Java

Minecraft Java mod using Bukkit / Spigot

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I have owned Minecraft Java for several years, but despite being a software developer, I have never looked into creating a mod, until now! This is certainly a different topic compared with my regular blog posts, but as always, I hope it will help someone somewhere.

I stumbled upon a video by one of the fastest-growing Minecraft YouTube channels (Dream) in which he quickly demonstrates creating some mods from suggestions in comments. My journey starts here, and with the fact that I can see an org.bukkit.event.Listener class imported.

This post should serve as a guide that works today, and I also now have a template bukkit mod on GitHub that you may find useful, as all Bukkit templates that I found were years out of date. However, perhaps I should have been looking for Spigot templates! Figuring all of this out only took an hour or so, and at the end of it, I was able to create a mod that left me with a world which you can see below.

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Reducing Java JVM memory usage in Containers and on Kubernetes

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For a while I have been running a Wikibase query service update script for WBStack, which is a Java application on a Kubernetes cluster. Part of that journey has included the updater using all available memory, hitting into the kubernetes memory limit and being OOM killed. The title of the post is a little verbose, but I wanted to include all of the keywords that might help people find the answers to the memory issues that I was running into.

Before getting into my weeds, if you want the answers head straight to https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2017/04/04/openjdk-and-containers/

UPDATE: This blog post was written with Java 8. Java 10+ now automatically recognizes memory limits and enforces them. https://www.docker.com/blog/improved-docker-container-integration-with-java-10/

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Add Exif data back to Facebook images – 0.10

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Screenshot of the Facebook Exif tool version 0.10

In 2019 I wrote a post introducing a tool that I created to add Exif data back to images downloaded as part of a Facebook information download. The tool allowed me to download and delete my uploaded Facebook images while keeping some of the useful data such as date taken. After some Twitter pressure I have finally released an updated and slightly fixed version, and it’s time that I wrote a updated guide to go with it!

What is Exif data?

Exchangeable image file format (officially Exif) is a standard that specifies the formats for images and tags used by digital cameras and other systems handling image files.

Snipped from WIkipedia

Common Exif data for an image includes the time that it was taken, the camera make and model and the coordinate data for the location of the image.

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Add Exif data back to Facebook images – 0.1

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Screenshot of the Facebook Exif tool

EDIT: Version 0.10 was released in April 2020 https://addshore.com/2020/04/add-exif-data-back-to-facebook-images-0-10/

In 2016 I wrote a blog post with this exact title when moving all of my pictures from Facebook to Google photos. I wrote a hacky little script which met my needs and added exif data from a HTML Facebook data dump back to the images that came along with it.

A few months ago I took another look at the script and made it slightly easier to run, but it still fell short on the usability side of things.

Since then more and more people have and been commenting and messaging me wanting to do exactly the same thing, and so I finally made a more usable version of my little tool.

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Wikimedia Commons Android App Pre-Hackathon

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The Wikimedia Commons Android App allows users to upload photos to Commons directly from their phone. The website for the app details some of the features and the code can be found on GitHub. A hackathon was organized in Prague to work on the app in the run up to the yearly Wikimedia Hackathon which … Read more

Wikidata Map – 19 months on

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This entry is part 4 of 17 in the series Wikidata Map

The last Wikidata map generation, as last discussed here and as originally created by Denny Vrandečić was on the 7th of November 2013. Recently I have started rewriting the code that generates the maps, stored on github, and boom, a new map! The old code The old version of the wikidata-analysis repo, which generated the maps (along with other … Read more