Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 25/06/2023: Cold Start and Reducing Scope Creep



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • Cold Start

        Refrigeration of the sourdough starter was the next thing to test; it developed one bubble on the surface, and did not rise. Then again it hasn't even been much on the rising front, which is why I've also been using instant yeast in the bread dough. Probably the starter needs a little more flour and a little less water to better favor yeast? On the other hand I'm okay with a lot of sour.

      • heatwave...

        what is your favorite thing to do during the summer and why?

        personally my favorite thing to do is to get a snow cone. they're delicious and an easy way to cool down. cherry flavored ones are my favorite but grape and green apple and great, too.

      • Re: The Library Rocks!

        I saw these posts and I wanted to throw in my own hurrah for libraries.

        The traditional book loans libraries offer have become uncool. That's something of an exageration, but so many of the praises I see of libraries emphasise that "It's not just books anymore!" I certainly don't think that it's a bad thing that they are expanding their offerings—why shouldn't the ideas of sharing and public access apply to music, movies, video games, etc. But I do enjoy the books.

      • Things Better Left Alone and the Adventurer RPG arrived

        My copies of “Things Better Left Alone” and the “Adventurer RPG” Player Guide and Dungeon Guide arrived today from Pacesetter Games.

      • Plant Identification Practice

        I've been practicing recording plant characteristics, using the terminology from an old book by Harrington[1]. So far, I have been focused mostly on the leaf characteristics. During one lunch break, I studied one tree with the following leaf characteristics:

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Ban scanners IPs from OpenSMTP logs

        If you are an OpenBSD running an OpenSMTP email server, you may want to ban IPs used by bots trying to bruteforce logins. OpenBSD doesn't have fail2ban available in packages, and sshguard isn't extensible enough to support the multiline log format used by OpenSMTP.

        Here is a short script that looks for authentication failures in `/var/mail/maillog` and will add the IPs into the PF table `bot` after too many failed login.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Reducing Scope Creep

          One of the reasons I created this blog/capsule (other than the opportunity to work with the Gemini protocol, text format, and Geminispace) was to encourage me to write more often. I started off well, but slowed down considerably three months or so ago. While there are several reasons for that, I've decided to I concentrate on writing short articles for this blog/capsule and relegate the longer articles for my other blog. I hope this will encourage me to write more. We'll see.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



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