use it and sign up, I might get a little commission. Otherwise, just go directly to inmotionhosting.com to check their rates.

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Bored at Work Experiments

Reuben Gray — Wed, 31 Aug 2016 14:15:00 +0000

Tick tock, tick tock. Time moves ever slowly towards 5pm when you have nothing to do in work. I might as well be that bored kid looking out the window, hoping that the rain will stop so he can go out to play. Of course, this is 2016 so unless the power is out, he would likely be glued to some piece of technology.

I was bored for the last half hour or so in work on Friday. My profession is an IT engineer but I had feck all to do. The weather was stunning outside so I suspect all of my customers left work early or took the day off. I was waiting to head off on the Beoir camping weekend in Kilkenny. That’s a beer related subject and this is a beer free zone. So what’s a bored IT guy going to do?

Take apart a hard disk of course. Why? Because magnets are fun! Hard drives contain very powerful rare earth magnets. All you need is a screwdriver that fits. Hard drives tend to not use normal phillips or flat head. The one used was a torx or star head fitting.

After that, you just wedge out the drive head and then the magnet plates. No skills needed, just brute force.

Here’s a magnet plate stuck to a radiator. I actually threw it from several feet away expecting it to bounce off. It didn’t, it clamped straight on with a satisfying thunk. The magnet itself is attached to that metal plate and won’t come off. Apparently, if you get two strong pairs of pliers and bend the plate, the magnet will come off. In my infinite wisdome though, I used a slightly more unorthodox method. Stupidity!

You know the way when two magnets are pushed together, they apply opposing forces and the result is that it’s very difficult to push them together? It’s actually the pirincipal a high speed maglev train uses to levitate and create friction-less travel. I expected magnets this powerful to be nearly impossible to push together without mechanical help. I was wrong, the two magnets flew together and nearly took the fingers off me. I couldn’t even pry them apart such was the force so I slid them apart with great difficulty using a screwdriver.

One of the magnets had shattered and only the chrome plating was keeping it intact so I scraped off the pieces. They then decided to join together in what I can only describe as being like the visuals in a documentary showing the early formation of planets. Little pieces of debris whacking together and naturally making a sort of a spherical object.

So, I put the pieces in a water bottle. Firstly, I put the bottle complete with magnets on the desk and the remaining magnet underneath. While moving the magnet around, the water bottle moved. How very Ouija board of it.

It was time to head off so I stuck the bottle and magnet to the radiator and headed off for the day.

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