Facebook has recently made some changes to its app (at least in Australia) that set the default settings to not show any posts from news pages. This is probably the direct result of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission trying to force social networks to pay for news. What I noticed in my behaviour is that I stopped using Facebook and had to look for other news sources - this may not be a terrible move but I didn't want to have additional apps for this.

There is a way to get the news back in your news feed though. The app has a settings option at the top of the news feed (you may need to scroll up until it pops into view). This option lets you select the default 'tab' that Facebook shows in the app...


There are three tabs - Home, Favourites and Recent. The Home tab appears to show posts just from your friends and groups you're in - or whatever Facebook's curation decides is relevant to you. Favourites is pretty obvious - what you follow. The Recent tab appears to be what the old news feed was before this change.


Changing this setting to Recent restored posts from various news pages I follow.

What I found quite annoying with this change was that even though I specifically set a number of news pages to 'show first', Facebook still did not show any posts from them in the 'Home' tab. I'm not sure how much more relevant something can be if you explicitly mark it to show first, but that's Facebook for you. At least there is a way to get the old behaviour back.

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I've been poking around in the terminal on my Mac recently and tried to list the contents of my Trash, using the `ls ~/.Trash` command, only to be presented with an error...



At first I thought this was odd but then I remembered that macOS introduced new security rules some time back and applications were required to be given access to do certain operations. In this case, the Terminal.app application didn't have Full Disk Access.

This was easily resolved, from the System Preferences, I clicked on Security & Privacy...


From there I scrolled down to Full Disk Access and clicked the lock icon at the bottom left to unlock changes being made. This required me to enter my password.


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The macOS Catalina 10.15.7 upgrade came up for me today, I generally like to keep up-to-date on updates so I let it go ahead. After the update installed (and restarted my Mac), Evernote Skitch kept on crashing every time I tried to open the app with macOS telling me The application "Skitch.app" can't be opened...and the crash report having more sinister details...



Here's a bit more of the crash report...


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I tend to keep my old phones when I get a new one, sometimes I give them to other family members though and with my recent upgrade that's what I did. In return I was given an old iPhone 5 that I originally passed down long ago. I wasn't really sure what to do with it and then my wife found this cool looking bluetooth speaker. So I figured that was something I could work with and after some 3D printing, this is what I ended up with...


The bluetooth speaker is designed for newer, much larger phones, so I had to make a bracket for it first. The design (in OpenSCAD) and STL files are on Thingiverse here - iPhone 5 bracket for PTH800 Bluetooth Peterhot Retro TV. I printed the bracket in orange to make the speaker. The bracket also includes voids for two button inserts so that the volume up/down buttons can be accessed.


The fit was quite good, can't say as much for the condition of the iPhone back and camera though!


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