Mine died last weekend and I had to replace it. $650 to do myself, and that included same day delivery.

It failed the prior night, noticed it mid-morning, ordered at 2pm, received it at 5, and had it installed by 7. Was kind of a pain but not nearly as awful as I feared.

Yeah. On the surface it seems like it would be a positive. But in practice, it shields people from criticism of their behavior.

Yeah, yeah, “use your words” and all that, but some comments are just so brain-dead or trollish that they’re not worth a response, and even a downvote is expending far more effort than the comment is worth. So the person who made it sees 3 upvotes but not the 50 downvotes, so their takeaway is that “wow, 3 people liked my braindead comment” rather than everyone except 3 people hated it.

I get the appeal of disabling downvotes, but if I say something stupid, I wanna know.

That’s basically me. Wake me when it’s time to:

• Eat
• Hand out gifts
• Go home

Added :) I also disabled the “Create Post” button if the community is on a defederated instance even though, technically, you can still post to your instance’s local copy (it just won’t federate).

Edit: This only works one way. i.e. it can only know if your instance is defederated from the community’s. If the community’s instance is defederated from yours, there will be no indicator because there’s no way to do it without a remote lookup which is both unreliable and inefficient at scale.

You mean like if there’s a community called !cats@example.com and your home instance no longer federates with the instance example.com?

If so, I’ll add that to Tesseract as it sounds useful.

Two in the same vein:

1. Someone once assumed that I used a code prettier by asking for my .prettierrc. Nope. I just write pretty code and was legit offended at that.
2. Multiple times I’ve been called an AI because I (checks notes) write out my thoughts in full sentences.

There’s been worse, but I’m quick to block, and I don’t dwell on things. It’s actually pretty easy when you step back and think about the kind of person who would go online make personal attacks like that. Once you have that mental image, you quickly realize you don’t give a flying fuck what that person has to say about anything.

In my city, they just keep paving over the old asphalt, so the manhole covers are like 6 inches deep in some places. Hitting one of those in my sedan is not pleasant.

I do!

Kubernetes is a nightmare and overkill for most things we need to run, and Docker Swarm is super easy to setup and maintain.

We only use it for one application, though. The app needs to scale horizontally and scale up and down with demand, so I put together a 6 node swarm cluster just for it. Works great, though the auto scaling required some helper scripting.

The thing about these deprecated tools is that the replacements either suck, are too convoluted, don’t give you the same info, or are overly verbose/obtuse.

ifconfig gave you the most relevant information for the network interfaces almost like a dashboard: IP, MAC address, link status, TX/RX packet counts and errors, etc. You can get that with ip but you’ve got to add a bunch of arguments, make multiple calls with different arguments, and it’s still not quite what ifconfig was.

Similarly, iwconfig gave you that same “dashboard” like information for your wireless adapters. I use iw to configure but iwconfig was my go-to for viewing useful information about it. Don’t get me started on how much I hate iw’s syntax and verbosity.

They can pry scp out of my cold dead hands.

At least nftables is syntax-compatible.

1080p buffered generously but it worked :) The sweet spot was having it transcode to 720p (yay hardware acceleration). I wasn’t sharing it with anyone at the time, so it was just me watching at work on one phone while using my second phone at home for internet.

Just about anything as long as you don’t need to serve it to hundreds of people simultaneously. Hell, I once hosted Jellyfin over a 3G hotpot and it managed.

Pretty much any web-based app will work fine. Streaming servers (Emby, Plex, Jellyfin, etc) work fine for a few simultaneous people as long as you’re not trying to push 4K or something. 1080p can work fine at 4 Mbps or less (transcoding is your friend here). Chat servers (Matrix, XMPP, etc) are also a good candidate.

I hosted everything I wanted with 30 Mbps upload before I got symmetric fiber.

Maybe I should flesh it out into an actual guide. The Nepenthes docs are “meh” at best and completely gloss over integrating it into your stack.

You’ll also need to give it corpus text to generate slop from. I used transcripts from 4 or 5 weird episodes of Voyager (let’s be honest: shit got weird on Voyager lol), mixed with some Jack Handy quotes and a few transcripts of Married…with Children episodes.

https://content.dubvee.org/ is where that bot traffic lands up if you want to see what I’m feeding them.

Thanks!

Mostly there’s three steps involved:

1. Setup Nepenthes to receive the traffic
2. Perform bot detection on inbound requests (I use a regex list and one is provided below)
3. Configure traffic rules in your load balancer / reverse proxy to send the detected bot traffic to Nepenthes instead of the actual backend for the service(s) you run.

Here’s a rough guide I commented a while back: https://dubvee.org/comment/5198738

Here’s the post link at lemmy.world which should have that comment visible: https://lemmy.world/post/40374746

You’ll have to resolve my comment link on your instance since my instance is set to private now, but in case that doesn’t work, here’s the text of it:

So, I set this up recently and agree with all of your points about the actual integration being glossed over.

I already had bot detection setup in my Nginx config, so adding Nepenthes was just changing the behavior of that. Previously, I had just returned either 404 or 444 to those requests but now it redirects them to Nepenthes.

Rather than trying to do rewrites and pretend the Nepenthes content is under my app’s URL namespace, I just do a redirect which the bot crawlers tend to follow just fine.

There’s several parts to this to keep my config sane. Each of those are in include files.

• An include file that looks at the user agent, compares it to a list of bot UA regexes, and sets a variable to either 0 or 1. By itself, that include file doesn’t do anything more than set that variable. This allows me to have it as a global config without having it apply to every virtual host.

• An include file that performs the action if a variable is set to true. This has to be included in the server portion of each virtual host where I want the bot traffic to go to Nepenthes. If this isn’t included in a virtual host’s server block, then bot traffic is allowed.

• A virtual host where the Nepenthes content is presented. I run a subdomain (content.mydomain.xyz). You could also do this as a path off of your protected domain, but this works for me and keeps my already complex config from getting any worse. Plus, it was easier to integrate into my existing bot config. Had I not already had that, I would have run it off of a path (and may go back and do that when I have time to mess with it again).

The map-bot-user-agents.conf is included in the http section of Nginx and applies to all virtual hosts. You can either include this in the main nginx.conf or at the top (above the server section) in your individual virtual host config file(s).

The deny-disallowed.conf is included individually in each virtual hosts’s server section. Even though the bot detection is global, if the virtual host’s server section does not include the action file, then nothing is done.

Files

# Map bot user agents
## Sets the $ua_disallowed variable to 0 or 1 depending on the user agent. Non-bot UAs are 0, bots are 1

map $http_user_agent $ua_disallowed {
    default 		0;
    "~PerplexityBot"	1;
    "~PetalBot"		1;
    "~applebot"		1;
    "~compatible; zot"	1;
    "~Meta"		1;
    "~SurdotlyBot"	1;
    "~zgrab"		1;
    "~OAI-SearchBot"	1;
    "~Protopage"	1;
    "~Google-Test"	1;
    "~BacklinksExtendedBot" 1;
    "~microsoft-for-startups" 1;
    "~CCBot"		1;
    "~ClaudeBot"	1;
    "~VelenPublicWebCrawler"	1;
    "~WellKnownBot"	1;
    #"~python-requests"	1;
    "~bitdiscovery"	1;
    "~bingbot"		1;
    "~SemrushBot" 	1;
    "~Bytespider" 	1;
    "~AhrefsBot" 	1;
    "~AwarioBot"	1;
#    "~Poduptime" 	1;
    "~GPTBot" 		1;
    "~DotBot"	 	1;
    "~ImagesiftBot"	1;
    "~Amazonbot"	1;
    "~GuzzleHttp" 	1;
    "~DataForSeoBot" 	1;
    "~StractBot"	1;
    "~Googlebot"	1;
    "~Barkrowler"	1;
    "~SeznamBot"	1;
    "~FriendlyCrawler"	1;
    "~facebookexternalhit" 1;
    "~*(?i)(80legs|360Spider|Aboundex|Abonti|Acunetix|^AIBOT|^Alexibot|Alligator|AllSubmitter|Apexoo|^asterias|^attach|^BackDoorBot|^BackStreet|^BackWeb|Badass|Bandit|Baid|Baiduspider|^BatchFTP|^Bigfoot|^Black.Hole|^BlackWidow|BlackWidow|^BlowFish|Blow|^BotALot|Buddy|^BuiltBotTough|
^Bullseye|^BunnySlippers|BBBike|^Cegbfeieh|^CheeseBot|^CherryPicker|^ChinaClaw|^Cogentbot|CPython|Collector|cognitiveseo|Copier|^CopyRightCheck|^cosmos|^Crescent|CSHttp|^Custo|^Demon|^Devil|^DISCo|^DIIbot|discobot|^DittoSpyder|Download.Demon|Download.Devil|Download.Wonder|^dragonfl
y|^Drip|^eCatch|^EasyDL|^ebingbong|^EirGrabber|^EmailCollector|^EmailSiphon|^EmailWolf|^EroCrawler|^Exabot|^Express|Extractor|^EyeNetIE|FHscan|^FHscan|^flunky|^Foobot|^FrontPage|GalaxyBot|^gotit|Grabber|^GrabNet|^Grafula|^Harvest|^HEADMasterSEO|^hloader|^HMView|^HTTrack|httrack|HTT
rack|htmlparser|^humanlinks|^IlseBot|Image.Stripper|Image.Sucker|imagefetch|^InfoNaviRobot|^InfoTekies|^Intelliseek|^InterGET|^Iria|^Jakarta|^JennyBot|^JetCar|JikeSpider|^JOC|^JustView|^Jyxobot|^Kenjin.Spider|^Keyword.Density|libwww|^larbin|LeechFTP|LeechGet|^LexiBot|^lftp|^libWeb|
^likse|^LinkextractorPro|^LinkScan|^LNSpiderguy|^LinkWalker|msnbot|MSIECrawler|MJ12bot|MegaIndex|^Magnet|^Mag-Net|^MarkWatch|Mass.Downloader|masscan|^Mata.Hari|^Memo|^MIIxpc|^NAMEPROTECT|^Navroad|^NearSite|^NetAnts|^Netcraft|^NetMechanic|^NetSpider|^NetZIP|^NextGenSearchBot|^NICErs
PRO|^niki-bot|^NimbleCrawler|^Nimbostratus-Bot|^Ninja|^Nmap|nmap|^NPbot|Offline.Explorer|Offline.Navigator|OpenLinkProfiler|^Octopus|^Openfind|^OutfoxBot|Pixray|probethenet|proximic|^PageGrabber|^pavuk|^pcBrowser|^Pockey|^ProPowerBot|^ProWebWalker|^psbot|^Pump|python-requests\/|^Qu
eryN.Metasearch|^RealDownload|Reaper|^Reaper|^Ripper|Ripper|Recorder|^ReGet|^RepoMonkey|^RMA|scanbot|SEOkicks-Robot|seoscanners|^Stripper|^Sucker|Siphon|Siteimprove|^SiteSnagger|SiteSucker|^SlySearch|^SmartDownload|^Snake|^Snapbot|^Snoopy|Sosospider|^sogou|spbot|^SpaceBison|^spanne
r|^SpankBot|Spinn4r|^Sqworm|Sqworm|Stripper|Sucker|^SuperBot|SuperHTTP|^SuperHTTP|^Surfbot|^suzuran|^Szukacz|^tAkeOut|^Teleport|^Telesoft|^TurnitinBot|^The.Intraformant|^TheNomad|^TightTwatBot|^Titan|^True_Robot|^turingos|^TurnitinBot|^URLy.Warning|^Vacuum|^VCI|VidibleScraper|^Void
EYE|^WebAuto|^WebBandit|^WebCopier|^WebEnhancer|^WebFetch|^Web.Image.Collector|^WebLeacher|^WebmasterWorldForumBot|WebPix|^WebReaper|^WebSauger|Website.eXtractor|^Webster|WebShag|^WebStripper|WebSucker|^WebWhacker|^WebZIP|Whack|Whacker|^Widow|Widow|WinHTTrack|^WISENutbot|WWWOFFLE|^
WWWOFFLE|^WWW-Collector-E|^Xaldon|^Xenu|^Zade|^Zeus|ZmEu|^Zyborg|SemrushBot|^WebFuck|^MJ12bot|^majestic12|^WallpapersHD)" 1;

}

# Deny disallowed user agents
if ($ua_disallowed) { 
    # This redirects them to the Nepenthes domain. So far, pretty much all the bot crawlers have been happy to accept the redirect and crawl the tarpit continuously 
	return 301 https://content.mydomain.xyz/;
}

I was blocking them but decided to shunt their traffic to Nepenthes instead. There’s usually 3-4 different bots thrashing around in there at any given time.

If you have the resources, I highly recommend it.

Most of the requirements are going to be for the database, and that depends on:

1. How many active users you expect
2. How many large rooms you or your users join

I left many of the large Matrix spaces I was in, and mine is now mostly just 1:1 chats or a group chat with a handful of friends. Given that low-usage case, I can run my server on a Pi 3 with 4 GB of RAM quite comfortably. I don’t do that in practice, but I do have that setup as a backup server - it periodically syncs the database from my main server - and works fine. The bottleneck there, really, is the SD card storage since I didn’t want an external SSD hanging off of it.

Even when I was active in several large Matrix spaces/rooms, a USFF Optiplex with a quad core i5, 8 GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD was more than enough to run it comfortably alongside some other services like LibreTranslate.

FYI: I moved the allow rule for DNS to the top of the chain, so that should fix problems with DNS providers not being able to reach the authoritative name servers.

Ugh. Thanks. It’s quite possible, though maybe just a regional one? I did inadvertently block one of the IPs Let’s Encrypt uses for secondary validation, so this may be another case of that.

I get a shitload of bad traffic from the southeast Asia area (mostly Philippines/Singapore AWS) and have taken to blanket blocking their whole routes rather than constantly playing whack-a-mole. Fail2ban only goes so far for case-by-case.

Here’s the image from the meme from an alternate source:

Your IP may unfortunately be inside a CIDR block that largely does nothing but spam my infrastructure with script kiddie tomfoolery. Firewall rules apply to my authoritative DNS servers as well.

Edit: If you would like me to whitelist it, DM me your IP and I’ll add a narrow exception.

Atkinson Hyperlegible is my new jam. I’m dyslexic and it helps tremendously even though that’s not its primary goal. It also looks a lot better than OpenDyslexic which I used to use.

Loaded “Hyperlegible” onto my Kobo, the reader app on my phone, and set it as the default font on my desktop environment.

Also added it as an option in Tesseract UI (which I swear I’ll be releasing “soon”).

I made my own smart outlets with an ESP-01, dual relay board, and ESPHome. Also made some temp/humidity sensors as well as a 20x4 text display. All powered by a bunch of ESP-01s I bought cheap and in-bulk from Ali and programming using ESPHome which handles most of the work interfacing with the components as well as the HomeAssistant integration.

https://esphome.io/