Category: Tech

The Algorithm Found Me

Tech

The algorithm finally found me, and it’s kind of terrifying, in an exciting way. Like a roller coaster, perhaps, but one whose maintenance and safety is unknown and untrusted and therefore viewed properly with suspicion.

Let me back up a bit. This is about TikTok, the current hot potato social media site. Sure, the US Government is hypocritically and for cynical reasons trying to force the Chinese government to give up control, and, failing that, ban it. I have opinions about that, surely, of course, but in the meantime, I have fun watching videos about comic books, D&D, lesbians, trans, and gay folks, and helping Palestine. Seriously that’s like 90% of my For You Page (FYP), the algorithmically-generated content it shows me. I don’t engage much, normally, just scroll through, like posts, maybe comment once in a while, and then close out.

Tragedy in Gaza

Recognition of the Palestinian genocide feels, from my view, to be the biggest social movement on the platform. (By the by, if you disagree with me on the word “genocide“, realize that the vast majority of UN member states as well as the International Criminal Court agrees with me, and I’m comfortable being on the side of the majority of the world.)

Related to that, a month or two ago, right after this year’s Met Gala, a lot of creators were calling out celebrities with large followings for not speaking out against genocide. The theory goes, if you have a large platform, you have a duty to use that platform to inform and direct your follower’s attention to things happening in the world. Especially, y’know, bad things. And minor social media influencer Hayley Kalil made a post from the Met Gala using the sound “Let them eat cake”, drawing immediate connection to the legendary inspiration for La Madame Guilotine and the French Revolution. A TikTok user named LadyFromTheOutside suggested we start not just unfollowing influencers like Kalil we disagree with, but also block them, a “digitine” – digital guilotine.

Mass blocking, posts about best ways to block, and posts trumpeting the success or failure of the bloking, ensued. And because of the way marketing and the TipTop algorithm works, mass blocking of celebrities caused a lot of problems for them. It was fun to watch and see the TikTok admins try to fix things, while marketing people explained in videos that it was working, to some degree of the word “working.”

Teamwork makes the dream work

When the anti-celebrity feelings rose, so also rose a sense of community among the non-celebrities; folks with small followings, or regular folks who just post regular things, not sponsored content. And a creator on TikTok named Jake (@jheisenburg) pointed out that just watching videos generates income for them, thanks to the Creativity Fund beta program. Qualified views on a video that gets over a certain amount of attention will be compensated by TikTok. Jake sat down and calculated how much money a specific number of views on a video would pay, and if they got X number of views, they could pay off their student loans.

That video, of course, went viral. People wanted to a) help this person pay off their debt, and b) wanted to get enough views on their videos to pay of their debts. The idea that people could get paid directly by the platform owners, without any viewers having to send their own money, was kind of like a gold rush moment. “All I need is five seconds of your time; don’t scroll away, please.” It spread like wildfire, and in a way, it was such a positive, wholesome moment. People helping each other out, with the bare minimum of attention. The main hashtag that emerged was #Teamwork because that’s what it felt like. Let’s all work together, use the tools the platform has given us, and maybe we can all benefit.

Eventually the details for what had to happen were sussed out. To even apply for the Creativity Fund, which is still in beta as of the writing of this post, a user on TikTok had to have 10,000 followers minimum, and had to have 700,000 qualified views. Once that threshhold was crossed, and their application for the Creativity Fund was accepted, then any view of 5 minutes or more on a video by that creator that was more than a minute long was deemed a “qualified view”, and each one of those was worth a certain amount of money. Not a lot, mind you, but some. And the more views that video got, the more money was paid out. Another caveat was that the videos had to be algorithmically pushed; you had to come across it on your FYP or it wouldn’t count.

TikTok demands organic engagement

TikTok was basically paying people to engage with the platform. They want videos to go viral. They want people to make fun, entertaining, or otherwise engaging content. The pay rewarded views; the other activities, liking, commenting, favoriting, and sharing, were signals to the algorithm that said “this one should be shown to more people.” That’s how the software figures out what “viral” is.

People who were over that threshhold started telling people how to play, and encouraging their followers to follow them so the creator could follow them back. People wanted to lift up creators under 10K, or even under 1K followers, which is the threshold when a creator can start doing Live streaming on the app, which is a great way to get views, followers, and also rewards like gifts and the like. People were hoping this trend would help them out, but they were also using it to generate donations for families in Palestine or the Congo. It felt, to me, sincere. It felt like community and working together. And you know me, I’m a sucker for community.

Saying “I’ll follow you back” is called a “follow train“, a quid pro quo that the platform hates, since it’s seen as gaming the algorithm and not “organic” engagement. But folks didn’t care, at least until TikTok started suppressing videos that used the hashtags or keywords. People found ways around that, as people always do, and the trend mutated a bit.

What the Hell am I doing here?

And now you have the context for my experience with the Teamwork hashtag. As I said above, I don’t really use social media to get huge numbers of views, engagement, or pay when it’s available. I think the most number of followers I’ve ever had in the past two decades is ~1500 on the shithole once known as Twitter (fuck you, Elon.) As of three weeks ago, on TikTok I followed a handful of friends and family, and another handful of interesting quirky creators, which totaled under 100. But I dug the idea that by watching other people’s videos I could help them out. Hell, I’m going to watch anyway.

At the height of the whole #Teamwork trend, I made a video where I said to anyone watching that they didn’t have to follow me back, they didn’t have to watch 5 seconds or more, they didn’t have to like or comment, because I am no where near having enough followers to even qualify. But I would do my best to watch their videos, comment if I could. I called it my Statement of Intent. I wanted to help, I expected no reward because I couldn’t give a shit who followed me or not, karma is real, I love you all. Sure, I’m unemployed. I could use another source of income right now. I just don’t have any clue how to get even 100 people to care enough about the random shit I sometimes post to click that “Follow” button on my account.

I knew that posting regularly also told the almighty algo that I was ready to be shown to a wider audience, so for a few days I posted daily, including a video where I mentioned being unemployed but looking for that dream job. I didn’t beg, not exactly… but it was kind of a beg post. I didn’t say send money directly. Was just putting out there that I’m looking for work. Not a beg, but an ad. That video got just under 700 views and a handful of comments in the first day it was on the platform, and then views trailed off. Oh, well, I figured that was my shot. I posted a couple more times, but gave up on the idea that my follower count would explode. I was happy just watching and helping others. My TikTok habits went back to where they were before the trend. I did gain a few followers over the next few weeks but the number stalled out around, I shit you not, 420, dude, which honestly felt a bit like a troll.

And then… last night, as I was getting in bed, I started getting a bananas amount of notifications from the app. People were commenting, people were following, and people were sharing. They were offering job hunting advice, they said things like “GenX is showing up for you!” and they were sending love, prayers, and good thoughts. When I finally set down my phone I had over 650 total followers. It was amazing, and a little terrifying. I’m an introvert, I don’t like being perceived. That was why I was OK when I hadn’t gone viral earlier; it was a relief. Now, though…

And again that’s not a lot of new friends. It takes 10K to get in the Creativity Fund, remember, and I was still a long, long, long way from that. But 1000 now seemed in reach, if the trend continued.

The algorithm pushed my stuff out to the right eyeballs, they took action, and even more eyeballs turned my direction, briefly. By the end of the day Sunday, as I write this, I have just over 900. I’ve been following most of them back (I don’t follow vocal fascists and Republicans, crypto bros, or empty accounts with no profile pic or videos; everyone else I do follow back.) I’ve replied to many of the kind comments, and chatted with a few (most of the chatters are shilling for their paid private porn, though, sadly; if I were employed with a solid handle on my bills, I’d probably toss them a few bucks. Why not? I like paying for my porn. Alas, not currently in that position.)

It’s good that we, the people, talk to each other. I suspect that’s why our government isn’t happy, coupled with the fact that we talk to each other on a platform who’s beholden to a government in a very competitive position to the US. There is a lot of pushback on both Democratic and Republican bullshit on the clock app and that’s gotta sting to them. But for now, it’s entertaining… and engaging. Just as it’s designed to be.

Intermittent Internet Connection

Tech

This might be a short one tonight, but I will try to include as much information as I can. Consider this an open support ticket for myself in the future.

I’ve had intermittent internet connection issues at home for the past couple of months. About once or twice a week, my cable modem (an Arris Surfboard G36 that I own, not one I rent from Xfinity) will lose connection. The logs on the cable modem are essentially useless; there’s never anything in them, let alone anything that might point to a problem. Since the problem is at the modem, it affects everything else downstream on my network, wired or wireless.

I’ve seen this issue before and it led to me replacing the previous cable modem with this one, a relatively expensive piece of small-business kit. (Edited to add: this Arris Surfboard G36 was purchased on 19 April 2022 – Brian) I’ve kept a log of the dropouts in case I have to contact Xfinity support, but I’m trying to collect more information before beating my head against the wall with their support. The few times I’ve contacted them, I get a chatbot that tells me to reboot the modem. Because the dropouts clear themselves up if I just wait it out for 10-15 minutes, I can’t tell if rebooting just occupies the time necessary for the problem to resolve on its own. I need more information.

The cable modem does have some diagnostic tools: basic shit like ping and traceroute, and a DOCSIS spectrum analyzer. My problem is, I don’t know how to read the results of the spectrum analyzer. I don’t know what’s within spec. The cable modem also reports a lot of information about the different up- and downstream channels: frequency, power level (in dB), signal-to-noise ratio, lock status. Again, despite my trying to find out what all this means and what the numbers should be, I haven’t been able to self-tutor enough to sort it out. Of course, Xfinity’s support articles are incredibly basic, aimed at non-tech consumers, so they don’t publish or bury the information I’m looking for.

I did find, during today’s troubleshooting, that a coax cable signal tester is incredibly cheap; $20. That might help me figure out if there’s something wrong with the wiring in my building (I rent so I inherited whatever is already in the walls.) Maybe there’s a slightly-more-expensive one that will give more information than just yes-signal/no-signal.

Edited to add: My problems did settle down a bit after the last factory reset I did on the modem, which by my records was on 6 March 2024, which feels relatively recent enough that I’m loathe to try it again.

Today’s outage, though, turned out not to be anything to do with my cable modem or Xfinity. In doing science, a flaw, a human flaw, is only reporting positive results. Gotta report all results in order to figure out what’s going on. What I’m saying is that today’s outage was my own damned fault. I was confuzzled because only my own desktop computer was showing any connection issues and slowness. Every other device on my network was fine. I’ll jump to the end: I had forgotten that my desktop computer was using a Proton VPN connection and it was eating up my bandwidth, disconnecting from time to time, and causing a whole lotta latency, which did not affect any other network device. Mea culpa!

I have a small audience here; if anyone has any suggestions for troubleshooting a cable modem connection issue, I am all ears. Reply or send me a note, I’d love to hear from you!

Fixing OBS Game Capture for Fallout 3

Gaming, Tech

Quick post to document a problem I had and the solution that worked for me.

When streaming/recording Fallout 3 using OBS Studio, if I used Game Capture, OBS would show the game briefly but then freeze up, or worse, just show a black screen. Tried every setting in OBS that I could change for Game Capture, tried running OBS as administrator, even uninstalled and reinstalled OBS. Just could not get it to work. Didn’t want to use Fullscreen Capture for aesthetic reasons (it would capture my desktop, or notifications unrelated to the game, that kind of thing.)

So I broke down and read the documentation. Wouldn’t you know it, they had a solution to this.

I had to disable/close RivaTuner Statistics Server. That did the trick. Turns out having that overlay breaks Game Capture in OBS. I seriously would have never thought of that if I hadn’t gone in and found the OBS support docs.

Good documentation saves lives! Or at least prevents stress wrinkles.

Runnin’ Down A Dream

Daily Story Project, Tech

A smoothly running car is a big stress relief. Have I mentioned my car hasn’t been running well lately? It’s kind of amazing that it runs at all, since it’s a 1996 Honda Accord four door. The paint (powder blue) is in terrible shape, blistering and peeling and faded. I don’t have the wheel covers so it’s just bare steel wheels and the cheapest tires I can find. Some of the window seals are in bad shape, and not everything fits together as well as when it was new.

There’s a big oil leak and I never check it, the suspension makes a clunking sound when I make left turns, and the steering is a bit wobbly. The brakes mostly work but take some practice, and I give a lot of space to the car ahead of me just in case. But mostly, it runs.

My joke was that it would probably outlast me as long as I keep the fluids topped up. It’s an inside joke, though, because I know that, being unemployed and often broke even when I’m working, I am barely keeping the fluids topped up. Typically only when I get a warning light, which is probably too late to avoid damage but it’s the best I can do. There are a lot of fluids in a car: gas, oil, brake, steering, transmission, coolant. Even window washer fluid, which stopped working for some reason years ago even though I can hear the pump going when I pull the lever.

All of this is preamble to me and my dad getting in my car the other morning so I can drive him to get some smokes, and the Check Engine light came on. Dad was instantly nervous and I was just annoyed. Really, car? You’re going to embarass me in front of my dad like this? My shame had no limits. I was just surprised it was this, instead of something more noticable, like a wheel falling off (that left-turn noise) or sudden engine failure (lack of oil) or running into the back of the car in front of me (brake failure.) No, it had to be something subtle like a generic warning light.

I know I mentioned this before. I’m just updating. On Friday we got a new air filter and swapped it in. Check Engine light stayed on. So we pulled the battery for 5 minutes and got the light to go out. Worst case scenario, if the problem still existed, the light would come on again, right? But a drive to WinCo and back and the light stayed off. It even felt like the car was running better than usual. It would stumble a bit at idle but not anymore.

Having working windshield wipers even helps; being able to see clearly out the windshield is amazing. I even unclogged the passenger side sprayer, and I know what I have to do to clean out the driver side sprayer — remove and clean it, and check the hose in case there’s a leak. If so, replacement hose is only $4 on Amazon.

Dad figures the oil leak is just the valve cover gasket, another cheap part that I have the tools to replace. Now if I can just figure out the clunking left-turn-sound… And top up the radiator before things get too hot. Oh, and check the transmission fluid. Maybe replace the spark plugs, while I’m under there.

I am my own technical support

Tech

Wrote up a long and detailed support request to Discord for the voice/video chat issue I was having yesterday and sent it off. I tried everything I could think of, but bottom line, it was affecting multiple computers on my home network, so everything pointed to it being a network issue.

I quickly got a response back from Nelly at Discord Support who listed a few other things I could try, some of which I had already done but forgot to put in the ticket. One, though, stood out:

4. **Whitelist Discord on Your Network**:
– Make sure that all required ports for Discord are open on your network. Especially UDP ports ranging from 50000 to 65535.

Reading that is when I remembered that I had tightened up my home router’s firewall, closing off a bunch of incoming ports. Sure enough, opening up UDP 50000 to 65535 fixed my Discord issue.

I emailed Nelly back, thanked them for the help, and wished them a great rest of their shift. Problem solved (it was me, I was the problem.)

The Power of the Atom – Installing and Modding Fallout 3 in 2024

Gaming, Tech

As a funny follow-up to my post a couple of days ago, Saturday morning I woke up and decided to install, patch, and mod Fallout 3 to make it somewhat stable, look better, and be a bit more modernized, in anticipation of streaming a playthrough of the game at some point in the near future.

And so did apparently everyone else.

The primary site for downloading mods for games like all of the Fallout games, as well as many others, is Nexus Mods. And on Saturday morning, Pacific time, by the time I got going, it was struggling. I kept seeing Cloudflare checks to prove I was human; a tactic to slow down high levels of use for websites. And sometimes, even then, the pages I was trying to reach did not load, and required refreshing. It was frustrating but also a little hilarious.

I am glad that there is interest in the Fallout games. I’ve said this before; I love the universe and the lore and the games, so having more people playing and learning about the world is amazing. You will never catch me gatekeeping people being excited about something cool.

I didn’t do a lot of mods; I think my list stands at 22 or so. Heck, for the record, here are the mods I installed:

I have a hankering to write up a current How To for this. The list above is sorted alphabetically and doesn’t reflect the install order or the load order. Let me know if you think that would be useful; I was going by my own experience and a lot of google searching for best mods and order. And most of the how-tos I found were for Mod Organizer or NexusModManager, not the newer Vortex, which is what I used.

There are more than enough gotchas in there to trip someone up. I can confirm that; I was that someone and I got tripped up several times. Had to wipe, uninstall, and start over at least twice.

Some tips for anyone trying this themselves:

Get a nice clean install of the base game first. Open the launcher, let it auto-detect your graphics settings, launch the game and let the opening title cards play, maybe start a New game, then exit. That creates the base files.

Install Vortex from Nexus Mods. You’ll install most (haha, no, not all) of the mods through here.

If you’re installing from Steam, it has an update that removes Games for Windows Live, which is broken since it was intended for WinXP, and Fallout Script Extender doesn’t work with that version (1.7.0.4). You’ll want to downgrade the game to 1.7.0.3. Luckily, the community has provided a patcher that will downgrade Fallout 3, as well as patch it to use more than 2 GB of RAM, and other helpful things. Download and manually run the Fallout Anniversary Patcher first before anything else.

Next thing you want to install is Fallout Script Extender. Don’t use the button in Vortex; manually download it and manually install it.

At this point, you can start installing other mods. You can use my list above as a starting point. My philosophy was – I wanted lore-friendly stuff, no major changes or new questlines, bug fixes and modernization, and just a hint of upgrades for modern graphics and displays. I did succumb to the temptation of making the 2008 Bethesda faces look a little better, but I did not install any body mods or new weapon or armor textures. I might, still, but for now I’m fine with it looking the way it did back in the day. And I am experimenting with re-done NPC animations.

I may still tweak or remove the persistent green tint in favor of third-party lighting and colors through the use of an ENB, or I might not. Again, part of the reason I want to play this is nostalgia. The look and feel of original Fallout 3 is a majority of the charm, to me.

It’s worth it, though, to have a clean, pretty game to play. And my computer, while it hasn’t been top-of-the-line for a good while, is still plenty powerful enough to run this game at 1080p and 60 frames per second. I’m looking forward to revisiting the Capital Wasteland.

Comment or contact me if you’d be interested in a full How-To write up. And stay tuned if you want to see me stream my playthroughs. That is definitely coming soon.

All of the above

Daily Story Project, meta, Tech

This blog has been up and in existence in some form or another for over 20 years. Over that time it’s run on several different platforms: first on Blogger, then on a bespoke CMS written by a friend, hosted on that friend’s server, and finally, when that friend moved away, hosted on a Mac mini I plugged in whereever I could, then, eventually, imported into WordPress and migrated from whatever hosting service sucks less and costs the least amount (currently Bluehost.)

When I started this whole thing, it was just a place for me to dump my random thoughts on whatever I wanted to talk about. I never designed this place for consistency and I never had an eye to making money from it, be it by getting sponsors or affiliates, putting ads up, or soliciting for digital downloads and media (although there was a desperate period in my life when I did try putting ads here, which failed because of the low low traffic.)

While I love everyone who comes here to read anything I say, there aren’t enough of you to make it worth it to Google for monetization. Don’t get me wrong on this. At the highest traffic levels for this space, I was getting about 200 hits per day, and I was posting nearly daily. To me, having 200 people care about my work is amazing and humbling! If I were standing in front of a crowd of 200 people who cared about the words I write, I would be beyond happy. But those numbers are peanuts to the internet, even for the time (this was a decade ago), and especially now.

But I do kinda care about reaching a larger audience, and one of the technical problems that I would need to fix, according to Google, is broken links. And with all the years of posting, holy shit are there a shit-ton of broken links, some of which I have no way to fix beyond deleting them or noting them as broken in the present day. I have spent hours going back through old posts checking links and fixing the ones I can, but let me tell you, manually doing that for (including this post) 2590 published posts over 21 years is a lot of work.

There’s another category of broken links, though. For a while, my post permalinks used the scheme of bamoon.com/year/month/day/post-title.php. I think there are perhaps 50-100 of those, from a previous WordPress configuration. Eventually I switched to bamoon.com/post-title/ Because these follow a regular pattern, I know that I could probably use a script to go through the posts and the database and update them all. But I am not a strong coder. I also know that one can use a feature of Apache and add lines to the .htaccess file to re-write the requests one-by-one as users request them. But, again, that means regex and scripting, not my strong suit.

Here comes ChatGPT, though. It’s not good at so many things, like making sure people have only four fingers and one thumb on each of two hands, but people (like Molly White) say it’s brilliant at scripts and coding. So I asked it for help. It gave me solutions for both cases. Great! I have a staging site I can test these on, so it won’t break the main site. But… one last question, ChatGPT: which solution is better?

And I feel like it punted. It said both are good, and I should implement both. The database fix is more permanent; the .htaccess rewrite is immediate and invisible to the reader.

Looks like ChatGPT is an Option D (all of the above) kind of bot.

Big Iron on our hips

Daily Story Project, Gaming, Tech, TV

With the release of Fallout on Prime, the new TV show set in the Fallout universe, interest in the post-post-apocalypse wasteland has never been higher. I mean me, my interest, mostly. I want to reinstall and play all the games, now. And I have at least reinstalled several of them (Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 76) but haven’t yet found the time to start a new journey in that wild far future.

It’s been fun going through the process of getting a nice clean install, patching the older games to run on modern hardware and software, and picking out a few good mods to make it more stable, improve the graphics and gameplay, and fix the more egregious bugs. OK, again, that’s probably just my own quirky tech-focused kind of fun; your mileage may vary. For Fallout 3, it took maybe an hour’s worth of googling, downloading, and a scosche of trial-and-error. But I got it all running.

Stay tuned to this channel for the possiblity of me streaming a playthrough of Fallout 3, playing as myself… I’m working up the nerve to try it.

Screenshot from the game Fallout 3, opening credits: an old TV test pattern in black and green saying "Please Stand By" in retro-futuristic text and graphics.
Coming soon: me making a fool of myself in the Capital Wasteland

That being said, my nephew also wants to play some Fallout, excited by the new show and especially for it being set in the game’s continuity, being a true follow-on to the game chronology. Max and I have been texting each other questions, theories, and memes about Fallout since the show dropped. This is actually fun for lots of people, not just computer geeks like me! Surely anyone reading this has one or several friends they share memes with, right? Not just me? It’s a universal thing these days?

The other day, though, he sent me a link to a Steam Community guide about how to install and run Fallout: New Vegas and asked me if it was a good how-to. I took a look and it seemed pretty comprehensive, and offered to help him out if he ran into any troubless. I felt a bit of a duty; I had helped him build his current computer a couple of years ago. Mostly though I’m excited to see him play and happy to help him get the most out of his rig. He’s been mainly a console player; mods aren’t a normal part of his gaming experience; whereas I’ve been modding games since Skyrim. I may not be an expert but I would consider myself a competent modder.

He started to get it going the other day but I didn’t hear anything more. When I pinged him to ask how it went, he said he got distracted, totally understandable. Today, though, he had the energy to get it going, and I was able to screenshare with him and walk him through the trickier parts, like making sure to back up the default files and folders before messing with them, which saved us in at least one instance. The instructions for the mod that enables scripting support, NVSE, said to copy the entire contents of its mod to the main game folder, it wanted to overwrite the Data folder already there. I backed him out of that, had him rename the old folder, and then copy everything.

Once we got the mods installed, though, the game crashed to desktop on launch, throwing the error “missing masters.” When I had Max launch the game normally, it didn’t appear any of the DLC was available; turns out they all lived in the old, renamed Data folder. Copying them to the new modded Data folder fixed the issue.

Then I spent over an hour watching him start a new playthrough, MST3K-ing and joking and googling things for him (like what is a hot plate used for, anyway? And did the Brotherhood try to take over Hoover Dam (they got distracted by Father Elijah’s fixation on HELIOS-1)). Fun times!

I’ve spent so much time in these worlds, playing, learning the characters, maps, and lore. Even making up my own wasteland lore (which has yet to be contradicted by the official material, yay!) Fun times, indeed. And I’m so glad that non-gamers are learning how rich and weird the Fallout universe is. I welcome new fans with open arms.

Feel free to ask me any questions. Love to help.

Computer Origin Story, Part 1

Daily Story Project, Gaming, Tech

I was listening to a member special from the Accidental Tech Podcast folks, and they were sharing their Computer Origin Stories; remembering their first time using a computer, and their journey from there to their later computer programming jobby-jobs (as Casey always calls their regular jobs) before they all eventually quit to do the podcast full-time, some faster than others.

It’s fun to reminisce! It was all so very long ago, because I am old.

I should probably make this a much longer post, with links and images, but I wanted to kind of sketch out the outline of my own personal Computer Origin Story first. Try to get it down in words. It’s hard and I may be leaving out things and it might not all be in the right order, but here’s my first notes on the topic.

I am unsure if arcade games count for the purposes of “computers” but they were absolutely computers, so I’ll begin the chain of events by my encounter with a Lunar Lander arcade game in what must have been early summer 1979. It was the end of my 8th grade year in Junior High and our class got to celebrate by taking a day trip to the Kah-nee-ta Resort in central Oregon. While the rest of my schoolmates were riding on horseback, or relaxing in the hot springs, or sunbathing, I was in the dark resort lobby feeding quarters into this game trying to land a vector-graphics spaceship on a 2D planet surface, guiding it in by using a knob to control the rotation and a button to feather the rocket to speed up or slow down.

The first personal computer I remember using was a Tandy TRS-80, at a computer store in a suburban shopping mall. I must have been a teenager in my middle years. There was a grocery store in that mall, and when mom would go get groceries, I’d wait for her at the bookstore in that mall, and then, eventually, I’d wait for her in the computer store. This must have been in the early 1980s. I was in high school but I don’t remember what grade. I suppose I can try to find the name of that store, but for the life of me I can’t.

At some point the store ran a contest where the prize was a TRS-80, which would have been prohibitively expensive for my family to buy. To win the contest I had to play a Star Trek game and have the highest score. I got one chance to do it, and I don’t think I lasted longer than a minute or two. My parents, particularly my mom, thought I was going to beat it. I did not, but I had a lot of fun.

That store sold other computers. I would regularly buy issues of Byte Magazine and read up about computers. That’s where my interest began. But it didn’t stop there. More to come soon; there are a few more stops along the way.

How to wrestle your Synology into exposing itself to FTP

clippings, Portfolio, Tech

For a very long time now, possibly for the entire life of my main personal blog, Lunar Obverse been operating without any automatic backups. I know, shocking. I’m a technology professional; I have multiple backups for my computers and phones, cloud plus local for everything. Having been on the help desk when someone called in asking for help recovering lost files that weren’t backed up, I empathize with the pain of loss.

That changed this weekend. And wow, what a painful process it was.

This blog runs on WordPress, and the recommended program/plugin for backups is Jetpack, though there are several others. The problem with them is that they all cost money, typically a monthly charge. I’m not above paying for a necessary service when it makes sense, but a) I’m currently unemployed, and 2) I have a massive 12 TB Synology on my home network with 5+ TB of storage space empty. I also own a handful of unused domain names, and I understand file transfers and some command line stuff. Surely I can take all these disparate pieces and cobble together an automatic backup?

Turns out I can. But it took a lot of individual steps, and lots of tweaking. I’ll try to go through them in the order it makes the most sense for someone using this article as a how-to.

Step Zero: The Disparate Pieces

As I said, the blog runs on WordPress. It’s hosted on Bluehost, which is fine. They give me command-line and CPanel access to the underpinnings of my site, though for the most part I didn’t need to mess with that. But I did need to find and install the BackWPup plugin. The free version lets me schedule backups, select what gets backed up, and then save or send the backup to a variety of locations, like via email, to Microsoft Azure, S3, or even Dropbox. The one I was most interested in, though, was FTP.

Sure, that’s an antiquated and insecure means of transmitting files over the internet. Maybe rsync would be better? But FTP is simple. Right? It should be simple. I’ll start there.

Step One: Name Games

I had to then figure out the safest way for me to allow an external server to FTP files onto my Synology DS418. My home network is provided by Xfinity, which is my only choice, but some testing showed that they aren’t yet blocking ports to my home network. At least they’re not blocking 20, 21, 22, or the weird random ones FTP uses in passive mode. So I took one of my unused domains, and went into the DSM softare under External Access, and added the domain as a Dynamic DNS entry pointed at FreeDNS. That way, if my IP address changes, the DynDNS service will update it to match the domain name.

This worked almost immediately. I could ping the domain and get my home WAN address. Step one completed.

In DSM, Control Panel > File Services I enabled FTP, FTPS, and SFTP, as well as enabling anonymous FTP under Advanced settings. I also set the default home folder for anonymous FTP to the specific folder I wanted to use for backups.

And even though I did this later in the actual process, here’s where you, the smart reader learning from my mistakes, would go in and make sure that the system internal user that would be accepting anonymous FTP requests had read/write permission to that folder. You set the folder permissions under Control Panel > Shared Folder > , Edit > Permissions. Select “System Internal Users” from the drop-down, and then assign read/write permission to the user “Anonymous FTP/Presto/WebDAV”.

Step Two: Expose Your Network

But I still had to open those ports necessary for FTP. My home cable modem/router supports UPnP and Synology DSM can talk to a router using UPnP to configure ports. The problem I ran in to here was that the number of ports needed exceeded the number available either on Synology or my router. So it took several tries, until I finally manually went into the router settings and opened the ports to TCP/UDP traffic myself. Testing this, again, using a website like showed that at least the FTP ports were open. The upper ones wouldn’t be open until an active connection was in progress.

I set up port forwarding on my router to point traffic to those ports to my Synology. That worked beautifully when testing FTP on my internal network. It failed, though, when I tried to run the backup job across the WAN, on my webhost using the job I’d set up in BackWPup.

This is one area I spent a lot of time on, because the blog backup would fail with some generic error like

WARNING: ftp_nb_fput(): php_connect_nonb() failed: Operation now in progress (115)

or

WARNING: ftp_nb_fput(): Entering Passive Mode (xxx,xxx,xxx,xxx,xxx,xxx)

or

WARNING: ftp_nb_fput(): Can't build data connection: Connection refused

And I started by troubleshooting the ports. I logged in to my Synology via ssh with root, and ran tcpdump. That all seemed to work. Looking at the logs, it looked like the connection wasn’t the problem; the plugin was connecting just fine. It just failed when trying to send the files over.

I’ll spare you all the dead ends I went down and cut to the fix: I had to disable SSL-FTP in the plugin. Turns out, Synology doesn’t like that. Or, at least, I couldn’t figure out how to make that work. The files only transferred when that was off on the client end. And believe me, I tried every other setting on both ends. C’est la vie.

Final Thoughts

There are still some quirks of Synology’s implementation of FTP that I want to point out.

  • When I set the folder for backups on the client end, I had to include a leading / on the name. Otherwise, new folders would be created instead of Synology recognizing that the client is putting the files in an existing folder.
  • I messed up when trying to use Let’s Encrypt to create a certificate to secure FTP and SFTP and ssh connections to my Synology. Maybe that’s why explicit SSL-FTP isn’t working? But since I exceeded the number of requests I can make of Let’s Encrypt, until that resets or I figure out how to delete the several I created and deleted, I can’t fix that. That’s a long story.

But it’s all working. I now have twice-weekly full backups of the 21 years of posts I’ve tossed up onto the internet for y’all’s entertainment. A safety net. And then, since I’ve discovered a new hammer, I used it to nail down backups for my neice’s new travel blog, April Taking Off, since I don’t want her to lose her work, and she doesn’t really have anywhere to store offsite backups. (Also you should check out her travel posts, she’s great!)