joe – JoeRess.com

Moving to a new Mastodon instance is very easy

I recently moved three Mastodon accounts from one instance to another and it was very easy to do. The official documentation is pretty clear, but I thought I would document how I did so that I can read through it in my own words next time I want to move instance.

Although there are some attempts to make it possible to move your old posts across to the new instance, I really don’t care about that. Social media is ephemeral to me. I have this blog for stuff I want to keep longer term. Let all the old posts burn.

With that in mind, the steps are pretty easy:

In your old account go to preferences > Import and export > Export
Download CSV files of the accounts you follow, mute, and block etc
Create a new account on the instance you want to move to
Set up your display name, bio, and photo
In your new account go to preferences > Import and export > Import
Upload the CSV files one by one
In your new account go to preferences > Account and look for “Moving from a different account”
There is a link there which takes you to a page where you have to create an alias to your old account
In your old account go to preferences > Account and look for “Moving to a different account”
There is a link there which takes you to a page where you enter your new account details

Once you do all that, it takes a few minutes for all your followers to move across and that’s pretty much it. You might lose some followers because their instance didn’t get the memo, but that seems to be fairly rare.

Swapping 2 and 3 finger touchpad taps on Xfce/Xubuntu

In Xubuntu I like to have a 2 finger tap as the middle button, and a 3 finger tap as right click. This is mostly to make opening and closing tabs in Firefox easier. By default on most operating systems it’s the other way round. I used to use synclient to do this but that stopped working in either 24.04 or maybe even 22.04. As usual, the Arch Wiki has the answer.

You create a file at

/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-touchpad.conf

and then paste the following into it:

Section "InputClass" Identifier "touchpad" Driver "libinput" MatchIsTouchpad "on" Option "Tapping" "on" Option "TappingButtonMap" "lmr" EndSection

A quick reboot later and the 2 and 3 finger taps are swapped.

Booting Linux from CD or DVD on a Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro

While recently trying to resurrect my ancient 17″ Macbook Pro that will only boot from its optical drive, I kept getting stuck at a screen that said “Select CD-ROM Boot Type”. It had options for 1 and 2 but the keyboard didn’t work so I was unable to select either of them.

Thankfully I found this post from Mark Stanislav which had a great tip on how to overcome that. I had to adapt what Mark suggested though. I found that once you get into the boot menu by holding down alt (or option as they call it on Macs), I had to press and hold the 1 key while clicking to boot from the DVD. I then had to frantically mash the enter key over and over again until I saw the Grub menu and then wait an awfully long time for a distro to boot.

This method isn’t fool-proof though. I’d say it works about 20% of the time so it took me several attempts each time I wanted to boot Linux from the optical drive. No such song and dance with an OS X Lion DVD, of course. That just works™.

It’s worth mentioning that I tried to get this old Mac to boot from USB using Plop but I couldn’t get that to work. It booted to the Plop menu but the graphics were all weird and nothing I tried would get it to boot from USB. Hence having to burn DVDs and do all this to get Linux to boot.

Maybe someone will find this useful and hopefully I will remember to read this again in a few years when I next try to play with my old Mac.

NFT shit-list

This is a list of well-known people and companies who have shilled NFTs. It’s very much not exhaustive but I’ll try to update it when I spot new offenders. Feel free to tweet me examples that aren’t on the list.

Also feel free to check out my podcast Late Night Linux where we sometimes laugh at and/or get angry about these bastards.

Jack from Twitter

Tim Berners-Lee

Jimmy Wales

People who want to defile Stan Lee’s memory

Rishi Sunak (this may not actually happen)