Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

Leaders are responsible for culture and strategy. Everything else is secondary. - Werd I/O

2026-11-12T06:16:57.000Z

Link: The Two Rails of Leadership, by Corey Ford in Point C

I’ve been thinking a lot about my entrepreneurship journey lately — and how I can draw lessons from it to help journalism — and this piece from Corey Ford landed at the right time.

“Culture and strategy are the two things a leader is responsible for designing; everything else is delegable. […] Your job as a leader isn't to come up with the next big thing. It's to build the culture, the people, and the process that can continually do this: a team whose velocity of learning outruns the pace of change. That capability lives on the culture rail. The strategy is what it produces.”

I basically punched the air.

The thing is, so many of us have got into the trap of either managing the incremental changes that we feel are needed to keep the lights on, or defining ourselves by the product we create rather than who we create it for. In doing so, we build inward-looking cultures that put us in danger of losing touch with the world we’re trying to serve.

Corey’s example of the newspaper is apt: do you produce words on a page, or do you serve a specific need for context and understanding? Only one of those answers will survive change. Someone asked me recently what I thought the business model for news should be, and I responded that it’s the wrong question to start with. The question is: how can we be most valuable to the people we’re trying to serve?

I’m constantly referencing Gina Chua, who points out that we should care more about saving what journalism does for us than the specific institutions that produce it today. A culture centered on providing the effects of journalism will stand the test of time; one centered on institutionalism will not.

Can existing media institutions recenter themselves around solving needs rather than finding ways to optimize the same products, workflows, and ideas? I don’t know the answer; it’s certainly not a given. But I do know that it starts with building the right culture. And if those institutions can’t adapt their cultures — well, we’ll just need to build new institutions.

Editorial policy: no paid endorsements - Johnny.Decimal

2026-11-12T02:42:57.000Z

I write about and recommend technology. Our upcoming video discusses MindNode. Soon I'll be talking about email, where I recommend Fastmail. I've discussed 1Password, and of course there's my beloved Bear.

In the past, I have published affiliate links for some of these services. This makes me feel awkward – I don't want to tell you how good Fastmail is and follow it with a little footnote: ¹ Clicking this link earns me money.

When I see others do this, I'm suspicious. I don't want you to be suspicious of what I write. So.

1. We do not earn money from endorsements

When I recommend something, I want you to know it's because I think it's the best thing. Not because it's earning me money.

This means we will not include, say, an affiliate link to a product that we recommend.

You might still get a deal

This weekend's post will include a MindNode offer. This is a public offer that has nothing to do with me. I'll still include offers like this where they might benefit you but not me.

This doesn't preclude advertising

I'm not saying that I'll never advertise anything. (Though, let's be realistic.) But if I did, it would be obvious: it would be an advert, plain and clear. I'll say "I'm telling you this because they paid me".

This policy lives at Support > Policies

I've copied this policy there. If we add to it in the future, I'll blog an update.

The Atmosphere Community Cooperative is another step towards building a truly open social web ecosystem - Werd I/O

2026-11-11T18:49:04.000Z

Link: Introducing the Atmosphere Community Cooperative

AT Protocol is the underlying protocol that powers Bluesky, Chicago.com, Sill, Surf, Leaflet, and many other social apps and services. It’s designed to be open, decentralized, and interoperable: the idea is that no one entity owns it, and any tool built on the protocol is theoretically interoperable with all the other tools. It’s one piece of an emerging, diverse open social web that’s free of monopolistic control.

At the News Product Alliance summit last month, Joe Germuska and I presented on AT Protocol with Frank Sharpe and Andjela Padejsky from Chicago Public Media. The protocol has allowed them to build Chicago.com more efficiently: they know two codebases they write on the protocol will work together. It’s also proven to be useful scaffolding for LLM-assisted development, which has allowed their development team to punch above its weight. There hasn’t been much attention paid to the protocol in spaces like journalism: our presentation and events like Protocols for Publishers are the exception. Nonetheless, I’m certain it will be an important building block.

But a building block that can be manipulated by a single owner introduces risk that newsrooms and other mission-driven organizations shouldn’t tolerate. (Consider what happened to Twitter.) Independence is vital; without it, a building block becomes a single point of failure.

Now the folks behind AT Protocol ecosystem pillars like the annual Atmosphere conference have filed to form a co-operative organization.

“As we look toward the third AtmosphereConf in 2027, we’re happy to announce that we’re transforming into a cooperative dedicated to supporting the health, growth, and stability of the Atmosphere.

This is the first post from the Atmosphere Community Cooperative, a new global cooperative based in Canada that is governed by and for the community, for the good of the ecosystem and the people inside it.”

This is a big deal for lots of reasons. The first is that it further formalizes the idea that a bunch of AT Protocol support and governance is independent of Bluesky. The protocol itself is already supported by a working group at the IETF, and the directory of identities is forming as an independent Swiss Association. This, then, is a third independent ecosystem org, ensuring that it’s not just the protocol that’s decentralized, but governance and support of it, too.

I do also think it’s really interesting that the Atmosphere Community Cooperative will be a real co-operative organization, adhering to international co-op principles, and established in Canada. Between this, the Swiss Association, Bluesky’s Delaware Public Benefit Corporation status, the IETF working group, and other participants like Dutch public interest organization the Modal Foundation, there is a plurality of geographies, organizational approaches, and communities involved in the protocol’s development and success. That feels like much-needed organizational innovation in addition to the technical gains. All of which makes AT Protocol safer to build on.

Frankenstein - Joel's Log Files

2026-11-11T18:40:00.000Z

Back in my younger days, my high school would hold yearly book reading events. The choice one day was Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley.

Quite a bit of students would line up, waiting for their turn to read a few paragraphs of the novel.

To be honest, while I found the event very interesting, in practice it was a bit boring. I never stayed to listen for more than a few minutes. I didn’t enjoy the voices much. I believe many of the kids there only did this for bonus points, not putting much effort into performing and adding emotion to the written words.

Besides, I ignored the legacy of the novel itself, it just seemed like an old story that we were being forced to listen to.

I always wanted to participate and reading aloud. I actually really love doing so with family or at church, but I was too shy to do it at school.

I didn’t realize how important this novel was until much later. Very weird of me since I already loved classic science fiction stories. Little did I know, that before H.G. Wells or Jules Verne, there was Mary Shelley.

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be his world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.

Other adaptations

I may as well mention that I watched some adaptations of the novel after I read it.

First, I read Junji Ito’s Manga version, which follows a lot of the same plot up to a point in the story where it changes completely and goes for a more spooky take on the creature and its actions. However, there are some things that happen way too fast, which I would have liked to see better developed.

Nonetheless, it was an interesting take on the characters and the message of the novel.

The art of this is also amazing, to be expected from Junji Ito’s style. The design of the creature was also pretty terrifying!

The finale ends up very similar to the novel. Though the story felt less nuanced, it still hit during the important moments.

Afterwards, I watched the movie! Not Guillermo del Toro’s latest adaptation, but the original film from 1931—which is going to become part of the public domain next year.

Its story pales in comparison to the original novel. However, I really appreciated it by what it is on its own, and I am willing to call it a masterpiece for the time. It has some dated moments and the fact that Victor and Henry swapped names is hilarious to me, but it still contains the original essence of the novel, as the creature—as dumbed down as it is compared to the book—is still misunderstood and feared.

The film features many iconic elements to the mythos, such as the “It’s alive!” scream, the character design, and the conclusion of the film, which is completely different to the novel, but has been parodied multiple times. There were some genuinely shocking and original scenes for the time, which caught me off-guard even today.

While not as thought-provoking, it is definitely worth a watch, just don’t expect it to be like the original at all.

Speaking of which, let’s get to it!

I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.

The novel!

There have been many influential books that I’ve read before, be it Dune, Roadside Picnic or The House on the Borderland. However, if we are talking about the cultural impact a book has had, it turns out that this one is on a whole different level.

There are plenty of classic works that have been bested by successors—sometimes the only thing of note is the fact that they did it first. But after two centuries, Frankenstein remains at the forefront of the genre.

At eighteen years old, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was part of a contest to make a spooky story. The participants were her husband Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and John Polidori. Only the latter would end up completing the challenge as well, with The Vampyre, a work that kickstarted the vampire genre, but like many others, became a stepping stone, a prototype for more known works like Dracula.

The story should be known by everyone by cultural osmosis at this point. Victor Frankenstein has quite the life ahead of him, a good family and promising studies. However, he ends up obsessed with the secret to creating life, and once he discovers it, he decides to play god. He builds a living, intelligent being, ignoring his friends, family and future during the whole endeavor. However, as soon as his creation comes to life, Victor is horrified by it, considering it wretched and vile.

The creature is alone on this world, and rejected by his maker, wanders off. He slowly learns about the world, about humanity, about language and culture. But he realizes that he’ll never be accepted, but hated and feared by any person he meets, so he declares himself an enemy of humanity, and swears revenge on his creator.

The story is a tragedy, a series of events that unfolds and ends in misery for everyone involved. A cautionary tale that resonates today.

I have to say that the writing of this novel is genuinely beautiful. There are so many interesting dialogues and narrations that were truly pleasurable to read, it was rather simple to follow, but it felt profound nonetheless.

The novel does have a weird structure, it’s a bunch of letter that contain a narrative, and another narrative is told within that. There is tragedy after tragedy, and each one feels fated while also completely avoidable.

The dialogues and the events are easy to follow, but but there is that lingering feeling about how hopeless it is. Victor Frankenstein can’t help but doom himself further, assuming the worst and falling victim to his own dumb choices.

I genuinely could’t stop myself from reading this. It took me less than a week, and I read more than half the book in a single day. It is delightful, but I also have to say that there were a few words I had to look up to understand, and some of those long sentences that I had to read with an old times radio voice to get through. I didn’t need to read a Spanish translation at all though, so that’s cool.

Victor Frankenstein considered his creation as perfect up until the moment it was brought to life. Mary Shelley’s creation may not be perfect, but it is very close, a cultural icon with a message that rings true in today’s day and age.

The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.

This is day 69 of #100DaysToOffload

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Note published on November 11, 2026 at 2:44 PM UTC - Molly White's activity feed

2026-11-11T14:44:10.000Z

i mean, just impeachment would've been okay with me... seems a little extreme

HowTo: Fix Eufy HomeBase 2 Storage Full Issues - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-11-11T12:34:05.000Z

Quick Fix: Insert a USB memory stick, format it in the app, restart the Eufy HomeBase 2, format the internal memory, restart the hub.

Background

I've had the eufyCam system for over 6 years - which is pretty long-life for IoT devices. The cameras have worked pretty much flawlessly. Four years ago I added their Video Doorbell which has been similarly well behaved.

But last night I went to check some security footage, only to be told that the 16GB storage was full. Ordinarily that shouldn't be a problem. Full storage just means that older videos get wiped and new ones replace them. In my case, all the old videos were gone.

I could see the cameras and control them, I just couldn't access any old recordings.

There was nothing on there I especially needed (although I'm curious as to when a courier dropped off a "lost" parcel) so I was happy to experiment with fixing the system.

The Eufy forums are full of people having these issues. Anker, the brand that own Eufy are usually fairly customer focused - but I guess they're more interested in getting people to upgrade to a newer hub than fixing the problems with their old kit.

What Didn't Work

Restarting - no change.
Repairing the storage - didn't fix anything.
Clearing the storage - dire warnings but didn't help.
Formatting - a last resort, but failed.

What Fixed It

I found an old 4GB USB-A memory stick and shoved it in the back of the Eufy. The app detected it fairly quickly and said the stick needed to be formatted - so I let it.

Once the stick was formatted, I restarted the hub. Running fix or clean didn't change the situation, so I tried formatting the main memory again. This time it seemed to work. It crawled to 100% and then hung.

I restarted the app and it told me that the storage was unformatted and needed to be formatted again, so I let it.

I restarted the hub and everything sprang to life, no more warnings about full storage.

Next Steps

I'll keep an eye on the storage to make sure it doesn't fill up again.

I'm reluctant to buy a new HomeBase. I like to self-host things, but the promise of commercial kit like this is that it takes the hassle out of ownership. I don't really want to be futzing around formatting memory and deciphering error messages.

If this fails again, I'll have to seriously consider moving my cameras onto something that I can control. At least that way, if it screws up, I'll only have myself to blame.

Note published on November 11, 2026 at 3:54 AM UTC - Molly White's activity feed

2026-11-11T03:54:25.000Z

i'm so happy to be done knitting this sweater because yay sweater, yay fruits of my labor! but also because as someone who knits almost exclusively at night, black yarn was the wrong choice

frosty morning - James' Coffee Blog

2026-11-11T00:00:00.000Z

Hazy, crystalline
Remnants of cool night coating
Green country fields.

on walking - James' Coffee Blog

2026-11-11T00:00:00.000Z

Walks as path finding —
Past inclement weather
Perspectives revealed.

This haiku was written on November 10th.

Rambling and procrastinating - Joel's Log Files

2026-11-10T21:50:00.000Z

Yesterday I was due for a medical checkup at work! They do this kind of thing yearly and it only takes like twenty minutes or so, but I had ignored the couple emails for people pending to take it, until they reached out directly on Teams.

I decided to stop procrastinating and go immediately. Blood pressure, vision, the usual stuff. There was nothing new for me: No drugs, no drinking, no diabetes, no allergies, no nothing. Bad eyesight but good glasses to counter that. The only real problem which I already know, is that I’m overweight.

I’m like fiftheen kilos above the “ideal”, that’s five more kilos since I wrote about my issue with snacking, so it’s clear that just writing about it isn’t enough, and that pretending the problem doesn’t exist and ignoring it will do nothing.

First thing I’ll do is cancel my gym subscription—I’ve been giving them free money for pretty much a whole year. It just doesn’t work for me. I keep talking about cycling or running, but I barely do it once a week—if at all. I need to stick to something and commit.

Countless times have I heard about the friction concept, how the path of least resistance should be the one that lead towards a healthier lifestyle. Making little changes to ensure that going that way is simply better.

But there are just too many things in my current path of least resistance that are not doing that. Tastier, less healthy foods, snacks at work, on my way home, or at home, and whatever else. I keep stumbling on less than ideal steps, and I keep taking them. Worst of all, I end up putting up with the “friction” to do things that aren’t ideal, there’s just not enough of it, being lazy and eating snacks is worth the price.

There are some things I’d be willing to change in theory, and there are many others that I can’t see myself doing anytime soon.

It’s weird how I am so okay with tracking every minute of my gaming, and every page I read of my books, and yet the idea of counting calories seems absolutely loathsome to me.

When it comes to excercise I guess calisthenics has an appeal for me. I just want to move my body, not worrying about weights and equipment. But then I don’t want to get on the floor to do some push-ups, but I also don’t want to buy a mat or do them in bed. Why amd I such a diva about it? I don’t know.

I always end up finding a way around getting the work done, or simply choosing to do nothing at all. Some sacrifices must be made somewhere—how many times have I said that already? I wonder.

At least I am thankful that this is the only health-related issue I have going on, but if I keep going on this direction, more issues may follow.

In case you are curious, the reason my cycling has been inconsistent lately is incredibly simple and easy to fix: I just need to inflate my tires again. I should be doing it every couple of weeks or so, but if I miss a day I end up procrastinating about it.

It’s always procrastination, when it comes to health or planning cool projects or writing something more than these blogs or doing something to meet-up with others and go outside my comfort zone!

A completely unrelated but still positive change that I’m kind of proud of: I’m actually flossing my teeth now! It’s something I pretty much never used do, but I find it to be entertaining enough while listening to a podcast or something, so that’s cool, it’s only been like two days, but the fact that I can even see myself still doing it in the future must mean something, right?

Maybe I’ll forget today and I’ll leave it for later and that later will never come again, until it does, for another two days.

Okay this is starting to sound kind of miserable. Let’s go through the bad stuff then in a list: I am overweight, I haven’t gone cycling in two weeks, I keep buying snacks, I have paid for the gym for nothing…

Now, let’s go through some positives, for a change here. My weeknotes mention quite a bit of those but still, let’s recap.

I did play a bunch of Badminton last Sunday, I started to floss my teeth, I have read daily and consistently, I have kept up with my Bible reading plan too!, I was visited by an old friend yesterday, I can walk and run and use stairs and move pretty well…

Honestly I’m doing okay, just another episode of me wanting to change things, and maybe it would be nice to do so and challenge myself, but it’s not the end of the world.

Procrastination isn’t the best, there are definitely problems, I am still young! I should take advantage of that. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was eighteen, did you know?

Sometimes I think about my friends reading this, especially those online that are older, that have kids and struggles beyond mine, this must be so silly to them. Funnily enough, I think the same of the younger friends I have IRL, who are too worried about grades and studies. Such is life.

This has been day 68 of #100DaysToOffload

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Book Review: The Unfinished Harauld Hughes - Richard Ayoade ★★★⯪☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-11-10T12:34:31.000Z

A decade ago, I read Ayoade's first book. In my review, I said:

It's hard to know how to assess a book like this. It's far too clever for its own good - a frustrating and humorous look at... what? It's neither autobiography nor comic novel. An anti-novel which trudges the reader through a series of comic vignettes. It reminded me of some of Woody Allen's work. If you get the joke - you'll find it hilarious. Everyone else will just look on in bemusement.

And, yeah, this new book is pretty much the same! It's an absurdist novel about a (semi) fictional TV presenter creating a documentary about a (probably) fictional director. Much like Bob Mortimer's books it revels in the mundane and delights in uniquely shaped language constructs.

As well as being wryly funny, it is mercilessly satirical. If you've ever read the risible scripts of an "influential" 1950s playwright, you'll immediately feel at home.

There's the drip-feeding of a tiny mystery - but it isn't quite enough to sustain the story. There's no urge to discover what really happened; you'll read this like it was a steam train documentary on in the background while you do the washing-up. There's sort-of a plot-twist, but it is of no consequence.

Despite it's caustic and cynical view about theatre, there are moments of genuine profundity. I found this especially beautiful:

It can sometimes cost ten times as much to sit near the front as compared to the cheap seats in the balcony. And that’s because it’s worth it. The experience is entirely changed by proximity. The tension alters.

What do we want from a celebrity documentary? Is it scandal? Hidden secrets and bitter jealousies? Do we want a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the making-of a documentary? This gets close to being a "Lost in La Mancha" in book form, for an author who didn't exist. It is an enjoyable read, but I think I'd've preferred to watch this late-night on BBC4 never quite knowing if it was a spoof or not.

Appeared on "Episode 31: Seeing Through Tech Hype, with Molly White" - Molly White's activity feed

2026-11-10T05:00:00.000Z

Appeared on:

"Episode 31: Seeing Through Tech Hype, with Molly White" (Podcast).

Adam Becker in Dreaming Against the Machine. November 10, 2026.

morning fog - James' Coffee Blog

2026-11-10T00:00:00.000Z

Opened curtains —
Field of fog envelops
The autumn day.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Foggy sky, look close
Only near trees visible:
Standing colour.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Ebbing weather
Temporary heavy air
Winter approaches.

Read "'Gotta be kidding me': Pentagon official reveals Hegseth's criteria for senior promotions" - Molly White's activity feed

2026-11-09T21:28:42.000Z

Read:

“'Gotta be kidding me': Pentagon official reveals Hegseth's criteria for senior promotions”.

Priya Sridhar in MS NOW. Published November 9, 2026.

A senior official exclusively told MS NOW how decorated military officers with decades of experience were withheld from promotion after Pentagon staff printed out internet searches showing they had attended official events like promoting Covid-19 vaccinations or marking International Women's Day.

Medium's new app looks a lot like an idea-sharing group chat - Werd I/O

2026-11-09T17:21:22.000Z

Link: Medium is launching a new note-taking app called TK, by David Pierce in The Verge

Medium is launching its new app, TK:

“The company is launching a new app, called TK, that combines note taking and journaling with something resembling a private social network. The app is meant to get you writing more, and help you share that writing with friends and fans. And it’s part of a much bigger idea about blogging, and a much broader thesis about the state of the internet.”

I’ve been using it for a while and it reminds me of some of my best experiences on the internet. It also contains a bit more AI than you’d expect to see in a writing app, but it doesn’t hinge on those features: for some people they’re useful ways to add more information, fill in blanks, or do some smart retrieval from notes you’ve already written, but you can get a great experience from TK without using it at all.

The Verge article notes that it’s a bit like group chat, and I think that’s right. The way I’d put it is this: if Medium (or any blog, including this one) is a magazine where complete pieces are published, TK represents the messy conversation, note-taking and idea-sharing that exists before that point. That’s an imperfect description, though, because a lot of this really is conversation: something that will never be a published thought. Some of the interactions remind me of LiveJournal at its height, which is probably the biggest compliment I can give to any new service.

That’s also why I’m not worried about it not operating on an open social web protocol. It’s intentionally closed for the right reasons, in the same way that my group chats are closed. These are ideas that I want to share with select people, not the world. And because of that, I’m more likely to be open, be wider with my thoughts, and share less-finished ideas. All of those are good things. And then, should you publish: yes, put it on your own domain, or somewhere like Medium, depending on your values and preferences.

I like it very much, is what I’m saying.

Blunt Banhammer Blocks Basic Bots Ballistically - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-11-09T12:34:00.000Z

I cut bot traffic to my site by over 80% with a simple trap.

Last month, my hobby website OpenBenches.org transferred more than 2.5TB of data to visitors. As much as I'd like to think the site is enormously popular, it looks like it is just AI bots endlessly crawling the data and slurping up the images.

So I've built B⁶ to be an indiscriminate tool to eradicate these unwanted parasites.

It is very loosely inspired by Jeff Starr's Blackhole, but works even on sites with heavy caching.

Here's the high level description of how it works.

Create a directory like /honeypot/ on your site
Put some code in index.php within the directory
Add the honeypot as an explicit "Disallow" in robots.txt
Include a hidden link to to the honeypot on every page of your site
If something accesses that page, write its IP address to your .htaccess
The .htaccess bans the IP address from ever accessing your site again.

This blog post shows you how you can build this yourself and discusses some of the problems it might cause.

Bad Robots!

The file robots.txt lives at the root of your website. It contains a list of instructions to automated web crawlers. Respectful bots will read it and refuse to look at specific parts of your site.

Add these two lines to it:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /honeypot/

That says bots shouldn't visit any page in the honeypot directory.

Bots generally check for updates every 24 hours, so either wait a day or manually submit it to major crawlers.

.htaccess

The .htaccess file contains a list of instructions for how your server should process requests.

Find the bit of your .htaccess file which looks like this:


        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteBase /

Edit it to look like this:


        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteBase /

### BLOCKED IPs
    #   TEST-NET-1
    RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} "=192.0.2.1"
    RewriteRule ^ - [R=402,L]
### /BLOCKED IPs

It is important that these rules come before any other rewrite rules.

Change the end of this IfModule to look like:



ErrorDocument 402 "Payment Required - Access Denied."

If an IP address is in the blocked IP list, the server will send an error code and a readable message. You can add whatever plain text you like here.

Wipe Them All Out

Inside the honeypot directory, create a file called index.php (or whatever you like). When this page is visited, it grabs the visitor's IP address and the name of its User Agent. It then places them in the BLOCKED IPs section.

//  What's their IP?
$IP = get_client_ip();

//  User Agent
$UA = isset( $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"] ) ? $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"] : "";

//  Get the existing .htaccess file.
$htaccess_file = "../.htaccess";
$htaccess = file_get_contents( $htaccess_file );

//  Split by newline.
$htaccess_lines = explode( separator: "\n", string: $htaccess );

//  Where's our start block?
$start = "###   BLOCKED IPs";
$end   = "###   /BLOCKED IPs";

//  Exit if the .htaccess doesn't have the block.
if ( !in_array( needle: $start, haystack: $htaccess_lines ) ) { die(); }

//  This is where to start from.
$start_block = array_search( needle: $start, haystack: $htaccess_lines );

//  Add the line after the start block.
//  Include a date.
$htaccess_lines[ $start_block ] = $start . "\n" . 
    "\t#\t" . date( "c" ) . "\t{$UA}\n" . 
    "\tRewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} \"={$IP}\" [OR]";

//  Turn the array back to a string.
$newHtaccess = implode( separator: "\n", array: $htaccess_lines );

//  Save the new .htaccess file.
file_put_contents( filename: $htaccess_file, data: $newHtaccess );

function get_client_ip():string
{
    //  Adapted from https://github.com/ibericode/koko-analytics/blob/main/src/Resources/functions/collect.php

    //  X-Forwarded-For sometimes contains a comma-separated list of IP addresses
    //  @see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/X-Forwarded-For
    $ips = empty( $_SERVER["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"] ) ?
        [] :
        \array_map( "trim", \explode( ",", $_SERVER["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"] ) );

    //  Always add REMOTE_ADDR and HTTP_CLIENT_IP to list of ip addresses, if set
    foreach ( ["REMOTE_ADDR", "HTTP_CLIENT_IP"] as $key ) {
        if ( !empty( $_SERVER[$key] ) ) {
            $ips[] = $_SERVER[$key];
        }
    }

    //  Return first valid IP address from list
    foreach ( $ips as $ip ) {
        if ( \filter_var( $ip, FILTER_VALIDATE_IP, FILTER_FLAG_NO_PRIV_RANGE | FILTER_FLAG_NO_RES_RANGE ) ) {
            return $ip;
        }
    }

    return "";
}

Setting The Trap

Web crawlers look at a page, find every link on it, then visit those links. So we need to put a link to the honeypot on every page - but in such a way that normal users will not find it or click it.

This adds a link, removes it from the accessibility tree, and gives it impossible to click text (a zero width joiner).

‍

This CSS hides it from normal viewers and removes the mouse cursor from view.

#honey {
    display: none !important;
    cursor:  none !important;
}

Problems This Might Cause

It's unlikely that a human will find the link, click on it, and be banned. But if they do, consider put a message in the blocking text telling them how they can get unblocked.

Some useful bots ignore robots.txt. If they identify themselves via a User-Agent string (and they should) you can manually remove them from .htaccess. You could also code in an allow list exemption for them. But, of course, many bad bots lie about who they really are.

Conversely, not all bots crawl every link. This won't catch bots which respect robots.txt but are nevertheless problematic.

If you have thousands of different bots blocked, the performance of your server might slow down while .htaccess is parsed. There's weak anecdotal evidence that it adds a slight overhead. But, personally, I don't think that's worth worrying about.

Bots often use hijacked IP addresses. After the bot has moved, an innocent party might be blocked from your site. Each block has a timestamp associated with it. You could periodically unblock older entries.

Bots rotate through hundreds of different IP addresses. So the same bot might get blocked multiple times.

Bots might see the CSS marks the link as hidden and refuse to follow it. Instead of CSS, you could use invisible spaces or other characters which would be hard for a human to see but appear visible to a bot.

Similarly, a smart bot might refuse to visit a path called /honeypot/ so choose a better name for it. A smarter bot would see that touching the honeypot leads to a ban - so perhaps a selection of traps are needed?

As is implied in the name, this is a blunt banhammer. It doesn't give a warning, nor does it look at User-Agent, Country, or any other signal. You touch the honeypot and you receive an instaban. No warning and no automated way to appeal.

Alternatives

There are alternative ways to do this. Some bots don't send language headers, some use older versions of HTTP, they often have severely outdated User Agent strings. Those are all reasonable ways to block something which is probably a bot. There are likely to be a few false positives though.

But B⁶ has no false positives. A normal user can't follow the link to the trap and a well-behaved bot won't follow the link.

Things like Anubis require a lot of work to set up and annoy normal users. B⁶ doesn't require a specific hosting environment and is never shown to normal users.

It Works!

Since running B⁶ a week ago, I've blocked over 400 IP addresses and seen a significant fall in traffic. I've not had any complaints yet. Sadly, none of the bots have paid to remove the paywall!

At peak, my site was seeing 216GB of data transfer per day. That's now dropped to around 25GB.

I don't claim this is the most sophisticated bot blocker in existence - but I enjoyed building it myself. I'll probably add something to records the geolocation of the IP and maybe remove any block older than a certain age.

If you'd like to use it or improve this code, I'd be grateful if you treated it as AGPL v3 licensed.

Jaffa Cake Jaffa Cam Review - Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed

2026-11-09T12:13:00.000Z

As a novelty camera enjoyer, I had to get my hands on a Jaffa Cake Jaffa cam. Just look at it.

For a penny short of seven english pounds you get the camera, the keyring, a USB A to C cable (A, really?), and a pack of Jaffa Cakes. You do have to provide your own micro SD card.

On turning it on you get a little jingle and a Jaffa Cake splash screen. Cute. I stuck in a 1GB one I had lying around and it said I could fit around 7500 images on it which gives you some idea of how low quality these photos are going to be — or maybe McVities have cracked a new compression algorithm that will change the world? Sadly, it's the former. The photos are 1920×1440.

Each of these photos, along with the other ones I took, I was as steady as I could be and the light was decent. I'm starting to think these types of cameras exist purely to disprove "the best camera is the one you have with you". I reckon I could draw better representations of these moments.

The camera also has filters, which I didn't use for any photos worth sharing, including a santa one and a beach scene but no jaffa cake one. What are they even doing here? Useless.

Interestingly the B&M camera that Ben has appears to be more or less the exact same camera based on the UI and version number formatting. You shouldn't buy that one either.

The only conclusion to be drawn is that £7 isn't enough to get a good camera. The Jaffa Cakes were good though.

2026-11-09 09:50: Just another day in Casa Quirk. 🤣 - Kev Quirk

2026-11-09T09:50:00.000Z

Just another day in Casa Quirk. 🤣

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

TGIF continues to prove valuable - Johnny.Decimal

2026-11-09T05:42:45.000Z

Our review process – 'Thank God I Filed It' – continues to prove its worth in uncovering duplicate information, clarifying the purpose of our categories, and refreshing our memory.

Categories are the heart of your system. If you can deeply understand, with absolute clarity, exactly what each of your categories is and isn't for, you'll find your information more easily, with less stress.

TGIF recap

As a recap, we first had the idea of regularly reviewing our system in early 2025 [0097]. Basically, you spend a bit of your okay I'm done with work and I just need to waste an hour before I pack up for the week time on Friday by going through your system, category-by-category, according to a schedule, and just giving it a bit of love.

Also see 0170, 0199, 0212.

Because knowledge doesn't look after itself. It atrophies. There's so much of it, you're creating and modifying it all day: you can't possibly hold it all in your mind.¹

You might think that you could outsource this work to your AI. And you could – but I'd argue that now you understand less about your business than you did before. You need to do the work for it to help your brain.

TGIF helps you to clarify purpose

Our business is a bit funny in that we use Johnny.Decimal to manage it, while at the same time being Johnny.Decimal, producing the system itself. It's very 'meta', which leads to some interesting decisions about how we manage our own data.

Lucy's TGIF revealed a discrepancy which led to us making a decision: category 24 Processes & procedures is for our internal processes & procedures. One of those is my 24.18 Email-sending checklist.²

'How I think about managing email' isn't here

I spend a lot of time thinking about how we – all, society – should manage email. This is something I've given hundreds of hours of thought to. It keeps coming up. Books are written. I don't think it'll ever be solved, because technology and our use of it continuously evolves.

So how I think about email is something that I consider to be part of our 21 Products & services. My thoughts on it, and the associated output, are one of the reasons you might follow me, and sign up. One of the next videos in the member's feed – likely a short series of them – will cover this topic.

I manage this at 21.53 Email, your opinions of and advice thereon.

What's important is the review

These details about my business won't be relevant to yours. What's important is the point that reviewing them – questioning them, giving them a poke, testing them this way and that way – this is what's going to give you a clearer mental model of your business.

It's unglamorous work. But I think it's really important.

I just did a word count on our business JDex: more than a quarter of a million words. ↩
Categories in this post are from the Small Business System. ↩

Weeknotes W4 - James' Coffee Blog

2026-11-09T00:00:00.000Z

Last weekend was so busy that I was too sleepy to write my weeknotes at my normal time. Thus, herein is a condensed version of my weeknotes.

Editorial note

In Weeknotes W1, I said that weeknotes would be a four-week-long experiment, with my writing one weeknote every week for four weeks. I have been enjoying the process, and so I think I am going to keep this going. I am not setting another goal, but will continue with this format for as long as I find it interesting.

Highlights of the week

Last week I:

Attended an academic conference online for the first time. I don’t think I was completely the target audience – there were so many words used that I have not yet encountered in my studies – but I enjoyed almost all of the talks to which I listened. The event was two days long. The only downside was that lunch was 30 minutes, and there wasn’t really another break between the rest of the talks.
Went to the Edinburgh Zine Fair. There were at least 20 vendors, collectively selling the widest variety of zines. I bought one zine that lists supermarket reviews of sardines, another on the introduction of Britain’s decimal currency, and a few more miscellaneous ones. The highlight of the event was getting to talk with other people who make zines. I asked one person how they made zines so small, and they shared that they like to use the pieces of paper left over. I love this concept, and feel inspired to try and make a few smaller zines.
Decided that I would participate in Writing Month. I am setting myself the goal of publishing one poem on my website every day this month. It has been going well so far. A side effect of this goal of trying to publish a poem every day is that I have many drafts of things that intrigued me but are not ready for publication. For the last few days, my poems have been haikus, a format I may write about in the future.
I made a few changes to Artemis:
- I moved to use the “lingua” Python package for language identification, which is being used to add the country code before a post title in Artemis if the post’s language is not my primary language. See “Brainstorming the multi-lingual reading experience for Artemis” for a write-up with background. This is only implemented for me right now, but I would like to roll it out to more people. To do so, I will need to add a feature for people to be able to set their default language, and a feature flag so people can toggle this on and off.
- I am working on code to turn words in a post title that appear all in upper case to sentence case, while trying my best to ensure abbreviations are not affected. I think it is going to take some time to get this right.
- I fixed a bug in the reading interface, and then fixed another bug introduced by my fix.
Visited a free exhibition at the Royal Academy of Scotland. I liked Paul Furneaux RSA’s “Sound of Water” (no date) and Waller Hugh Paton RSA’s “Ardentinny on the Clyde” (1872). The latter painting used colour in a way that reminded me vaguely of Seurat, although the ground was much more real than that in Seurat’s pointillist renderings.

This week I plan to focus on my upcoming art history assignment, look through as many of my notes as I can, and read some of the zines I got at the weekend.

Thoughts, wandering

Many of the notes below are copied from my notes this week, or are inspired by them.

The joy of the first smell of coffee in the morning.
I made things with paper before I made things with computers.
How a story or a song can hold us — the suspense of waiting for the next line in a song.
I visited a cafe with an old, red, telephone on the wall. The coffee was great. I wonder if that telephone works.
Baristas talking about Tumblr made me smile. It’s nice to hear people chatting about Tumblr. The cafe had matcha white chocolate cookie, chocolate tahini, chai loaf, jamaretti (TIL!) among other delicious treats. I got a matcha white chocolate cookie. It was so good!

Also:

Me: I have an idea for something I want to add to my website. Also me: Where do I begin? Still me: I have no idea where to begin. Now: It's TV time.

Miscellanea

Send in the clowns! Dreamlike images – in pictures is a wonderful collection of photography. I especially like the “New York City, 2018” photo with the lady walking across the street, the “Brussels, 2025” photo with the lady at the bar, and the “Brussels, 2022” photo that is an “homage to Edward Hopper’s iconic painting Nighthawks.”
I thought this video on “Dimensions of Programming” (14 years old now) was interesting.
This week I learned that there is a commercial history to Captain Scott’s British Antarctic Expedition. I haven’t read the linked paper, but watched a presentation on the topic at the aforementioned academic conference that referenced this paper.
I love the calendar on the Action for Happiness website (which I think I learned about via Frances’ website).
Jane Eyre has been translated more than 618 times. Prismatic Jane Eyre uses this as a basis for academic inquiry. (I haven’t looked too much into this beyond hearing a presentation this week, but it definitely feels worth linking here.)
I enjoyed Thamara’s post “Be silly, be unapologetic, be free”.
This week I learned kitchen foil does run out.
A message I sent in the IndieWeb chat this week:
- “We’re not the only people who talk about buying domains. I’m listening to an NFL podcast and the hosts are talking about buying a domain.” Quoting from the podcast:
  - What are we doing with this domain?”
  - “We’re going to start a Sumo league, Travis.”
- The podcast to which I was listening was New Heights. I ended up listening for an hour, and learned a lot.
I liked Jim’s write-up on “Addition by Subtraction”.
Shellsharks’ Scrolls newsletter (always a great read!) linked to a web page called “Audio Description in Art and Museums”, where the page’s author, Brett, has curated links related to the topic. I haven’t explored this much yet, but suffice to say I have many bookmarks as a result of this page.
I enjoyed the episode of In Our Time on The Evolution of Trees.

Action for Happiness website Addition by Subtraction Audio Description in Art and Museums Frances’ website lingua Brainstorming the multi-lingual reading experience for Artemis Prismatic Jane Eyre Shellsharks’ Scrolls newsletter Be silly, be unapologetic, be free The Evolution of Trees Sound of Water Ardentinny on the Clyde commercial history to Captain Scott’s British Antarctic Expedition Send in the clowns! Dreamlike images – in pictures New Heights Dimensions of Programming