Month: October 2022

Amazon disappointment – I’ve removed my Echo (Alexa) devices

There was a recent policy change at Amazon which I hate, and as a result, I have removed the Amazon Echo (Alexa) devices and app from my life. It does mean I’ll be carrying my phone with me more.

A part of the Vision Statement for Amazon is “Our vision is to be earth’s most customer-centric company”. Well, this change in policy belies that; trying to annoy their customers for more money is the new practice. That’s the nice way to put it; predation is the stark reality.

So, what happened?

  1. Amazon Music started inserting audio advertising into my morning music play. This happened four days ago.
  2. Amazon raised their prices on Prime membership, and I opted-out at the beginning of October (about one month ago).

I’ve mentioned before that I hate bullies, and dislike advertising. I also really liked setting up my morning wakeup routine to start the day with inspirational music. This change by Amazon crossed all three lines.

So if my morning wakeup routine is spoiled anyway, what really do I need these devices for?

Other than as voice controlled light switches, they are sometimes a convenient voice controlled timer. I don’t need this – it’s a nicety at best.

The bargain was they would listen in, the app on my phone would do tracking, and Amazon would do (whatever) with that data. I assumed they were monetizing it somehow; that was fine – that was the bargain. But now that they’ve crossed the line and spoiled my morning wakeup routine, I’m out.

Really, the only power consumers have is the power of money; either the boycott or favored trade.

Part of the annoyance is that I purchased the .mp3 files outright. I made my playlists out of only these files. Yes, I wanted the artists to get paid for their work, and thought is was only fair that Amazon also got paid for doing the work to set up the deal, import the files and handle the transactions to the artists. My point is that I paid for these files. Anyone that would wrap my files inside their advertising is a bully / predator.

This morning, the advertisement specifically said “Buy Amazon Music Unlimited and you won’t get advertisements”. Or, I can just completely opt out. Spotify costs the same as Amazon Music Unlimited, they do have Joe Rogan, and they have an API I can use to create my morning playlist programatically.

In that way, Spotify is better: I can write a Python script to classify songs into lists, and pick two from the spirtitual category, one from the energetic category, build today’s list and program Spotify to play that. I could even then put the songs in a FIFO queue (perhaps with some randomization). Much better than anything I could get with Amazon Music.

It’s not lost on me that the Open Source community has a project, Mycroft, which would let me connect to my IoT devices without the data tracking which was the part of the Amazon Echo bargain. I’ve already got one Raspberry Pi. All it really needs is a microphone. Guess what I’ve got on order?

Maybe I don’t even need Spotify. Maybe I can just get Mycroft or Home Assistant to play .mp3 files on various Bluetooth connected devices.

Until I get that set up, I’ll have to use my phone apps for controlling the lights and keeping timers. This is a minor inconvenience at worst. And if eventually I hook Mycroft up to a Home Assistant and a Magic Mirror, the better.

PHP Upgrade for Bitnami Lightsail WordPress

Turns out the way to upgrade is to spin up a new box (or two) and migrate.

Step 1) Spin up a new instance. At the moment I’m using Amazon Lightsail.

Step 2) assign a DNS entry to it. At the moment I’m using Hover. I do have the DNS entries set to a 15 minute time-to-live. Whatever IP address that Lightsail assigned is what I put into Hover.

Step 3) Set the new machine to know it’s new host name.

  1. Of course, the what-used-to-work is different now. The command is now sudo /opt/bitnami/bncert-tool

Step 4) Get logged in to the new instance of WordPress. BTW, the login user name has changed. It used to be bitnami now it is user

Step 5) Update WordPress to the current version, if it’s out of date.

Step 6) Delete the plugins in the base image that won’t be migrating over. BTW, one of the plugins, TaxoPress, apparently had a different name prior to updated and would err out instead of deleting. Do upgrade the ones I’m keeping.

Step 7) I use NS Cloner and NS Cloner Pro to migrate between servers. I like the people there; they did actually help me when I was having an error getting it to run. I was migrating a site with All-in-One Event Calendar by Time.ly and apparently that plugin just does not play nice with database records or something. I am lucky that I bought a licence a long time ago; since then they have had to raise their prices. As a tool, it has been working great, but the price increase was really steep. If I did this for a living, I’d have no qualms about paying the annual license fee.

And then ….

The problem is that I just migrated gerisch.org to davidgerisch.xyz, but I really want the web site on gerisch.org

Okay, so there are two ways out of the problem here.

Alternative 1 is to go to the old gerisch.org and run sudo /opt/bitnami/bncert-tool and change it to something else and then go to davidgerisch.xyz and run sudo /opt/bitnami/bncert-tool and change it to gerisch.org AND THEN do database search and replace to swap out davidgerisch.xyz to be gerisch.org instead – all on the new machine. My experience with these sort of database search and replaces hasn’t been wonderful. There’s also the problem of being logged in to the web site I’m changing the name of; at some point I cut off my own feet while I’m trying to stand on them (DNS -wise).

I went with alternative 2:

  1. In Lightsail, detach the static IP that gerisch.org is pointing to.
  2. In Lightsail, delete machine (old) gerisch.org
  3. In Lightsail, spin up (new) gerisch.org
  4. In Lightsail, attach the static IP for gerisch.org to this new machine.
  5. Run sudo /opt/bitnami/bncert-tool to assign the machine it’s new name gerisch.org
    1. Note that with alternative 2, the Hover domain name registration hasn’t changed. The public IP is on a different box (running an out-of-the-box WordPress install), but from the DNS point of view, this is simpler – nothing has changed. DNS name gerisch.org is still pointing the same IP address it always has.
    2. With alternative 1, I had the problem that the old box “knew” it was gerisch.org, so I had to run bncert-tool to change it to something else. If I didn’t, and I just ran bncert-tool on the new box, trying to claim gerisch.org, the Let’s Encrypt people would complain, correctly, that this domain name is currently in use on a box it can talk to right now, and that box has a different IP address. Am I trying to steal it’s identity?
  6. Do the top steps 4, 5, 6, and 7 again: Update WordPress, plugins, and migrate with NS Cloner Pro.
  7. Delete the running machine davidgerisch.xyz – it was only every going to be a temporary container anyway.
  8. Change all the Hover entries to point to the same IP as gerisch.org

My site is pretty small, so the migration with NS Cloner Pro takes under five minutes. If I had more data and it was going to take longer, I’d probably figure out how to enable FTP so that NS Cloner Pro could use that.