Author Archives: dontai

What Beats Beats? Beets

Beets clearly beats Beats, especially if you like to eat sweets. Beets, or 甜菜 tiancai, in Chinese, are obviously a sweet (the chinese character 甜 means sweet) vegetable.

I nuked a couple for 8 minutes, peeled the skin and they were sweet. The water is blood red.

Beets, bookending a fake copy of Beats. Photo by Don Tai

Permanent link to this post (59 words, 1 image, estimated 14 secs reading time)

Htaccess Shows Host Names not IP Addresses

Apache, the server and not the Indian tribe, is a fickle mistress. She is more than a little unpredictable, or at least it feels this way on Site5. While I realize that Apache is a web server, a computer who should be very logical, often times I notice very odd behaviour. Maybe it is the server setup, caching, or even traffic volume, I do not know. I do know that if you have some error in your htaccess file, the Apache server will then display a combination of ip addresses and host names. Once you fix the error, which no one can point out and there is no error message to go by, you will be back to only ip addresses.

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iPhone SE vs Sony DSC-H2 Shootout: Zoodles in Pasta Sauce

Don Tai and his Sony DSC-H2, Zoodles and Meat Ball Pasta Sauce, Toronto, Canada. Photo by Don Tai.

Compare, we are, of Big Weed’s new iPhone SE vs my 2009 Sony DSC-H2, shooting in the same light, location, time, date and subject: Zoodles in Meat Ball Pasta Sauce.

Yesterday I had cooked beef meat balls in a tomato pasta sauce. Today I spiralized zucchini into pasta, hence the zoodles shootout. Making zoodles literally takes seconds and you need not cook them. BTW both of us thought the uncooked zoodles and pasta sauce, heated in the microwave for 50 seconds, were a great wheat noodle substitute.

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Host Name 0 Zero or localhost in your Raw Access Log

Does your raw access log display a host name of “0”, or zero? Very odd, is it not? I have been struggling with this for a couple of months, and my ISP Site5 had no answers. It turns out that one of my spammers, NFORCE_ENTERTAINMENT, puts an unprintable character into their host table, so that when my ISP looks them up, they display the unprintable character in my log as “0”.

Trying to control your site’s spam can be challenging. If you try to ban an IP that is simply 0, or a host name of “0” you will fail, because there is no zero in their host name, but an unprintable character. Ban these guys instead.

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Getting Old Sucks, Especially if you are a Smartphone

The march of time stops for no one, rich or poor, for whomever. While humans may be able to mitigate their demise with a bit of compassion, there is none for old phones. Android phones grow old, older than 2 years old, slow down, and then get pitched into the back drawer, replaced by a new Android model, never to be turned on again.

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Managing a Large Apache htaccess: Tips

After a long while your htaccess might get a tad long. My favourite htaccess checker only processes files up to 5,000 lines. Often this is due to lots of comments, which I encourage. Let us cover some ways you can shorten your htaccess:

Combine your user agents/referrers
If you have multiple user agent or referrers that have similar names, combine them into a single statement,
from:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*Blackboard\ Safeassign [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*BlackWidow [OR]
to:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*Black(board\ Safeassign|Widow) [OR]

From:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*pizza\-imperia [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*pizza\-tycoon [NC,OR]
To:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*pizza(\-imperia|\-tycoon) [NC,OR]

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Spiralized Potato Shoestring Fries

Bought yesterday, I did, a Starfrit Spiralizer. Since Little Weed wanted to see how it worked his first choice, of course, was french fries.

Spiralized white potato was really simple to do. It looks but does not taste like pasta spaghetti. Photo by Don Tai, Toronto, Canada

I used the smallest shoestring blade, the spaghetti size, which turned out to be too small. Potatoes need a larger sized tube. It took only 8 minutes in my deep fryer but came out acceptably. There are shoestring french fry recipies out there that are baked rather than deep fried. I’ll try that next.

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Trying Rona Canada Price Match Policy: Not Smooth

Rare, is my visits to Rona Home and Garden Store, here in Scarborough, Toronto, Canada, at Midland near Steeles. While they are pretty clean and almost all the sales associates speak Mandarin, close by there is also the Home Depot Head Office store, as well as Lowes.

Starfrit Spriralizer cuts veg into long and thin spaghetti, on sale at Cantire for $20, Walmart regular price $26, Rona regular price $23. Rona grudgingly price matched Cantire and then beat them by an additional 10 percent. Yay, but laborious to remind Rona staff of their online policy.

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no-ptr.as20860.net Comment Spammer: Research, Ban

no-ptr.as20860.net is a dual Ip spammer with a twist. The originating IP hostname lookup returns three IPs! You’ll need to ban all three, but there’s a lot more. They use IOMart, GB as their ISP.

It seems like this hostname also morphs to numerous IP addresses, making them difficult to track down.

Observation:
no-ptr.as20860.net hostname lookup 62.128.193.135 84.22.161.172 50.97.43.3

Method:
no-ptr.as20860.net not only uses the dual ip spammer strategy, but also changes its host name through many ip addresses, making it double difficult to ban.

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fvds.ru Content Spammer: Research, Ban

fvds.ru spammed me, so I researched them. A good portion of their IPs are in the range of 62.109.24.0/24 but there are others. They use a wide variety of names.

Observation:
t-testing.fvds.ru host lookup 62.109.2.78 is bogus. Research revealed 62.109.24.26 and 62.109.24.27.

Research:
tinchurin.fvds.ru 62.109.16.78
info2.fvds.ru 62.109.18.75
dap.fvds.ru 62.109.24.110
zwrk018.fvds.ru 62.109.24.115
esesovets.fvds.ru 62.109.24.132
ensore.fvds.ru 62.109.24.14
camedia.fvds.ru 62.109.24.145
a777825.fvds.ru 62.109.24.157
move.fvds.ru 62.109.24.20
izhirnoff.fvds.ru 62.109.24.215
pool-62.109.24.0.fvds.ru 62.109.24.218
app777.fvds.ru 62.109.24.236
darthspacker.fvds.ru 62.109.24.249
motorspb4.fvds.ru 62.109.24.30
admin15.fvds.ru 62.109.24.35
cyberilya32.fvds.ru 62.109.24.53
merchdist.fvds.ru 62.109.24.61
aachibilyaevyandex.ru.fvds.ru 62.109.24.82
realmyst1.fvds.ru 62.109.24.95
nkryptor.fvds.ru 62.109.29.208
dimys12373.fvds.ru 62.109.31.36
frederick.fvds.ru 62.109.31.91

Mgi.fvds.ru 78.24.219.148
Fvds.ru 78.24.219.165
fakeyoudeadxtv.fvds.ru 78.24.221.1
MMM5.FVDS.RU 82.146.33.242
alosvlad.fvds.ru 82.146.34.229
voloshenko.ilya.fvds.ru 82.146.36.96
exiex.fvds.ru 82.146.38.254
leonid.fvds.ru 91.240.85.23
fdvcxvcxv.fvds.ru 92.63.98.50

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