Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • running wild

    I am wild like a hare is wild
    always aware
    eyes darting 
    body trembling
    

  • Food Forest Update #9

    I have made a couple attempts at grafting before. Last year I tried grafting some Loquats and failed. A couple months ago I tried grafting a mulberry and a plum. The mulberry graft failed but the plum graft took! Last weekend I attended a grafting workshop at a kombucha shop. It was about a 3 hour long workshop and we learned about grafting, practiced and grafted a tree that we got to take home. On one hand I didn't feel like I learned much new to me information, but on the other hand it was nice to get some in person observation and reassurance of someone more experienced in grafting.

    For our take home tree we got to choose from four different fruit trees. I ended up picking Carambola (starfruit). Now I just have to wait and see if my graft will be successful. The guy that did that workshop also brought extra scions (branch cuttings from a tree to be used for grafting are called scions) so I also was able to take some home. I got scions of a different cultivar of carambola and scions of a good cultivar of white sapote. I grafted those this week. Fingers crossed that at least some of my grafts are successful. I'd be happy with even one, haha!

• Politics and World Events

  • True evil requires teamwork

    VILLAIN: I invented a machine that will poison and enslave all the peoples of the world!

    HERO: I vow never to rest until such evil is defeated.

    VILLAIN: Alright, I hear you. I’ll dial it down to just poison and enslave the people we really don’t like.

    HERO: I'm listening...

• Technology and Free Software

  • Managing Dotfiles with GNU Stow

    If you've ever tried to keep your development environment consistent across multiple machines, you've probably felt the pain: copying config files, forgetting tweaks, overwriting something important, or ending up with subtle differences that break your workflow.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Observations on blocking various webbots

      Going through the logs from my web server for March, I noticed that 26% of all requests resulted in a failed client request (stuff like “404 Not Found” or “429 Too Many Requests”). These requests are more annoying than they are debilitating, but ideally, I would love a way to crash these bots as they're mostly scanning my site for exploits; fully 50% are just scanning for various PHP based scripts (which I don't use at all) and the rest for a variety of other files that can lead to exploits. But short of that, it would mean having to block such requests at the firewall as there's no point to really switching a response from “404 Not Found” to “403 Forbidden”—the bot authors won't change their methods just because the status changes. Such scanning is fully automated and as stateless as possible (given modern infrastructure, a complete scan of the Internet can be done easily within a week).