Tech talk on ABC Radio

Could the iPhone end up looking a lot different from what it does now? By September, it could feature a larger screen, upgraded selfie camera, and possibly a thinner design.

Also, Australia will require age verification for social media by the end of this year.

Peter Marks, software developer and technology commentator from Access Informatics, joined Philip Clark on Nightlife to discuss the latest news in technology.

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/105587888

Quick Wordpress testing using Docker on Linux

Recently I've been investigating how to migrate from Google Blogger to Wordpress. The best solution for me so far is by using Google's takeout to get a feed.atom file and use a python script to copy over posts, comments and images.

Along the way, I needed to run Wordpress and my normal approach to this was to install Ubuntu Linux and manually set up mysql, nginx, php, and wordpress. This gets tedious. I've played with docker in the past but was very pleased to find that there is an official wordpress compose.yaml and this makes it very quick to get up and running. (Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS)

curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh 

sudo sh get-docker.sh 

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

# log out and back in then test

docker run hello-world

docker info

mkdir wp-docker

cd wp-docker

# save the compose.yaml file

# from https://hub.docker.com/_/wordpress

docker compose up

Then visit the machine's web port 8080 like http://latitude.local:8080/ 

The first time you get this:

The two docker containers, one for mysql, the other for the apache web server, already know how to talk to each other. After just a little config we have Wordpress:

The terminal that you did the 'docker compose up' in can be gracefully shut down with Control-C.

To wipe it all, so you can start fresh or get some space back:

docker compose down --volumes

Note that docker is extremely efficient and takes much fewer resources than running a full vitual machine.

macOS?

It's even easier and nicer on macOS. Install OrbStack which provides VMs and Docker and is free for personal use. I'm on Apple Silicon and it all "just works". The UI has a link to click to go to it in the browser.

Amazing.

Portable operation from Palm Cove, Cairns

Just returned from a few days in Australia's far north. In contrast to the cold and wet here in Victoria, it was around 26C and very pleasant in the pool.

Each morning I walked along the beach and watched the sun come up.

Signs along the beach are a little alarming though:

Our unit had a small outdoor area and naturally I took enough gear to set up a WSPR station. Seen here with a long G&T for scale.

My antenna was far from ideal but I did hear some stations.

The QMX is excellent for this task and I can also recommend the Z-match tuner which can match almost any old bit of wire.

Script to migrate a Google Blogger takeout feed.atom over to Wordpress with posts, images and comments

Bill on the Soldersmoke blog posted recently with some concern that one day Google might lose interest in their free blogging platform Blogger. I share his concern and wanted to assure myself that there's a way to move all of my posts, images and comments to something else, most likely Wordpress, if suddenly required to.

After much searching around there don't seem to be many options. One is a promising looking Wordpress plugin btw-importer by mnasikin. It's not in the plugin directory but you can download the zip and install it.

This is probably the way to go in the end but currently it doesn't migrate comments. I've reported a few bugs and mnasikin has been very responsive. He even accepted a tiny pull request from me to at least skip comments for now, rather than turning them in to posts.

Wordpress has a very nice REST API and I can see some python code around that makes a nice wrapper for it. I asked Anthropic Claude to write me python to read the Google takeout feed.atom file and migrate posts, images and comments over to Wordpress and it did a pretty good job. I fixed a few bugs but it's working well enough to be a good start.

I've stuck my (our?) code up as a Github gist: blogger2wordpress.py and I hope it helps someone (maybe future me).

Here's a migrated post:

Here's the comments:

Looks pretty good although, undoubtedly there are bugs.

Update: Blocked by Mod_Security

I tried all this on an Ubuntu virtual machine at home and it worked fine. When I tried on a hosted Wordpress site I got this error:

Processing entry 9/20: Why the 30 Meter Pipeline to Norway?

Error creating post: 406

Response: <head><title>Not Acceptable!</title></head><body><h1>Not Acceptable!</h1><p>An appropriate representation of the requested resource could not be found on this server. This error was generated by Mod_Security.</p></body></html>

✗ Failed to create post: Why the 30 Meter Pipeline to Norway?

It seems that Mod_Security doesn't like the Wordpress API being used.

Several days went by trying to get the support people to turn off Mod_Security. Next I ran the script and it transferred 206 posts, categories, comments and images before the host stopped responding. I'm not sure what happened - perhaps some sort of rate limit, or a maximum traffic issue. The host had DDoS protection so it's possible that was triggered.

The script had a one second pause between posts but this wasn't enough and I raised it to five seconds. I still saw a few errors with posts, comments and images. Some were complaints about illegal characters, some images were not liked by Wordpress - I don't know why.

In any case it looks like this script works well enough. Here's the end of the run which went for about 36 hours:

Migration complete!

Posts - Successful: 3757, Failed: 2, Total: 3759

Comments - Successful: 8561, Failed: 324, Total: 8885

Images processed: 3861

Cleanup completed

Tech talk on ABC Radio

The Qantas frequent flyer program has written to members to inform them that the data of millions of us has been taken. Just how safe are we when purchasing online?

Cyber crooks knowing of your Bronze Status doesn’t seem too concerning, but are there precautions we should all take?

Peter Marks, software developer and technology commentator from Access Informatics, joined Chris Taylor on Nightlife to discuss the latest news in technology. 

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/105535882 

Australian FreeDV RADEV1 Sunday net

I've had two good contacts VK3-VK5 using FreeDV RADE1 today. Quite a lot of stations on air.

It would be good to have a regular net for Australian stations (and anyone else who can hear us). To start with I suggest Sunday mornings from 10:30am Eastern time.

Speaking of FreeDV RADEV1, there's a great intro and reception demo from popular YouTube channel Tech Minds:

At one point he says "...the new RAIDV1 mode .. in my opinion has to be the best sounding digital mode I've heard to date." Nice.

First net

We've just had the first Australian net (with me as controller anyway). A big success! VK5KVA Jack, VK3PCC Peter, VK5MA Ian, VK5LN Michael, VK2BLQ Stephen, VK2GTS Gary. I could see VK2ABO was hearing us and I had reports from VK3RV.

Second net

On 20-July-2025 the following stations were on the net: VK2BLQ, VK3BRT, VK5APR, VK3PCC (listening only), VK7MB, & VK4DNO.

Third net

I was away unfortunately so Peter, VK3PCC, kindly coordinated and recorded the following stations: VK3PCC, VK5LM, VK2GTS, VK5MA, VK5KVA & VK4PHD. Thanks Peter!

Talk to you next Sunday from 10:30am eastern time.

Travelling with Meshtastic

I recently purchased a pair of Meshtastic capable heltec devices. As I live at a remote location I had never found any other nodes aside from my second unit. I can see one on the map at Woodend and I drove there but it was off air at the time I drove by. This week I travelled from Melbourne to Sydney CBD and I took a device with me. My device saw quite a few others along the way.

Interestingly it also picked up some signals while in flight either during taking off and when coming in to land. I don't think it saw any at cruising altitude.

There was never a good enough connection for a direct message but I did see some traffic on the default channel.

Meshtastic is built on top of LoRa and is capable of amazing range, mostly line of sight. I have much to learn about this technology but the idea of having a way to communicate, either direct or via a mesh network without internet or cell phone coverage is interesting. A lot of nodes are named after the callsign of the ham that owns them.

Tech Talk on ABC Radio - AI Slop

Artificial Intelligence is the biggest story in tech at the moment. But there are down-sides and unexpected consequences. 

One of them has a new name “AI Slop”. In other news, incredible remuneration packages are being offered to attract AI researchers to change jobs.

Peter Marks, a software developer and technology commentator from Access Informatics, joined Dom Knight on Nightlife to discuss the latest news in technology.  

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/105483494