Category: Technology

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Migrated away from Pinboard

I’ve migrated my online bookmarks away from Pinboard to LinkAce, which for my sins I am self-hosting at liber.puzzling.org. If you were following my bookmarks, here’s the updated links:

Various scripts and useful tidbits

  • Zapier supports LinkAce integrations, including for self-hosted instances, if you want to automatically add LinkAce bookmarks from any source
  • pinboard2linkace: LinkAce choked at importing all my Pinboard bookmarks (there were many thousands of them), so I wrote a Python script to migrate the remainder; for bonus points this script preserves the privacy settings of the links
  • LinkAce Privacy Lock: marks new LinkAce bookmarks private a number of days after creation
  • Pinboard Deleter: deletes all bookmarks stored in a Pinboard account. Ensure you backup / export your bookmarks before running this, Pinboard has a backup page, and the script itself will provide a JSON dump before it runs. An alternative to using this script is closing your account entirely.

Elsewhere

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Delete your free Slack backlogs!

Why delete Slack backlogs?

Slack and other chat software tend to retain conversation history so that you can see and search what was said in the past. This can be very helpful for historical context and avoiding repeat conversations, but there’s all kinds of reasons why you don’t want to retain backlogs indefinitely:

  • people who join some time after the Slack is formed may find themselves being discussed in backlogs in terms that are uncomfortable now they can see it
  • the relationships of people in the Slack may change over time and previously friendly conversations may be weaponised by members
  • any malicious person who gains access to your Slack (whether by hacking or by being invited) gets the entire history of everything said there to bully or blackmail people with
  • the contents of the Slack might be subject to legal discovery at some point in the future and be used to win a lawsuit against members or owners of the Slack, or else simply dumped into the public record

Learn more in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Slack privacy campaign: What if All Your Slack Chats Were Leaked?, Slack should give free accounts control over retention.

How to delete Slack backlogs.

If you pay for Slack, you should use their message and file retention feature.

Update September 2024: as of 2022, Slack allows free workspaces to configure deletion after 90 days (otherwise it will hide the messages/files), and as of 2024 all data from free workspaces is deleted after a year and cannot be retained without paying. The below script is now mainly useful if you wish to retain data for less than 90 days in a free Slack workspace.

If you have a free Slack, you can do it yourself. If you are using the free plan, you can delete messages through the API. Here’s a really simple sample Python script any admin of your Slack can use, which will delete most messages posted more than 6 weeks ago. (Instructions.)

Alternatively, slack_cleaner2 is nicely flexible if you want to develop your own script. Or members could delete at least their own messages with eg the Message deleter for Slack 2.0 Chrome extension.

Script caveats

You will need owner or administrator access to your Slack instance (or else you cannot delete messages other users wrote).

The script operates with the credentials of the admin who runs it, and will not be able to delete other people’s messages in 1:1 DMs, or any messages in any private channel that admin is not in.

The script will not delete messages older than the 10,000 recent messages that free Slacks have access to (even deleting the newer messages doesn’t restore access to these). Yet these older messages are retained by the company and could be accessed if, eg, someone pays for the Slack in future or if a discovery motion is granted. Unfortunately, you will need to pay for Slack, at least briefly, to access these older messages for deletion.

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Delete your free Slack backlogs! by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Handlers speculative: how to get a random word notifier in GNOME 3

I’ve been using my “fan merinos” random word generating script for a long time, and increasingly regularly as I take part in a few forums with transient pseudonymity and it’s a useful way to quickly get a pseudonym:

$ rw 1
mortally

Sure. Pseudonym activate. Yours, “Mortally”.

The result has been though that I increasingly return to my desktop to find that I’ve opened about 15 terminals and run rw in each and abandoned them.

How useful it would be to have a GNOME notification generated via a keyboard shortcut! Eg I could press Ctrl+Alt+R and get:

A GNOME notification reading: convalescence identities teases handlers speculative

Putting all this together takes a bit of work. First, the shell script to create the notification:

#!/bin/bash

WORDS=/usr/share/dict/words
NUM_WORDS=5 # fits nicely in a notification for me

notify-send "$(cat "$WORDS" | grep -v "'" | grep -v "[A-Z]" | shuf -n $NUM_WORDS | xargs echo)" -a "Random words"

Save to, eg ~/bin/rw-notify.sh, and then make it executable: chmod 700 ~/bin/rw-notify.sh

If you run the command from a terminal you then get the notification.

But for some reason I haven’t worked out, GNOME’s keyboard shortcuts won’t run a shell script. If you try and add a shortcut that runs this command, it will simply do nothing.

So, next create another file: ~/.local/share/applications/rw-notify.desktop:

#!/usr/bin/exo-open
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Random Words Notify
Exec=[YOUR HOME DIR]/bin/rw-notify.sh
Type=Application

Replacing [YOUR HOME DIR] with the location of your home dir, eg:

Exec=/home/mary/bin/rw-notify.sh

This will let you activate an application called “Random Words Notify” from the GNOME launcher.

Last step, binding it to a key.

First, you need to have /usr/bin/exo-open available on your system (for some context, see GNOME bug 343896). On Debian and Ubuntu, you’ll need to install exo-utils and on Fedora exo.

You will also need to make the desktop file itself executable: chmod 700 ~/.local/share/applications/rw-notify.desktop

Now, finally open the keyboard shortcuts editor (open the Activities view and start typing “Keyboard”). Scroll to the bottom and press the + to add a new custom shortcut:

Screenshot of the GNOME keyboard shortcut dialog

Then press “Set shortcut” followed by the keys you want (in my case, Ctrl+Alt+R), and fill in a name and, as the command, the full path of the rw-notify.desktop file, eg /home/mary/.local/share/applications/rw-notify.desktop:

Screenshot of the GNOME Add Custom Shortcut dialog

Press “Add” and now Ctrl+Alt+R will bring up 5 random words in a notification for you:

A GNOME notification reading: convalescence identities teases handlers speculative

All shell scripts and commands in this post (enclosed in the <code> HTML tags) are in the public domain.

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Don’t trust Livejournal? Delete your account.

In December 2016, LiveJournal moved their servers to Russia and in April 2017 they updated their terms of use in a way many users find unacceptable.

In January 2017, as people considered the implications of the server move to Russia, I saw a number of people hesitant to delete their accounts as they were hoping to overwrite their data on Livejournal before deleting, by, eg, replacing their entries with Shakespeare’s plays, or with random nonsense, so that Livejournal didn’t have the entry any more. This won’t work and you might as well just delete your Livejournal account.

Here’s a loose analogy for the way that data on a site like Livejournal may be stored:

There’s a journalling website. It stores its entries on vast reams of paper in a giant library and new entries are scribed onto paper and filed.

The “overwrite with nonsense” strategy assumes that any journal entry you make is at a fixed location on a fixed bit of paper for all time. When you update the entry, the scribe goes to the existing bits of paper and writes on top of them. While this is technically possible with hard drives and similar, in a way that it isn’t with literal paper, here’s what more likely actually happens:

You update the entry, replacing it a Shakespearean play. The new version is written on entirely random empty paper (maybe blank, maybe where someone else’s deleted entry once was), and an index in a different part of the library is also updated. It used to say that your entry of January 7 was on floor 6, shelf 216, and now it says that your entry of January 7 was on floor 12, shelf 16.

But the contents of floor 6, shelf 216 are likely not overwritten for some time. Perhaps they’re marked as available to be overwritten, to be reused whenever it seems sensible, but you won’t know when that is. On the other hand, perhaps they are deliberately marked in the index as “an old version of the January 7 entry” for the sake of users having an edit history, or to have an audit trail, or because a lawsuit demands it, or because a government demands it. This may or may not be visible to you.

Even if floor 6, shelf 216 is marked available to be overwritten, it may not be actively erased, and if it isn’t actively erased, it’s available to be searched by a sufficiently determined or empowered person. (And searching unindexed digital storage is a lot faster and cheaper than searching paper, so not one thousandth as determined or empowered as you need to be to search a library full of unindexed paper.)

And even if floor 6, shelf 216 is no longer marked as “an old version of the entry of January 7”, on any moderately well-run website, floor 6, shelf 216 was never the only copy of your entry anyway. What if there was an accident with fire or water or whiteout? There are backups of your entry, probably at least two in the same library and at least one in a different library. These backups are usually moments in time, ie, the state of the entire journalling website as of New Years. The state of the entire journalling website as of New Years the previous year.

These backups are almost certainly never wiped of entries that are simply edited, and without adding a system that searches back through backups and selectively deletes backups of deleted accounts, they most likely contain the complete contents of deleted accounts as well.

So what you’ve ended up with is a situation where floor 12, shelf 16 contains a Shakespearean play, floor 6, shelf 216 likely contains your original entry, and there are several backups around that almost certainly contain your original entry and are designed in such a way as to be found and restored relatively quickly. This is not a much more secure situation than before you replaced the entry with a Shakespearean play; probably not worth the work you did.

All that said, it’s important to know that there are trade-offs in adding secure, permanent deletion. People quite often edit or delete their data accidentally, or temporarily — for example it is quite common to disable social media accounts temporarily to enforce a social media break — and it’s also common to be hacked and have your data deleted by the hacker. Enthusiastic data scubbing will actively harm you in all these cases. On top of that, storage systems fail (in my analogy, the library burns down, except hard drives fail more often than paper does), and backups are especially important then. And any system that goes back in time and edit backups has risks; what if it has a bug (all software has bugs) and deletes things it shouldn’t? System design to balance securely deleting data that users want to permanently delete with rarely or never deleting data they expect to keep is not easy.

So Livejournal or another site has your personal data, what should you do? I suggest that when you no longer use an online service, or you no longer trust in its management, that you take a personal backup of the data if possible and if you want it, and then delete your account.

You cannot usefully take any additional steps like overwriting your account with nonsense to ensure that actual data scrubbing took place and you should assume that it wasn’t scrubbed unless you can find some written guarantee otherwise. However, over time, backups will get selectively pruned, outages will happen, the business may eventually fail and your data will most likely become slowly less available and complete. That’s the best you can do.

For online services you actively use and where you do trust the management enough to keep your account, ask for written descriptions of their data scrubbing practices to be developed for deleted data and deleted accounts, including deletion from backups and handling of disused hard drives.

Elsewhere:

Tim Chevalier, PSA: Switching to Dreamwidth? (January 2017).

Disclosure: I am an employee of Google. This post does not describe Google’s data deletion practices, in which I’m not an expert in any case; it’s a general description of easy, sometimes harmful, defaults that systems designers could fall into. For Google-specific information, you can view privacy.google.com and Google Infrastructure Security Design Overview.

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Don’t trust Livejournal? Delete your account. by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Flickr features I’ve known and loved

As the planning for the sale of Yahoo!/Altaba to Verizon continues, I’m not the only person worried about the fate of Flickr, which has been owned by Yahoo since 2005:

I’ve got a tediously backed-up local copy of my photos and won’t have to kiss them goodbye, but as a happy Pro user of Flickr I’m really worried about its future and beginning an active search for replacements. I’m going to start evaluating possible replacements on the basis of these specific features, roughly in order of importance:

My favourite Flickr features

Embedding my foremost use of Flickr is as a photo host for my parenting blog and, increasingly, to show off my best photos. The ability to embed photographs in third-party websites is essential to me.

Locking at the photo level and guest access. It’s not easy to find non-recent photographs of my children on my Flickr account. That’s because I have a script that marks photos as private once they’re a certain age. Some other types of photos (for example, photos of other children) I often mark as private immediately.

Much of my web life runs this way: just because you can find my recent stuff doesn’t mean you get to casually browse everything I’ve done on the Internet since the beginning of time (circa 1999). I’ve taken full advantage of websites with individual locking every time I’ve used one, including WordPress sites, LiveJournal&Dreamwidth, Pinboard, and, yes, Flickr, and strongly prefer it.

At the same time, the chance of people who care about me obtaining a login to Flickr, or to social-photos-site-of-the-month in order to view pictures of a party we were at is basically nil, so the ability to share links to photos via Flickr’s guest pass system has made it useful to me for semi-private events and photos.

API access. I’m not locking all this stuff on all these sites down by hand! It’s all scripted and done via APIs.

Multiple albums for a single photo I look at my photos through several different types of, uh, “lenses”. There’s events, there’s individuals in the photos (mostly my children), and there’s my show-off albums for my favourite photos or ones most I’m likely to want to share with other people if only they’d ask to see more of my photos. I use albums for all three ways of looking at photos, and thus many of my photos are in both a “my kid at age 3” album and a “visit to the beach in November” album.

I also use tags and I might be able to modify my workflow to use tags to replace some of these features, although the result of a tag search would need to be viewable as a first class album, rarely true in my experience so far.

Creative Commons licencing. I like easily dropping my photos into a big pool of photos that might someday find good uses elsewhere and licence a lot of my non-portraits CC BY for (nearly) maximum re-usability. I fear that even sites that support CC licencing won’t end up being searched by anyone in practice, and if I note a CC licence myself in the description, it’s never going to happen.

Features I’d reluctantly sacrifice

Chromecast support. It’s been really enchanting having our TVs display great photos of our kids throughout their lives, travel we’ve done, and a lot of clouds, all via Chromecast’s support for using Flickr photos for background images, but I’m willing to give it up for my core set of features.

An app. Don’t get me wrong, I do like being able to peruse my photos on my phone, but I’d give it up if I had to. Because I do about half my photography with a DSLR, and edit essentially all my photographs, I don’t upload photos via apps in any case.

Less important

The social ecosystem. I started using Flickr regularly after a lot of people stopped, and I’m indifferent to the social features, eg favourites, comments, following other folks, putting my photos in group albums. I do use some of these, but I won’t be looking for them in a replacement.

Locking to different sets of people. I do use Flickr’s “friends” and “family” distinction a little, but in giving up social, I’m also happy to give up locking other than “locked” and “not locked”.

And now, I’m afraid, it’s well and truly time to go shopping for a new photo host. My favourite. Only not.

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If you’re still maintaining a LiveJournal, your journal’s now in Russia

Signal-boosting this news as I know a few people still maintaining a LiveJournal who might choose to delete it, or change their use of LiveJournal after learning about this.

LiveJournal is now hosted in Russia

As of late December 2016, the LiveJournal servers (computers) are now hosted in Russia. While LiveJournal has been owned by Russian company SUP since 2007, the servers had until now been hosted in the US and access to them somewhat controlled by Californian law.

SUP has, to the best of my knowledge, not announced or commented on this themselves, but there’s more information at rahirah’s Dreamwidth journal with links to different evidence of the new location of the servers.

A Russian-language LiveJournaller appears to report that Russian law then allows that all the confidential information of [LiveJournal] users is available for [Russian] domestic security services in real time [note though that that’s a automated translation].

A BBC report on Russian law regarding social media in 2014 seems to confirm this:

A new law imposing restrictions on users of social media has come into effect in Russia.

It means bloggers with more than 3,000 daily readers must register with the mass media regulator, Roskomnadzor, and conform to the regulations that govern the country’s larger media outlets.

Internet companies will also be required to allow Russian authorities access to users’ information.

Thanks to my original source of information about this (found via @anatsuno on Twitter).

siderea expresses several important concerns with this:

  1. if you’re in Russia or vulnerable to Russia, and a political opponent, you could now be more easily identified by Russian security
  2. regardless of where you are, your LiveJournal could be possibly be deleted without notice for expressing opposition to Russia or its interests or for other content censored in Russia (eg LGBT-related content)
  3. the flight of LiveJournal users from LiveJournal following this news could simply kill the business and cause everyone’s journals to disappear without notice (Archive Team is storing public entries, regarding it as an at-risk site)

Readers’ connections to LiveJournal aren’t private

LiveJournal redirects secure https links back to insecure http. For example, if you visit https://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/ your browser will connect, but it will be instructed to head to http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/ before loading the page. (Info from this Dreamwidth comment by mme_hardy, confirming my personal experiences with LiveJournal RSS feeds over the last several months.)

What this means is that the content of any entries you read, including locked ones by both you and other people, are trivially visible to anyone who can eavesdrop on your net connection, including (often) other people on your local network, and anyone on the path between you and LiveJournal such as your ISP and anyone with access to the data flowing across international cables or access to the data as it enters the Russian hosting facility, whereas https connections are encrypted in a way such that those people can see that data is flowing but can’t read it absent considerably more niche and intensive technical measures. (Even if HTTPS were turned on by LiveJournal, you wouldn’t be safe from the Russian law, since they can ask LiveJournal itself to turn over your data in addition to whatever nation-state attacker level techniques they can employ.)

Given my experience with LiveJournal RSS feeds, I’m fairly sure this has been true for some time, predating the move of the servers to Russia. (Here’s one other report that this was already true as of September 2016.) Regardless of timing, this speaks of, at best, disregard for the privacy of their users’ explicitly private (because friends-locked!) information. It’s 2017, mandatory HTTPS for transmission of any data that is sensitive or might, conceivably, somehow, maybe, be sensitive is an absolute minimum standard for user safety. LiveJournal doesn’t even have optional “if you have HTTPS Everywhere installed” or “if you remember to stick the s into the URL yourself” HTTPS (which would still be insufficient as you cannot control whether your readers use HTTPS when reading your journal).

Getting your content out of LiveJournal

If based on this you choose to delete your LiveJournal, here are some options to keep your entries. This list isn’t comprehensive.

If you want to move the content to another website, here’s some blogging platforms that provide imports from LiveJournal:

If you want to download your entries for private use, you can:

  • use LiveJournal’s own export tool but rather painfully (you’ll have to do one download per month), and without comments
  • use ljdump on the command line, which worked for me as of 2015 when I deleted my LiveJournal, but will require that you’re an experienced command line user
  • use BlogBooker to export it to a Word or PDF file (disclosure: I haven’t used this site in quite some time, and would appreciate hearing if it works, but I suggest people at least try it because it exports to a non-programmer friendly format that people could keep as a private archive, and claims to include comments and images)
  • Archive Team lists other backup tools

If your LiveJournal made use of their photo hosting, I am not sure which backup solutions will import your photos or how they will be stored. I am also not aware of any import tool that replaces LiveJournal entries with a “this entry has moved to URL” message or similar. If anyone is working on a competing LiveJournal import/export tool, photo export and redirection text are both features that my friends and I would have found useful at various times.

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If you’re still maintaining a LiveJournal, your journal’s now in Russia by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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All my custom emoji secrets, revealed

I’m known in a few Slacks as the emoji whisperer for adding obviously necessary yet inexplicably absent emoji.

Sometimes, as in the case of the nopetopus and the WTF cake, a certain amount of time in Inkscape is going to be necessary, but I’d say that I whisper around ⅔ of my emoji via downloading images just two websites, and what’s more you can too! (It’s just that easy!)

Emojipedia contains existing and, importantly, upcoming and proposed Unicode emoji. I used it to get hold of unauthorised pre-approval user-beware emoji for avocado, duck, and fingers crossed.

openclipart contains whatever people want it to contain. Aside from providing sources for many of the puzzlemoji, I’ve recently found good witch and wizard hats there. Most of the images can’t be shrunk to 128px and still be made out, but there’s enough that can to make the search worth it.

[Update 2019: freesvg.org or publicdomainvectors.org are currently more searchable than openclipart.org.]

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fan merinos; or how to have a little fun searching logs

At an engineering training with Greg Sabo in my first week at Stripe, he showed a cute trick: using a shell command to generate two random words when testing.

For example, every time I reconfigure my mail server, I send a distressing number of emails in this style:

echo "Testing" | mail -s "Mary Test 1" mary
echo "Testing" | mail -s "Mary Test 2" mary
echo "Testing" | mail -s "Mary Test 3" mary

(I usually lose count around Test 4, for the record.)

Likewise, in testing the Stripe create charges API function, one might run this from the documentation:

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/charges \
-u sk_test_BQokikJOvBiI2HlWgH4olfQ2: \
-d amount=400 \
-d currency=usd \
-d source=tok_189fCj2eZvKYlo2CjCzCPbk5 \
-d description="Charge for test@example.com"

Wouldn’t those be both more fun and somewhat easier to find in mailboxes, logs and dashboards as, say, Mary test fan merinos and Charge for cellular ascendents respectively? It would be! Thanks Greg!

Implementation-wise, on very recent Ubuntu, the trick is to add something to your bash profile along the times of:

rw () {
cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -v "'" | grep -v "[A-Z]" | shuf -n 2 | xargs echo
}

Background: shuf is a command that behaves like head and tail, only it returns a selected number random lines. I’m filtering out single quotes (grep -v "'") in its input so as to not unduly annoy xargs, and filtering capital letters (grep -v "[A-Z]") as a proxy for filtering out proper names.

From there:
$ rw
newscaster mucky
$ echo Mary test $(rw)
Mary test equitable rough

For systems without shuf installed, there’s a lot of potential solutions to shuffling a text file at Stack Overflow, this answer has a great roundup.

As a note of caution, you don’t want to run rw live in front of other people or send them the output unchecked; a random selection of 2 English words has some reasonable chance of being disgusting, offensive, strange, inappropriate, etc. Generate some memorable phrases privately in advance!

Slightly related: xkcd: Password strength.

Change the number of words

Added 28 Sep 2016

A slightly improved version of rw that allows a variable number of words to be returned, defaulting to 2:

rw () {
  NUM=$1
  if [ -z "$NUM" ]
  then
    NUM=2
  fi
  cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -v "'" | grep -v "[A-Z]" | shuf -n $NUM | xargs echo
}

$ rw
reverberations drumming
$ rw 1
bards
$ rw 7
protections proving unfortunately blubbered uninstallers pitchmen locality

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Make your Dreamhost site HTTPS-only

Encrypt all the traffic!

Some of the archival Ada Initiative web content is hosted on Dreamhost, and today I re-enabled HTTPS for it now that Let’s Encrypt certificates are available both on Dreamhost and WordPress.com.

Update October 2017: official Dreamhost documentation on adding an SSL certificate and forcing your site to load securely with an .htaccess file is available.

Here’s how to enable, and insist on, HTTPS connections to sites hosted on Dreamhost:

  1. Log into the panel
  2. Go to Secure Hosting
  3. Click ‘Add Secure Hosting’
  4. Select the domain you want from the dropdown, check the box next to ‘By checking this option you agree to the Let’s Encrypt Terms of Service.’, leave ‘Unique IP’ unchecked, and press ‘Add now’.
  5. Important: wait for an email from Dreamhost telling you the certificate is ready. This seems to take about fifteen minutes or so. The email contains a copy of the certificate but you don’t need to do anything with it, they configure the webserver automatically at about the same time as they send the email.
  6. Once you have received the email, check that your site is available at https://YOUR-URL and that your browswer does not report errors. (If it does, wait around 15 minutes, try again, and if you’re still seeing errors, screenshot them and contact Dreamhost support.)

Now that HTTPS is working on your site, you can then force all HTTP requests to redirect to HTTPS by placing this in the ~/YOUR-URL/.htaccess file:


<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
# Redirect all insecure requests
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^/?(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

# tell web browsers not to even try HTTP on this domain for the next year
# uncomment this only after you've confirmed your site is working on HTTPS, since it commits you to providing it over HTTPS
# Header set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000" env=HTTPS

Check that visiting http://YOUR-URL now redirects to https://YOUR-URL, and the same should be true of pages underneath http://YOUR-URL.

Feature request for Dreamhost: make a “force HTTPS” option in your standard config.

For more information on Strict-Transport-Security see HTTP Strict Transport Security for Apache, NGINX and Lighttpd and Stack Overflow: How to set HSTS header from .htaccess only on HTTPS.

Bonus round: update absolute links

If your site is a bunch of static HTML files, and you have done a lot of absolute linking to your own webpages, here’s a possible command you could run, replacing example.com with your own domain. I don’t recommend running it unless you know the UNIX command line, and you have a fairly good idea of what find and sed both do:


DOMAIN=example.com
cp -a ~/$DOMAIN ~/$DOMAIN-backup-before-https-edit
cd ~/$DOMAIN
find -type f -name "*.html" -exec sed -i "s/http:\/\/$DOMAIN/https:\/\/$DOMAIN/g" {} \;

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Make your Dreamhost site HTTPS-only by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Post-Squeezebox audio setup at long last

We stuck with the Logitech Squeezebox system for streaming home audio long long past discovering that Logitech was ending development of the ecosystem but inevitably it started to date. Our Squeezebox Classic didn’t survive our house move in May. Our Squeezebox Boom and Squeezebox Radio did, but over the last year Andrew subscribed to Google Play Music, I switched to a podcasting app (Pocket Casts) for my phone rather than a command line tool that downloaded new episodes (podget), and so more and more things became phone-only and unable to easily send audio to the Squeezeboxen.

We like whole-home audio (the ability to play the same thing throughout the house), so even aside from audio quality issues, Bluetooth wasn’t going to cut it. I started to look into switching to the Sonos system, but it was another all-in system where we’d be looking at replacing all of our equipment if Sonos went out of business or end-of-lifed their setup. Logitech, you’ve done a number on the hardware side of whole-home audio systems. So we’ve switched to using good speakers with fairly cheap and disposable ecosystem adaptors, ie, the Chromecast Audio.

Software:

  • ReadyMedia (formerly MiniDLNA), which we were already using to stream video to the TV, let’s us continue having access to the audio on our Ubuntu home server
  • BubbleUPnP to send audio from the home server to the Chromecasts

ReadyMedia has to be one of the easiest to configure Linux services I’ve ever dealt with. I’m intending to play around with BubbleUPnP Server in front of ReadyMedia shortly; shared playlists are still a Squeezebox feature missing from this setup so far.

We also needed speakers to replace the Boom and Radio (we could have used their line in function, but we’ll sell them to continuing Squeezebox users). Thus, new equipment to go with the set of Yamaha MSP5 powered speakers we already have:

  • Audioengine A2+ powered speakers for my office and for our bedroom, based on the Wirecutter review of computer speakers (bonus not noted there: they come in red)
  • Rolls MX42 4-Channel Passive Mini Stereo Mixer

The mixer is something of a revelation: we’re feeding the TV audio and a Chromecast into it, in order to be able to listen to either of them through the Yamaha speakers without having to press any buttons or even use any kind of remote. Obviously we pretty much never want to listen to the TV and the Chromecast outputs simultaneously; but we can now listen to them in very rapid succession and the energy needed to decide to listen to music in the lounge room is way way lower than it was. Long may the Hamilton cast recording, Justice Crew’s Que Sera, and Doctor Who podcasts be heard around our house.