Rick's b.log - entry 2025/03/26

It was a busy day

Blog changes

A side effect of this to note, however, is that if you want to force mobile or desktop mode, you must write it like /blog/entry/yyyymmdd&keitai=X where 'X' is '1' for mobile and '0' for desktop. Notice the use of '&' rather than the expected '?'. This is because it is translated internally into the index.php?diary stuff, so there's already the '?' present in the URL.

In order to avoid messy redirections from the index.php to the entry/ versions, I have specified that the entry/ one is the canonical. If this breaks search engines, well, shrug. Some of them were always having 'issues' with seventeen years of blog at one URI...

Oh, as a side effect of this, the translation links ought to be working again.

Bot blocking

I have set up a bit of script so that every blog entry fetch will write to a file listing User-Agent strings along with the time. The result looks like this:

2025/03/26 10:08:31  ?=20171217  Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; freefind/2.1; +http://www.freefind.com/spider.html)
2025/03/26 10:08:31  ?=20190203  Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; freefind/2.1; +http://www.freefind.com/spider.html)
2025/03/26 10:08:32  ?=20191226  Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; freefind/2.1; +http://www.freefind.com/spider.html)
2025/03/26 10:08:33  ?=20210115  Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; freefind/2.1; +http://www.freefind.com/spider.html)
2025/03/26 10:08:33  ?=20250325  Mozilla/5.0 (RISC OS) NetSurf/3.12

This shows a bot for freefind spamming the blog with requests, and there's me. Because it doesn't contain any identifying information, if you'd like a peek then it is the file useragents.txt at the blog base URL. I don't want any bots to pick it up so I won't give a direct link. If you can't work out what to do, then the result likely won't be of any interest to you. ☺
Note that the file may be trimmed, deleted, or wiped-and-restarted at any time.
Oh, and the different formatting in the first few lines was it not working correctly because typo...

As a result of 'insights' provided by this logging, I have banned:

• Freefind - for not respecting delays
• Semrushbot - some SEO rubbish
• Ahrefsbot - ditto
• Bytespider - ByteDance's AI sniffer
• meta-externalagent - because screw Zuckerberg
• babbar - don't know what this is but it was spammy, so culled at 7pm

I'm not 'against' bots, per se. One needs the likes of Google and Bing in order to have a findable presence on the internet. I would block AI filchers out of principle, and certainly anything that is abusive gets blocked. I'm going to allow GoogleOther for now, as it is sort-of following the old robots.txt directive of 5 seconds between fetches. Sort of. It's now set at 30 second intervals, so if this bot keeps coming back then it'll get the ban hammer.

What happens upon a ban? Well, it is done by the .htaccess so the blog system doesn't even get involved. The recipient may or may not get an HTTP 403 (Forbidden) response. They are redirected to /errdoc/403.html which may or may not include a 403 in the HTTP response. If it doesn't, I don't care. All they'll see now is "Hasta la vista, baby!".

A new light in the kitchen

I got a pull switch from Amazon and hacked it into the small Lidl LED strip light.

Pull for presence of light, pull again for absence of light.

One the other side of the wall is where the lighting for the 'cave' runs, so I drilled a hole through the doorframe and passed the cable through to hook into that. You can see where I've patched in the white wire from the light to test that the plan works...here's some trauma for you.

Trauma-inducing wiring.

Even I thought that looked dodgy, so I got a little cover from Amazon. It's amazing the crap you can hide inside a little plastic box. Now it doesn't look anywhere near as scary. The red electrical tape, by the way, is because the supply wire is ancient, so it's that awful cloth-coated rubber rubbish that disintegrates as soon as it is touched.

Slightly less awful wiring.

The light has three modes - reddish, bluish, and both. If I leave it at reddish, it actually makes a rather nice ambience in the room, and with the pull-string to turn it on and off I don't need to fiddle around to find the switch. Just swipe my hand under until I feel the cord, then tug it.

Ambience.

I can leave that light on by itself to give an almost candlelit ambience, like if I want to sit at the table or whatever.

More ambience.

Vaccination

Anna going to the vet.

Mowing

After that, I bought out the shiny new big mower to trim the part where I put the picnic table and then I thought I ought to give a trim of the way down to Anna and one thing led to another and after a couple of hours it was all mown. Except for the Picnic Lawn over east ways because, well, because I forgot. Oops.
But wait, it feels like it's been just days since I last cut the grass and, yeah, it needed it. Again. It's that time of the year.

The Western Wilderness, mown again.

Euromillions

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Rob, 29th March 2025, 09:42

Given the jackpot, I bought a tenners worth of euro millions tickets. Just had an email: "You've won a prize!"  Logged in to check.  Unfortunately I'm not going to be buying and opensourcing all our favourite software packages..    I won £6.80 :-(

Rick, 29th March 2025, 09:58

That's about my level of win... less than I spent.    Yesterday? Zero, zip, nada, rien.  Oh well, guess that means I'll be going to work on Monday. 😪

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