How to make ActivityPub plugin publish WordPress posts

In general it should be super simple to federate WordPress posts to the fediverse: Just simply install and activate the ActivityPub WordPress plugin and there you go.

I activated the plugin in two WordPress installation. In one it worked like a charm in one the federeation simply did not work. I aslo asked at the ActivityPub Support on WordPress.org (and checked Cron logs etc). Nothing helped.

Then, one day I found the solution: The Site URL / Domain name must be all in small letters. On this blog, I had the site URL = www.Locked.de. As soon as I changed to a small “l”, federation worked like a charm.

How to filter / hide / ignore News in an RSS feed

Recently I realized that there are certain topics in my news / RSS feed that I ALWAYS scroll over. I’m just not interested in them. Like news about certain brands, manufacturer or products.

I wondered, if there is no easy way to simply NOT see them in my feed. I recognize them by only looking at keywords in the title. Really super simple.

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How to fix: Jabra Elite 75T volume too low / decreasing

Problem: Recently I faced the issue with my Jabra Elite InEars that while I was using them, the volume started to continually decrease until I had to max out the volume on the phone. Yet the sound was still barely loud enough to hear it. After not using them for a while, sound was okay again (still quiet but better) until volume started to decrease again while using.

The internet is FULL of advice about Bluetooth settings, resetting the phone, entering developer mode etc. Yet it was ways easier.

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Exclude OpenAI GPTBot from future crawling a website

In order to tell OpenAI to stop crawling a website and thus not use the content for training GPT, OpenAI now supports to disallow GPTBot from accessing your site.

The Information can be found on the GPTBot – OpenAI API website:

Completely disallow GPTBot:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

Allow/disallow certain parts of a website:

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /directory-1/
Disallow: /directory-2/

For WordPress sites, I can recommend the Virtual Robots.txt – plugin.

How to fix: Jabra Elite 75T different volume of in-Ear headphones

I often just use one of the in-ears of my Jabra 75T. Recently I figured out that when I use both in-ears headphones, the right one was significantly louder than the left one. After a quick hearing test, I was convinced that it is not a problem with my hearing but with one of the headphones.

After some back and forth, the easiest solution was:
Simply hard reset the headphones in 2 simple steps.

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AI Text Generation and Blogging: How AI-Assisted Writing Can Revolutionize Your Blogging Experience

Blogging has become a popular platform for individuals and businesses to share their ideas, opinions, and experiences with the world. However, blogging just occasionally can be a challenging task. It requires getting into the writing flow, writing cohesively throughout an article, crafting a proper introduction, and ensuring the use of correct grammar and vocabulary. For non-native English speakers, it can be even more challenging to write in a language that is not their mother tongue. The lack of proper vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure can hinder their writing ability and prevent them from expressing their thoughts effectively.

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AI Image Generation and the Future of Photography and Graphics Industry

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been transforming various industries, and the photography and graphics industry is no exception. With the development of AI image generation tools, it is now possible to create realistic images that are indistinguishable from those captured by a camera or created by a human designer. While this technology holds immense potential for businesses in terms of cost and time efficiency, it will also bring about significant changes in the industry and its related sectors.

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My critical view about “the Metaverse”

Recently the term “Metaverse” is across like in every IT related news. Noone really knows what it is but it seems to be the hot shit you have to be into! And it seems to be THE ultimate solution for so many odd problems AND a totally new business market!

The “metaverse” topic has followed me now a couple of months and I had a couple of discussions already about my critical view about the topic. And if it was worth discussing so often – it might be worth writing it down as well. 😀

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Samsung Soundbar does not connect to SmartTV

When you own both a Samsung Soundbar (HW-[something]) and a Samsung Smart-TV, you would assume that they work in nice harmony. Which they usually do! Just once in a (seldom) while, the both just don’t connect any more and it seems there is no way to connect them again.

Recently we ran into the same trouble. It required a lot of forum reading, searching, reading support pages. Especially as it requires sound-resetting both devices and does not require hard-resetting the TV (loosing channel list, favourites et. al). As it was a real pain to figure it out, I wrote down my process.

The following steps worked for me the last time I had to try it.

  1. Soundbar (maybe this is not required?)
    • turn off
    • press (and hold) the stop button until the soundbar displays “init, ok”
  2. TV:
    • Remove soundbar from the config:
      Menu > System > Device manager > Soundshare > remove Soundbar
    • turn off the TV
    • disconnect from power
    • wait ~3 min
    • reconnect & power on
  3. Soundbar:
    • Power on
    • switch to TV mode and wait for connection
    • MAYBE reset soundbar: press & hold “play” until it displays “reset”

Hope this helps! Leave a comment if it helped you or if there’s a faster way to reconnect both devices.

Where to install custom / portable programs in Windows10/8.x?

There are a couple of programs that cannot be installed / put into the regular locations (c:\Program Files and c:\Progam Files (x86)) as they cannot be run in non-administrator mode. So – where should you put / install those programs?

Fortunately Windows comes with a good place for those programs. Just put them into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs which expands to C:\Users\...\AppData\Local\Programs.
No need to tweak permissions (as it is in your user directory).

Downside: If you are part of a large domain (which you will not be with your private computer), your programs will not be synchronized to other computers where you log on. If you would like that you would have to place it in %appdata% (which expands to C:\Users\...\AppData\Roaming). But it would also mean that possibly large installations are synchronized. Don’t blame Windows if you are suffering from long login-times then!

In case you want to go deeper into the differences between Roaming, Local and LocalNow, have a look at the answers at superuser.com:

Roaming. (%appdata%) contains data that can move with your user profile from PC to PC – because data is synced with a server (e.g. web browser favorites or bookmarks.

Local. (%localappdata%) contains data that can’t move with your user profile. This data is typically specific to a PC or too large to sync with a server (e.g. temporary files).

LocalLow. (%appdata%/…/locallow) contains data that can’t move, but also has a lower level of access. E.g., a web browser in protected or safe mode, will only be able access data from the LocalLow Folder.