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• Post #4449314

  @neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk My commiserations for tonight's sleep, but congratulations on the improved sleep in a few nights time 😀

• Post #4449051

  New #blog post: Looking at Tarpit and LLM Maze Stats A high level of analysis of stats from my SSH tarpits as well as a look at the behaviour of #ai crawler bots which have fallen into my endless maze https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/the-internet/the-efficacy-of-tarpits-in-2026.html

• Post #4145979

  RE: https://fedi.83n.uk/@step_bot/34262561866496000 This is a new record. Thats 4 steps... crap watch needs charging... 4 steps back 🤣

• Post #4038586

  You know how I know we've got too much stuff? Was just having a conversation at work about first gaming systems. I mentioned my Atari ST and only having a couple of cartridges for it. Someone questioned it - the ST didn't take cartridges. You might be right, I said, let me check because ITS IN THE GARAGE Why have I still got it? They were right btw, it was an XE

• Post #3793805

  I know it's not an option for everyone, but shit like this - https://www.neowin.net/news/samsung-will-delete-your-health-data-if-you-dont-let-them-use-it-to-train-ai/ - makes me **really** glad I put the effort into shifting my wearables over to #Gadgetbridge

• Post #3699880

  Must actually remember to buy #EMFCamp tickets next year... I'm already getting FOMO and it's not even started yet.

• Post #3486579

  Mood: https://bots.robots.rodeo/@scream/116827276278958735

• Post #1737864

  The biggest benefit that I got from setting up Ko-Fi and BuyMeACoffee *isn't* the money that people kindly send. It's the occasional unexpected mood boosts that I get from people including a message to indicate that I made their day a little better. This really helped yesterday:

• Post #971147

  New #blog post: Adding A Balcony #Solar Install to our garage We've had solar for nearly 3 years now, but our easterly exposure has been niggling at me: output starts waning around lunch so the afternoon feels wasted (particularly after a cloudy morning) So, I've added some west facing panels to the garage using a plug-in solar kit This post talks about the install, setting up monitoring with #telegraf as well as results in the week since https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blo...

• Post #906187

  @MikeFromLFE@cupoftea.social I wonder if that'll change after the rules do - in Europe you can buy plug-in battery storage, so I *assume* they'll probably clear the way for that too. So rather than needing to buy a (more expensive) hybrid inverter that needs a sparkie to install it, you'd end up with an off-the-shelf commoditised plugin battery unit.

• Post #654499

  New #Documentation: Blocking requests from #Cloudflare's automated browser #crawl endpoint Cloudflare recently announced an endpoint on their Browser Rendering service which allows users to make one API request to trigger a crawl of an entire site. This documentation details how to block the resulting request. https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/documentation/general/blocking-cloudflares-automated-crawl-endpoint.html

• Post #598702

  @mikebell@remotelab.uk Ah, yeah - I keep the library on the host's SSD and then periodically rsync to NFS as a backup

• Post #597330

  @mikebell@remotelab.uk @markpitblado@mstdn.ca Oh nice, let me know you get on! I'd _definitely_ recommend getting a Kobo to replace the kindle. Booklore's continued to do what I need of it, though the RAM usage still bugs me. I've also grown a _little_ concerned by Booklore's release cadence - it feels a little high and seems to involve a fair bit of fixing the previous release. On the other hand, it means it's actively getting better so 🤷

• Post #550830

  @Edent@mastodon.social Where i've had to do similar in the past, I've tended to include a `Connection: close` along with a `content-length: 0` (it'd be before your flush()) <?php header("Location: example.com"); header("Connection: close"); header("Content-length: 0"); flush(); sleep(100); do_thing(); die(); But, that was a long time ago, so it might be that Curl has changed in the meantime

• Post #484648

  My #AI crawler maze has seen activity grow over the last 30d and is now handling in the region of 3 million requests a day The links into the maze are marked noindex,nofollow. The maze is also a disallow in robots.txt and each of the pages that the maze serves are marked noindex,nofollow. No honest bot should be in there. The number of crawlers executing javascript seems to have dropped off though - the various JS traps are firing much less frequently

• Post #437097

  New #Blog post: Moving our #ebooks to #Booklore Over the weekend, I saw someone else's blogpost about Booklore and got nerd sniped by the mention of working Kobo sync support. This week I've been playing around with migrating our book collection over to Booklore along with getting it working with a Kobo https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/general/moving-ebooks-to-booklore.html

• Post #363988

  @xs4me2@mastodon.social @lproven@social.vivaldi.net @dynamite_ready@mastodon.gamedev.place @reading_recluse@c.im What you're essentially suggesting here, is that LLMs are only good for consuming information if the user either already has the knowledge to judge output (in which case, why are they asking?) or spends time to verify the claims that the LLM makes (in which case, why bother asking the LLM?). I've seen them make some pretty important mistakes, including suggesting that a Dir...

• Post #355197

  Yep, I think I'm definitely going to be looking at setting Booklore up tomorrow, it seems to check all the boxes

• Post #354235

  @MFDOOMALLCAPS@metalhead.club The new single sounds good. It took a few listens to grow on me, but I get that with any kind of change (style, singer etc) I never lost interest though, they've long been a go-to (but then, I also liked The Agonist when A-WG was there, so maybe that's no big surprise)

• Post #353692

  @bloor@bloor.tw @dtl@8bitorbust.info FWIW, I quite happily run it at home on a NUC. Although I've got gigabit internet, it turns out it'd probably have been fine on ADSL too I have moved media to object storage though, which helps a lot

• Post #353489

  New #blog post: Converting a SMK CP2 #airgun from CO2 to PCP Late last year I bought a CO2 gun. Although it was sometimes fun to shoot, I got quite frustrated at how variable an experience it gave Rather than selling it on, I decided to make it use high pressure air (HPA) instead https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/general/converting-a-cp2-to-pcp.html

• Post #282037

  #AI has now "progressed" onto publishing personal attacks on #OSS maintainers as a result of them rejecting PRs https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-11-gatekeeping-in-open-source-the-scott-shambaugh-story.html This technology is really making the world a better place....

• Post #249081

  @popey@mastodon.social That effect is part of what drove me to give up on my second attempt at Threads (the first was because I got banned for using a non-standard client...) - everything it was putting in front of me tended to be rage bait, more than a few of those were pushed as "you should see" notifications too. I still *have* threads, but I've turned everything off, so it no longer comes to me, I had to go to it (which doesn't really happen unless someone pings me a link)

• Post #185396

  @stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe ooof I remember getting almost exactly the same request years back. They'd pointed Nessus at the box (without telling us... rude) and our protections had _quite rightly_ identified and blocked their source IP. So, they contacted us and said that we needed to turn the firewall off so that they could check security. In that case, the test was being done as part of assessing the customer's PCI-DSS compliance.