Local timeline
This morning, I had a "shower thought": I could adopt the 80/20 approach to my overall life in 2026: 80% relaxed, 20% fully committed. I call this Polarized Living.
Jokes aside: I should stress less.
Remember me saying I was staring down the #meshcore / #meshtastic rabbit hole?
I set up a MeshCore repeater node with a small solar panel on our roof. My inner nerd craved stats, so I built a thing to extract them. Very fun and educational.
Over 5,100 unique #tencent IPs triggered the ban within roughly 2-3 hours of this scenario going live. These guys don't mess around...
The Tencent crawler pretends to be "Chrome 126 on Windows 7."
Chrome 126: released June 2024, Windows 7: lost Chrome support in February 2023.
This browser is impossible. Someone copied and pasted a User-Agent string and forgot Windows 7 has been dead for years.
Update on the Tencent crawler situation:
Identified the fingerprint (Chrome/126 on Windows NT 6.1, always from AS132203/132591/45090) and deployed a #Crowdsec scenario to auto-ban them for 90 days.
Already blocked 100+ IPs within the first hour. They rotate constantly, but the fingerprint stays the same.
The attached chart shows traffic from the last 24 hours. All yellow spikes are recurring Tencent crawls.
I spent a few days sick and noticed a flaw in the Daily Suggested Workouts algorithm by #garmin:
When you're under the weather, but your HRV and sleep are still good, the algorithm continues to recommend intense workouts.
This can worsen your condition since each hard workout can temporarily weaken your immune system, pushing you further away from recovery.
A reminder to always use common sense and listen to your body.
Just ordered this phone. I'm slowly noting a few impractical challenges with this idea, but nothing that can't be fixed or worked around.
The idea itself feels very uncomfortable; all the more reason to go through with it. I have become way too dependent on my smartphone. I check my phone an average of 43 times a day. 43!
Debating a challenge to start the new year: going the first 30 days without a smartphone, in an effort to reset my unhealthy patterns with my phone.
The rules: a dumbphone for calling and perhaps a once-a-day sync with Garmin for running metrics.
I can think of some impractical consequences (WhatsApp, for instance), and I need to give it some thought about whether they're really necessary or if I should set up an alternative.
RE: https://procolix.social/@koen/115609954794839500
Laat NOS een voorbeeld nemen aan social.overheid.nl :-)
Playing around with the Gateway API this evening, in preparation for the stopping of Ingress NGINX. Pretty cool implementation, I'm a fan.
Went with the Cilium Envoy approach for now, since we're already running Cilium at most clusters.
Earlier this week, I shared details about a custom observability stack designed for Mastodon.
I completed the repository yesterday evening. After a few configuration adjustments, it should be compatible with any cloud-native type Mastodon deployment. I really enjoyed building this project and learning about Jsonnet/Grafonnet, and I hope it can be helpful to other admins out there.