Category Archives: How-to

Proper Date Formats

Something you quickly run into if you correspond with people in both the U.S. and Europe, which I have done over my career as well as in my personal life, is that we don’t write dates the same way. If you think March 14th is Pi day because in the U.S. it is written as 3/14, people in most of Europe will wonder why you think there is a 14th month to the year. And if you want to make a joke about May 4th, as in “May the fourth be with you”, it is 5/4 in the U.S., and 4/5 in most of Europe. And it can be even more complicated once you drag in the rest of the world. There is simply no uniformity. You can see this with this page at Wikipedia. And we are not even consistent in how we talk about dates. In the U.S. we might well say “May 4th”, and that does indeed match how we write dates. But then we will insist that our independence day is the “Fourth of July”, almost like we are not a British colony any longer, but let’s use their date format for one of our most important dates.

In my experience, each side thinks the other is a bit odd, but regards it as a harmless eccentricity. But which side is correct in this? The answer, of course, is neither. The one absolutely correct date format has been defined, and you can find it in the ISO 8601 standard. The correct date format is YYYY/MM/DD, because that puts the elements of the date in a logical order. Why is this the logical order? Well, suppose you were filing documents by date. Would you start by putting all of the documents from the 4th day (without regard to month or year) into a group? Or would you first collect all documents for a given year? Now, you might argue that filing documents is something people don’t do as much of these days. We have computers and digital documents, we don’t need any filing cabinets. But that only strengthens my argument, as you can easily verify. For example I am writing this on February 13, 2025. If I use a date code for my digital file, and I make it 02132025, what happens if I later on create file on January 6, 2026? That would then be 01062026. Try this, and you will see that in your file manager 01062026 will appear before 02132025, because all computers treat the significance of digits from left to right.

But if you follow the ISO 8601 standard, the most significant part of the date is on the left, and all of your files will be in order. And once you get used to it, your life is easier. An example of this is photos. My wife and I like to travel, and we take a lot of photos using our smart phones. And every photo we take uses date/time stamp as part of the file name, and the dates all follow the ISO 8601 standard. So I can easily sort my photos in the order in which they were taken. And since I have over 13,000 photos in my Flickr Pro account, a little help with sorting them is really nice. I now use this format not just for digital file names, but for most of my dating purposes. It just makes sense.

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Switching my Mastodon account

As we discussed previously, the idea of Federated media is that there is no central server with all accounts. Instead, there are various instances, and you choose one. In my case, I get sent an invite from my late lamented friend Craig Maloney to join on the server he was on. But I got a notice a few days ago that the instance I am on is closing. It won’t be completely shut down for 8 months, so I can’t complain about any lack of notice, but I might as well get going on it. Step one was to find good directions for migrating my account. This is actually not too bad, since as stated the Fediverse is built on an understanding that your account is a separate entity from the instance it is on, an one has incentive to “capture” users since there is no way to make money from them. Quite the contrary, I expect. It costs money to run a server, which is why I signed up to make a donation to the person running my old instance. As my old friend Door-to-Door Geek always says, support the people who support you. Anyway, I went to the invaluable site Fedi.Tips web site, and indeed found a good explanation on the page Transferring your Mastodon account to another server.

Step one is find a new server. I went to Fedi.garden and looked through several categories before finding Freeradical.zone which seemed like a good fit. So I applied for an account there, which was fairly easy, but they have to approve the application. They ask you to review their policies, and write a few words about yourself, to make sure you will be a good fit there. While waiting to hear if my application has been approved, the next steps involve exporting data from the old server. This process is not too bad, but it really should be done on a desktop computer using a Web browser, not an app. You can move all of these:

  • Followers
  • Follows
  • Bookmarks
  • Lists
  • Mutes
  • Blocks
  • Domain Blocks

Since I got my email that my account was approved the next day, I proceeded to initiate the move to my new account: @Ahuka@freeradical.zone

What does not get moved are your Followed Hashtags. If you have any, you can see them by going to the three-dot menu next to your name and looking for Followed Hashtags. You will need to write these down and manually redo them on your new server. But for the movable items above, all you have to do is go to your old server, to the three-dot menu, Preferences, then Import and Export, and select Export. You can download a CSV file for all of the above movable items except Followers. That is handled differently, because anyone following you needs to have your new address in their Mastodon account. Don’t worry, this mostly happens in background, but it can take time. But for the rest, just download the CSV files and save them to your hard drive. You can also request an Archive of your posts, but that is purely for your own reference since your old posts cannot be uploaded to your new server. In my case, I passed on that because my old posts are not that important. And if some of those categories are blank (I never created any lists, for instance), you will download a zero-byte CSV file.

Then on your new server account, go to the three-dot menu, to Preferences, Import and Export, and select Import. In the drop down box, select the appropriate category from the drop-down list for the CSV file you are uploading, Choose the file, and click upload. In this case, since you are populating a brand new account that is all you need to do, but note you have options to either Overwrite or Merge. That is all you need to do for these.

Now, back to Followers. There is a way to mostly move your followers, but it is not 100% guaranteed for a variety of reasons. But the start is to go to your New account, three-dot menu, to Preferences, Account, and scroll down to where you see Moving from a different account. Follow the directions here to create an alias. This is just your old address, and mine was @Ahuka@octodon.social. This is the first step, but it doesn’t do anything yet, and is completely reversible if for some reason you want to stop. The instructions at fedi.tips say you need to wait at least 5 minutes for the next step, so this a good time to do a little housekeeping. I used this time to copy my profile from the old account to the new one. I also added “has moved” to my name on the old site, and in my profile text I put my new address. fedi.tips says this isn’t really necessary in most cases, but it can help.

Once I did that, I went to the old site, and this is where the move actually starts. You go to Preferences, Account, Move to a new account, and enter your new address. This starts the process of moving your followers. If you followed what we said previously you know that the old server knows who you follow and who follows you. So the old server can send a message from your account to the servers of the people who follow you and update your address. Of course, this isn’t instantaneous, since now you are at the mercy of the servers of those people, so don’t be shocked if it takes a few hours, or even days, for this to all happen. For this reason, it is advised that you keep the old account for a little while just so you can see if anyone is still on your old address. You cannot use your old account once you have started the migration, but you can send someone a message from the new account and tell them to manually make the change in case the automatic move fails.

And that is all there is to migrating your Mastodon account. It probably took me longer to describe than it will take you to do it. Meanwhile, if you are interested you can follow me on my new account @Ahuka@freeradical.zone.

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The New Audacity and Batch Processing Macros

Audacity is the wonderful open-source audio-processing program that I use every day. I use it for a couple of reasons.

First, I use Audacity to record and prepare my own podcast shows, which are mostly for Hacker Public Radio. I seem to have done over 200 shows for them, and I am still actively recording shows, and I expect to continue as long as I can, though at the age of 69 I can see that there may come an end sooner rather than later. And Audacity does a great job for me. I just plug in my Blue Snowball microphone, open Audacity, and press the Record button. When I am done I add a little volume boost, save the project, then export the FLAC file for upload to Hacker Public Radio.

Second, I like to listen to podcasts speeded up. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and even when I weed out the ones that just go on for too long, it is still hard to keep up. I know that people who use smartphone apps can speed up podcasts in the app, which is fine, but I don’t listen to podcasts on my phone. I use small, inexpensive MP3 players and this lets me save my phone’s battery so I get through the day without problems. So my method is to download my podcasts using GPodder on my Kubuntu box, and about once a day I will delete the ones I have finished listening to and prepare a new bunch to load on the player. And Audacity is what I use to prepare the files. I created a “chain” some years back on the old version of Audacity, which would take the files, speed them up by 70%, boost the volume a bit, and then export the finished file. And I could do it as a batch process on a whole directory of files. It would open the files one at a time, apply the “chain”, and then move on the the next file. This was very handy.

Then I made the jump from Kubuntu 18.04 to 20.04. I tend to stick to LTS releases and be fairly conservative because I would rather use my computer to do things than spend time fixing software issues, and LTS releases work well for me in this respect. In fact, I did not move from 18.04 to 20.04 until February of 2021. And with the OS upgrade came the software upgrades, including Audacity. And when I went looking for chains, they weren’t there! I did some investigating on the Web and found that they were replaced by “macros”, and instead of being on the File menu they were on the Tools menu, which is reasonable enough I guess. I looked in the Tools menu, found Apply Macro, and when I opened that I found that my chains had all been moved over to the Macros, which was great since I did not have to recreate any of them, not that it would be all that difficult to do. But I could only apply a macro to one file at a time. The process seemed to be that I had to open a file, then apply the macro. And when I tried to do that to a directory with about 20 files in it, each file opened seperately in its own window (a big mess right there), then I had to go through them one at a time to apply the macro and then close the window. Ugg.

As I considered this, it did occur to me that in all likelihood I was doing it all wrong, and that the capability was still there. I started by going to the Audacity Forum, where I did see some references to batch processing, but none of them ever explained how to do that. So I started searching for “audacity batch processing”, and the first few results got me nowhere. They either went back the to the page that referred to batch processing without explaining how to do it, or they went back to the older version with “chains”. But then I found a YouTube video called Audacity Macros – Easily Apply Effects to Multiple Files, and that was where I got my answer. On the Tools menu there was another option, called simply “Macros…”. Selecting this opened a window called Manage Macros, and on the bottom there was a section to “Apply Macro to” and you could either do it to the current project, or to a group of files. So it was there all along, I just missed it.

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Hacked?

On Thursday evening, as I was having my dinner, my wife came in to tell me that my Facebook account was hacked and I should change my password. The evidence for this was that some other people that I was already friends with were getting friend requests that appeared to come from me. Now I have been on the other end of this many times, and didn’t give it a lot of thought. Other people getting hacked is not exactly news as far as I am concerned. It sucks for them, but nothing I need to get worked up about. But having it happen to me made me think a little harder.

The first thing that puzzled me is that I have enabled Two-Factor Authentication on my account. I have to enter a code from my phone to log in to Facebook, and I didn’t see any way that someone could get in without me knowing about it. And at the time I was in fact logged in, and how could there be two different logins at the same time?

And the answer is that my account was not hacked at all. What happened was a Facebook Clone scam, something increasingly common. What the scammers do is clone your account by using all of the information Facebook makes public about you. This is not difficult at all. I decided to go through the steps of cloning (without actually doing it, of course) just to illustrate how it is done.

  • First, type in a first name into the Facebook search box, and a list of possible account names pops up. Pick one at random. I used my own account for this exercise.
  • Second, click the link under the Profile photo that says “Photos”
  • Try Photos by this person, or Profile Photos if that is there, as places where you can download their Profile photo. My Profile photo was the very first one I saw there.
  • Then, go back and next to the link to Photos you will a see a link to Friends. Click that, and you will see all of this person’s friends listed.
  • You now have everything you need to create a fake account and send out scam Friend requests.

This approach is the well-known security technique of thinking like an attacker, which is very helpful in making yourself safer.

Public Information

The key to this attack is that Facebook makes public all kinds of information about you. This particular attack is pretty obvious, but there are more insidious ones. If you go to the About link, take a look at what is there. Places you have worked? Places you have lived? Where you went to school? Family Relationships? Your birthday? Suppose you found out someone’s spouse? If they also have a Facebook account, you can get the spouse’s birthday. The point is that these are all the kinds of things that are used for “second question” authentication on other accounts. When you are setting this up for your bank account, you might think no one would know this. But in fact it is all publicly available. We had this exact thing happen in 2012 in the U.S. to a Vice-Presidential Candidate, Sarah Palin, who had her e-mail account hacked because her “second questions” were all things easily discoverable, and some kid looked up the information and get into her account. Of course, you can sometimes pwn yourself. I set up a PIN for an account many years ago and it required 4 digits. I thought I would be clever and picked a date from history (my first degree). It took me a few months to realize that my wife’s birthday matched this date, and change it. As to it being a “duplicate” request, that is not even possible even if someone managed to hack into your account. Once someone is your friend you cannot send another Friend request, period. The software won’t allow it.

Now, if this happens, what can the scammers get out of it? If they can get other people to accept this fake account as being you, maybe they can send them Malware, Russian election misinformation, promote illegal activities, or whatever. The good thing is that these days we have seen this so often that almost no one pays them any attention. But it is all a numbers game, and even a very small percentage of successful scams can be profitable when pursued on a large scale.

What you can do

As to what you can do, not a whole lot. Changing your password won’t do anything here because your account is not hacked in the first place. And I tend to be a little leery of changing passwords willy-nilly, because human nature being what it is, it usually results in passwords that get simpler and more guessable over time, which is why NIST recently came out against the requirement in many places that passwords be changed frequently on a schedule. What you can do is pretty simple. If you see someone you already are friends with send you a friend request, do them a favor and click on the profile (you can always do this before accepting a Friend request. I regularly get friend requests from suspiciously attractive females whom I have never met and who seem to have a serious lack of history.) Click the Timeline, and there is a menu on the right with three dots. Click that to report the profile as a fake profile. Of course, it may already be closed when you try to do this, because Facebook has gotten pretty good at finding and shutting down these clone accounts. And you can always check to see if anyone has cloned your account simply by searching on your name. My name is not unusual, but if I see two accounts with my same profile picture, I know one of them is bogus.

The other thing you can do if you have not done so yet is set up Two-Factor Authentication.

  • Go to your Home Page in Facebook
  • Click the drop-down arrow on the Top Right
  • Select Settings and Privacy
  • Select Settings
  • Select Security and Login
  • Go to the Two-Factor Authentication, and turn it on
  • Set up how you want to do it. I have a Facebook App on my Android phone, and that gives me a code, but you have a few options here.

Scam alert: Be wary of accepting Facebook friend requests from people you’re already friends with
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