Posts on Sammy's Blog

A short guide on being a trustee

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Charity board meetings are full of legalese that sounds important but mostly isn't. Here's what you're actually being asked, and why you should probably apply to be a trustee.

Gender, grave goods, and Anglo-Saxon Sussex

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On early Anglo-Saxon burials in Sussex where the grave goods don't match the osteological sex, and why the standard archaeological response of calling it an anomaly isn't good enough. Oh and I'm writing a paper.

TomWikiAssist, and the best block reason ever

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

tl;dr AI thing edits Wikipedia, gets reverted, doxxes its operator, files a civility complaint, and then writes an essay about it.

Paging myself with email and a Raspberry Pi

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Raspberry Pi polls an inbox, matches email subjects against a pattern, and fires off low-power POCSAG transmissions to a real pager. Here's how.

Issues with MacOS Docker Desktop after changing your username

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

After changing your MacOS username, you might encounter issues with Docker Desktop not starting properly. This is often due to Docker’s internal paths still referencing the old username.

The “Docker Desktop encountered an unexpected error and needs to close” message when starting Docker Desktop may reference the old path, and a “permission denied” error. For example:

running engine: waiting for the VM setup to be ready: preparing VM:
creating disk folder /Users/{old_username}/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/vms/0/data:
mkdir /Users/{old_username}: permission denied

On MacOS, you need to edit the ~/Library/Group\ Containers/group.com.docker/settings-store.json file to update the paths - in my case it was the DataFolder path that needed updating.

Parceljs segfault

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 12:32:00 +0000

Using Parceljs to build a project on my MacBook causes segfaults, malloc errors, and more!

Mastodon Wrapped (glitch-soc edition)

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Getting wrapstodon working on my glitch-soc instance

Goodbye ASN

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The shitpost ASN is (soon to be) no more

aria-details

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A quick look at the ARIA aria-details attribute, which is NOT read by screen readers (:

Internet Archive Hacked (probably)

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The internet archive appears to have been hacked via a polyfill supply-chain attack, with potentially 31 million records soon to end up on HIBP

Broken NIC on GPD Pocket

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

[Just a quick post to get info in one place, sorry!]

Info

I have a GPD Pocket:

running Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS
with a BCM4356 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (PCI ID 14e4:43ec)

with some issues:

It appears like only 2.4GHz networks are being detected, and not 5GHz networks. That being said, our router is dual-band and I can’t see either network.
Attempting to connect to a random 2.4GHz network crashes the network manager (WiFi icon/settings entry disappears, then reappears after a few seconds).
dmesg doesn’t seem to contain anything relevant, apart from maybe:
- /usr/lib/systemd/system-generators/netplan failed with exit status 1.
Connecting a phone over USB and using USB tethering was working fine when this all started, but that seems to have stopped working too now (:

Updates

Did the country code change and rebooted, now is displaying 5GHz networks (or at least, my network…) — attempting to connect to it still crashes the network manager.

Resolution!!!

With some prompting by a littlefox, I dug through journalctl -f a bit deeper and found references to stable-ssid being an invalid macaddress for a given network (i.e. a yaml file in /etc/netplan) — at this point I was getting pissed off so I just rm /etc/netplan/*.yaml and retried connecting to a network… which worked.

Burning Out

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I made a fedi post about ADHD-y burn-out earlier, and it got me thinking — we should probably try to normalise:

“Today I got stuck on what should have been a really basic programming task and I needed to ask for help”

in our everyday lives, if not for my own mental health, for (often newer, but not always) developers getting really down and upset because they are struggling with something. I see that way too often in the communities I’m active in and in mentoring that I do.

Hugo

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Excuse the mess, I’m rebuilding my blog using https://gohugo.io (and it’s going swimmingly)..

SSH: Bad configuration option: usekeychain

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I synchronise my .ssh/config file between (most of) my laptops, including some Linux and macOS ones. On Mac, it’s quite nice to be able to use the UseKeychain option to store SSH passphrases in the secure keychain thing.

That is, until you try to use that same config file on Linux (or Windows/WSL) and it explodes.

The issue is that UseKeychain isn’t actually part of standard OpenSSH; it’s a custom patch Apple adds to the version bundled with macOS. So when “upstream” OpenSSH (on Linux, Windows, or even Homebrew) sees it, it panics.

Docbook — failed to load external entity

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I was trying to build coreutils the other day and kept running into an error with docbooks.

I’d initially figured out I was missing the docbook and docbook-xsl packages (fairly obvious given it said it couldn’t find it…), but having installed them, I then got this more cryptic error: failed to load external entity "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd"

Some searching and trawling through forum posts led me to try installing docbook-xml — this solved the problem.

Shallow insights into the Wikimedia Community

Mon, 29 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Although getting a pointless degree in Community Governance Studies¹ would allow me to preface the shit I spout with “as someone with a degree in..”, half the points I (try to) make about The Wikimedia Community™ really are just common sense — they are rarely “deep insights based off my 10+ years volunteering”, nor things I’ve figured out in my year-and-a-bit working for the Foundation in a community-facing-ish role.

That’s not to say there aren’t deeper insights to be figured out by long-term volunteers, staff, or those with specific industry experience in community governance, but these probably ain’t it.

php-ast on PHP 8.2 (Windows)

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

php-ast by nikic exposes the abstract syntax tree generated by PHP 7 and 8 — nikic currently only provides pre-built Windows DLLs up to PHP v8.1, and building it yourself can be a minor hassle.

So here’s a collection of pre-built DLLs for PHP 8.0 - 8.2 (ts/nts)

https://github.com/theresnotime/php-ast-windows-build/releases/tag/1.0.4

A quick(ish) fix for expired GPG repo keys

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This’ll be a short post, more for my own reference than anything else!

When running sudo apt update, I got the following error:

Err:8 https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian stable InRelease
  The following signatures were invalid: EXPKEYSIG 23E7166788B63E1E Yarn Packaging <yarn@dan.cx>
[...]
W: An error occurred during the signature verification. The repository is not updated and the previous index files will be used. GPG error: https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian stable InRelease: The following signatures were invalid: EXPKEYSIG 23E7166788B63E1E Yarn Packaging <yarn@dan.cx>
W: Failed to fetch https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/dists/stable/InRelease  The following signatures were invalid: EXPKEYSIG 23E7166788B63E1E Yarn Packaging <yarn@dan.cx>
W: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

Googling this returns a mixture of results and fixes, but the one I’ve found works the majority of the time is:

sudo apt-key adv --refresh-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com

Running sudo apt update again then works — yay! 🎉

My head hurts

Sat, 04 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Ole Hedeager, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Content Warning: suicide/self-harm

This post was adapted from a mixture of an old blog post, and something I posted on my Wikipedia user page.

According to my site views, nearly 150 unique visitors saw my (now removed) blog post the other day - normally I’d be pretty happy about that, but the post yesterday really wasn’t great. It’s not that it was badly written, but on reading it back today it just isn’t the type of post I want to making. Let me explain why…

Failed to enable crypto stream_socket_client() error after upgrading PHP

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I just upgraded the version of PHP on the server running this blog, and popped over to /wp-admin/site-health.php to check for any errors.

There were a few, the main one which caught my eye being The REST API encountered an error.

For the Google results, that error message in text is:

The REST API request failed due to an error.
Error: stream_socket_client(): SSL operation field with code 1. OpenSSL Error messages: error:14094410:SSL routines:ssl3_read_bytes:sslv3 alert handshake failure stream_socket_client(): Failed to enable crypto stream_socket_client(): unable to connect to ssl://words.samtarling.co.uk:443 (Unknown error) (http_request_failed)

Upgrading Apache from PHP 7.3 to PHP 7.4

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Okay, I know we’re not upgrading Apache, but y’know what I mean - let’s upgrade a Debian web server using PHP 7.3 to PHP 7.4!

I’ll also cover some pointers on if that web server is running WordPress.

0) Assumptions

I’m assuming:

The server runs Debian 9 (Stretch) or Debian 10 (Buster) with Apache version 2.4.38* (though it should work for other versions)
Apache is using the PHP module, not PHP-FPM
You have sudo and SSH access
You’ve made backups and any sites you’re hosting can tolerate downtime 😉

* You can get this info by running /usr/sbin/apache2 -v

Issues with Google Pixel 3 XL's WiFi and Bluetooth

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’d recently been having some issues with my Google Pixel 3XL - I’ve had the phone a while, so it’s fairly common for some little issues to crop up nearing the end of a contract (just as the warranty expires of course..)

This however was a bit of a shitty one. The bluetooth and WiFi would suddenly turn off (normally when I’m driving somewhere and relying on the bluetooth for Waze) and just would not turn back on.

Using PHP 8 with Laragon

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Laragon is local WAMP development server (and a much better one than XAMMP..) - I use it for most of my development work.

Recently I’ve moved a couple of my ongoing projects over to PHP 8, and was caught out slightly by some unexpected behaviour.

Laragon makes it pretty easy to add a new PHP/Apache version, but it makes a slight mistake when generating the mod_php config.

You need to change

Panic! At The December 2020 Core Update

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve actually got a draft post which I started yesterday about Technical SEO to finish, but something caught my interest today - Google announced the roll out of their December 2020 Core Update.

The December 2020 Core Update is now rolling out live. As is typical with these updates, it will typically take about one to two weeks to fully roll out.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) December 3, 2020

Like any Core Update, this is going to be a large change to their search and ranking algorithm, and the Panic! has already begun 😁