wogan

@wogan@mastodon.africa

Today is a good day to build! | Admin of mastodon.africa

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wogan, to random

Shout-out to @iamhazelbag for putting me onto wearable electric blankets - mine just arrived and, for only 160W, I get to remain not-cold during the day, so that's a win!

wogan, to random

So to send $1,000 from South Africa to the United States, so far, I've had to:

  • Apply for, and be vetted for, a CFC account at FNB (my only option)
  • Self-certify the entity, UBO and tax information to SARS, including all my contact info

Assuming RMB accepts everything, FNB might be able to get me my USD today, which I can then wire transfer out (and probably trip some other process).

Totally understandable that people want to circumvent stuff like this (eg: cryptocurrency).

wogan, to random

So to send $1,000 from South Africa to the United States, so far, I've had to:

  • Apply for, and be vetted for, a CFC account at FNB (my only option)
  • Self-certify the entity, UBO and tax information to SARS, including all my contact info

Assuming RMB accepts everything, FNB might be able to get me my USD today, which I can then wire transfer out (and probably trip some other process).

Totally understandable that people want to circumvent stuff like this (eg: cryptocurrency).

wogan, to random

FYI: is now running with AUTHORIZED_FETCH=true, which has the effect of preventing suspended domains from accessing ActivityPub feeds from mastodon.africa, with some tradeoffs when it comes to compute overhead.

If you see any strange behavior following this change, please let me know!

GossiTheDog, to random
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    wogan,

    @GossiTheDog I dunno - https://x.com already 302's to twitter.com, not sure they would have bothered if it was just a publicity stunt. Plus, Elon has the unique inability to know he's making a mistake, so I fully expect them to follow through with a disastrous rebrand here.

    wogan, to random

    FYI: freespeechextremist.com has been defederated from following an actionable abuse report + a very clear pattern of unmitigated trolling on their instance.

    wogan, to random

    FNB delivers another world-class best-business-bank-in-Africa-or-whatever win: The system that sends out OTP SMS messages is apparently dead, so I can't pay salaries right now๐Ÿ™ƒ

    wogan,

    Fun new thing I learned: Apparently if you enter the wrong OTP 3 times in a row on a transaction, your account gets locked out. I found this out on my second wrong OTP attempt, right:

    Except the OTP I entered was the one I received on the SMS just now, after a huge delay, because the other fun thing I just learned is (as far as I can tell), asking to re-send an OTP generates a new one.

    I'm now one wrong OTP away from locking myself out of the ability to pay my own salary.

    So fucking done.

    wogan,

    @GrahamDowns My personal banking OTPs became InContact messages (what you describe), but I ended up losing access via the app for a while because of FNB's incompetence.

    Among other things: I have 2 separate online banking profiles, and decided NOT to opt my business one in (since I can't: I can only log into one at a time on a given phone, and I'd need to run 2 phones). Luckily, that turns out to have been the smart move, because once you're on the app, you're at risk of FNB locking you out.

    wogan,

    @GrahamDowns Given that it took 2 separate branch visits just to get back into my online banking app after FNB proactively kicked me out, I'm not willing to risk setting up my business banking the same way.

    In fact, right now, I'm looking for an alternative business bank to move to before my next invoice gets paid, I'm so sick of dealing with FNB on this.

    wogan, to random

    End of an era! I remember back in 2007 (or was it 2008?) when I built TwitterSA.com - a free aggregator that basically just saved all geolocated-to-South-Africa tweets and served them in a read-only twitter-like UI, which came in handy many times (due to the fail whales!), and was finally taken out of commission by a C&D from Twitter's lawyers (for using "twitter" in the domain").

    Given how it's ending, can't say I'm sad to see it go.

    (Pic grabbed from @taylorlorenz )

    taylorlorenz, to random
    @taylorlorenz@mastodon.social avatar

    The Twitter account just officially rebranded to X but they canโ€™t figure out how to change the handle

    wogan,

    @taylorlorenz Maybe because they first have to boot this poor unsuspecting account off the network?

    wogan,

    @ukrkyi @taylorlorenz This is Elon we're talking about, the only reason the @x account is not dead yet is because the engineer is currently in the bathroom or something.

    GrahamDowns, to random

    Hey @wogan. I wonder if x.africa exists yet? If not, perhaps you should register it as an alias for mastodon.africa? :-D

    (Or actually, create a portal there linking to mastodon.africa, pixelfed.africa, peertube.africa... Call it the Federated Social Networks of Africa) :-?

    wogan,

    @GrahamDowns It's a neat idea, but it looks like the registrar doesn't allow for single-character domains!

    wogan,

    @GrahamDowns It probably would! And if I'm being honest, I don't really want to have anything to do with "X" (as a social media brand) given who's currently running it. Happy to let someone else roll those particular dice.

    wogan,

    @GrahamDowns X is too generic a symbol to copyright or trademark (I think a German clothing brand tried to grab Y at some point), so best of luck to those lawyers enforcing anything.

    For me, I just genuinely don't want to be associated with Elon or anything he does ๐Ÿ™ƒ

    wogan, to random

    I got a new perspective on the "build vs buy" argument recently. I've usually been in favor of "buy off the shelf if it meets 80% of your needs" because "building in-house has huge complexity and cost implications"

    Except, apparently with enterprise/B2B SaaS, where the "off the shelf" licensing cost for some tools exceeds what you'd pay a good developer to build for you custom.

    Because it turns out, you're actually paying for the devs at the other company to build your "off the shelf" solution

    wogan,

    So right now, I'm working on helping my client build an in-house tool, and we're having to compete with an "off the shelf" solution, but the more we dig into it:

    • The licensing cost for the off-the-shelf solution is insanely high
    • Anything extra that's needed (it's always extra) is charged for
    • In effect, my client is paying for the vendor's developers to make the system do what they want

    In some aspects, functionally indistinguishable from just hiring and running a dev team directly

    wogan,

    @malmorrow Haha! That's really true to enterprise software, it turns out :)

    I think the tradeoff runs along the "key customer" axis:

    • Company with small handful of large accounts - it's mostly bespoke dev per customer
    • Company with thousands of small users - it's more truly "off the shelf" since you don't need to fight to keep any one customer happy
    Skoop, to random
    @Skoop@phpc.social avatar

    So, I have an Office 2016 license. When I log onto the Microsoft website and download the Office 2016 installer, I automatically get the Office 365 installer.

    THAT IS NOT WHAT I ASKED FOR!

    wogan,

    @Skoop You will install Microsoft's latest walled garden and you will like it :P

    wogan, to random

    Spent all of 20 minutes this morning trying to figure out how to manually dial out on a modem (using AT commands), and it's honestly amazing how many hidden layers there are to the stuff we take for granted (like getting online).

    Also, yes, I could not figure it out ๐Ÿ˜‚ AT+COPS? and AT+CPIN and everything else tells me I should be good to go, but ATD keeps returning NO CARRIER and I'm done head-desking on this for the day.

    wogan,

    @GrahamDowns Surprisingly, some folks do!

    I'm building a smart metering business, one of the things I need to be able to do (which I honestly thought would be a lot easier than this) is to get the MSISDN of a SIM without putting it into a phone. AT+CNUM barely works in SA, so doing ATD135501#; (for Vodacom) is my only realistic option, but getting that right via minicom is proving to be a pain.

    carnage4life, to random
    @carnage4life@mas.to avatar

    The tech press tends to swing between two extremes, this is best company/product ever or this is the worst.

    You see that in the coverage of Threads which went from Twitter is dying to Threads is dying within a week. Reality is rarely ever that binary.

    The reality is demand for the app is clear (150 million downloads), the product is good, and Twitter is a shit show. The future of Threads is bright.

    https://www.platformer.news/p/five-reasons-threads-could-still

    wogan,

    @carnage4life It's basic directional stuff:

    • Twitter is run by a bonafide maniac who seems intent on bankrupting it to get out of a massive debt
    • Threads is run by a platform company that has people that build platforms every single day, and likely want to build platforms for the rest of their careers.
    wogan, to business

    And away we go! My Stripe account is fully setup, and just received its first $10 test payment. A few days from now, it should payout to my Mercury bank account, and then I will legitimately be able to charge USD globally.

    ๐ŸŽถa_whole_new_world_little_mermaid_1989.mp3

    zip, to random
    @zip@wandering.shop avatar

    One day Iโ€™m gonna invent the glib way of saying โ€œweโ€™ll do everything to fix this as long as itโ€™s not the solutionโ€ because itโ€™s a pattern I see constantly.

    People drowning in the channel? Weโ€™ll spend ยฃ100k a person making sure the experience of surviving the crossing is so miserable that people donโ€™t start. And it doesnโ€™t work!

    People doing sex work? The same people who think itโ€™s the moral issue of our time are absolutely determined to do everything except give people enough money to live.

    wogan,

    @Talia @zip @davidgerard Exactly: Building pointless dashboards only serves to fux the situation.

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