MSP Logo

Blog

Keep up with the latest news.

  • Kyanite Facebook Archive Browser v1.0.0 Release

    Software engineering

    This is the first 1.0 release of the Kyanite Facebook Archive Browser. There were some minor bugfixes since the last beta release. You can find the latest release at the Downloads Page and the source code at this GitLab repository.

  • Fediverse Archive Browser v1.0.0 Release

    Software engineering

    Earlier this year I released the first version of the “Friendica Archive Browser”. In the intervening months there has been some churn on some big Diaspora instances. While I haven’t used Diaspora much since 2019 I do federate to Diaspora instances from Friendica. I also still have a soft place in my heart for my time developing on the Diaspora code base. Because of that I decided to make the “Friendica Archive Browser” the “Fediverse Archive Browser”. It now supports reading in the archives generated by my Friendica Archiver tool for Friendica or the archives generated from Diaspora’s built-in data exporter tool. They share identical features between both archive versions.

  • Friendica Archiver v1.2.0 Update

    Software engineering

    There is a small tweak to the Friendica Archiver to fix the timeline pulling REST service call. Although it worked at one point it has stopped working in a recent release. Looking at the original code I’m not sure how it worked in the first place but it has now been fixed. You can find the latest release at the Downloads Page and the source code at this GitLab repository.

  • Friendica Archive Building and Browsing

    Software engineering

    Due to various circumstances I got sidetracked from getting the Kyanite Facebook Archive Browser out the door this month as intended. Part of that was because I found out that my Friendica instance was shutting down at the end of the month. Friendica is one of many projects on “The Fediverse” alternatives to the big-tech owned platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.). While it has many advantages one of the disadvantages is that most of the servers that you would join through are run by one or two people. That means when they decide to pull up stakes you have to figure out what to do with your fediverse digital existence too. That’s where I found myself at the beginning of the month. My answer was to take my new found skills with Dart and Flutter and the Kyanite code base to create an archival and archive viewing system for Friendica. The archiver and browser can be found at this link

  • Kyanite Beta 3: Now With Link Previews, Stats, and More!

    Software engineering

    Time flies especially as holidays are coming through, doesn’t it? A couple weeks ago I posted about the Kyanite Beta 2 release. It was about a month ago that I introduced the first beta of Kyanite. Today the third beta release. This is the one that I consider to be feature complete for a 1.0 release. Coming out of the second beta the two big features I wanted that were missing were link previews and the ability to look at posting statistics. There are some other features, tweaks, and bug fixes in this release as well. You can get the latest version for download here.

  • Kyanite Beta 2: Now With Maps and More!

    Software engineering

    A few weeks ago I introduced the first beta of the Kyanite Facebook archive viewer. Today I’m announcing the second beta release complete with a bunch of bug fixes and new features. My favorite new feature is the map view for browsing/filtering posts that have geospatial information. You can get the latest version for download here.

  • Fixing Facebook's Borked File Encoding

    Software engineering

    While working on the Kryanite Facebook archive reader I ran into a frequent problem of garbled text. Ninety-nine percent of the time everything would be fine but then I’d see a string of weirdly out of place characters. I had assumed that perhaps the default encoding picked by the Dart file reader was to blame. Perhaps it should have been UTF-16 instead of UTF-8, or something along those lines. Experimentation didn’t help the problem. It turns out the problem is one of Facebook not properly encoding their files. With the help of another blogger who discovered the problem and fixed it I was able to create Dart code which fixes it for my uses as well. Here is the snippet. Read below the fold for more details.

  • Harnessing Your Facebook Data With the the Kyanite Facebook Archive Viewer

    Software engineering

    It is no secret that Facebook has been expertly doing the vendor lock play to expand and retain their user base. If all of your family and friend photos, event information, thoughts on current events, etc. are solely in their database then you have no place else to go once you finally join and start using it. It becomes more reinforcing the longer you are there and the more friends that join and do the same thing. In recent years though due to a combination of legislative action, public pressure, and fear of regulation they started allowing users to export all of their data from their system. It’s kind of hidden and can be a little confusing but once it’s done you can get a giant ZIP file archive of all your data. While it meets the letter of what was requested the fact is that that data is not digestible to the average user. To anyone that wants to actually use their Facebook data they still are stuck doing it through their system.

  • Getting Your Facebook Archive

    Software engineering

    Facebook actually has a mechanism for users to download their entire history from their site. It’s not exactly on the front page but not entirely hidden. If you don’t download it correctly it’s hopelessly difficult to make it useful. When you do do it correctly it is still difficult to use but with a tool like my Kyanite archive viewer it is possible to finally get access to your Facebook data in a meaningful way. This post is about how one can properly generate this archive within Facebook to use with this tool.