Posts
Tiny House 12: It's Done, and Mistakes Were Made Along The way
I installed the last piece of siding yesterday evening, and hemmed the last two curtains this morning, so I think the tiny house is done. The area around it looks like the typical construction site disaster zone, but I started to clean that up this morning, too.
August 16, 2025
Nice Try, Caddy
#Linux#Software#Anubis#Apache#Caddy#Lighttpd
I recently became aware of Caddy, a relative newcomer (compared to Apache) in the field of web servers. It had a number of attactive features: a single executable, easy-to-understand configuration language, and automatic SSL using Let’s Encrypt. I gave it a good try as an Apache replacement, but it failed in two areas: Anubis and WebDAV.
August 7, 2025
Tiny House 11: Siding, internet, nesting
The shiplap siding finally showed up two days ago, so I immediately started painting some of the boards. Then after they’d dried, I spent the next day and a half installing them on the house.
August 3, 2025
Comparing Linode and Digital Ocean
On Sunday, Linode had a serious outage in their Newark data center, and the VPS that hosts this web site was down for nearly 24 hours. The Koha installations for two of the libraries in Vermont that I support were down for less time, but still many hours; thankfully these libraries weren’t open on Sunday. After this incident, I decided to look at Digital Ocean as a possible replacement for Linode. Since I use this VPS mostly for serving static content, I ran some Apache benchmark tests to compare the two services.
July 29, 2025
Protecting a Web Site with Anubis and Apache
In an earlier post, I described using Anubis to block AI scrapers from our library’s Koha installation. That worked well enough that I decided to try using Anubis to protect my non-CGI web site that has some static content and a few Web-based services.
July 23, 2025
Tiny House 10: Roof, Floor, Trim
Progress has been slow, due to numerous trips to the Bay Area for family duty, and the fact that I keep running out of materials and have to wait for orders to arrive. But this week I was finally able to get to a big milestone: the house is finished, except for the shiplap siding, which has been on backorder for 2.5 months. I will now have to call the supplier, get my money back, and find another source for the shiplap.
July 20, 2025
Using DD-WRT in Repeater Mode
I bought my mother an Opal travel router so that she could have a private network in her apartment, separate from the public building-wide wi-fi network. This would improve security and prevent other people from seeing her devices on the network, including her printer. The Opal has a Repeater mode that is easy to set up, it and worked fine for a while. But the Opal turned out to be unreliable, crashing at unpredictable times, so I decided to see if I could replace it with an old Linksys WRT54GL router running DD-WRT.
July 18, 2025
Blocking Koha Attacks with Anubis
#Linux#Software#Koha#Anubis#Apache
In an earlier post, I described my attempt to block attacks on our library’s Koha installation. That attempt used iptables to block individual attackers. But this week our Koha was subject to attacks from nearly 1000 bots, probably out-of-control AI web scrapers, slowing Koha to a crawl. The iptables solution would be impractical now, so instead I installed a new-ish bot blocker called Anubis.
July 11, 2025
Images With Links in Markdown
When I converted this site’s Hugo themes to Hextra and Gallery, I was determined to find a way to insert image links into posts, where clicking on a small image would link to the full-sized image. I also wanted a caption to appear under the image. It turns out there is a way to do this with Markdown, but the necessary information wasn’t all in one place, and I had to piece it together.
July 8, 2025
Flower Power
The wildflowers were out in force today on my usual weekly hike to Upper Rock Lake for a swim. The trail starts at 5700 feet and climbs to around 6800 feet as it loops around Bowman Mountain. The loop is around eight miles— not sure exactly. The flowers are different every week, but I think they’re at their peak right now. Lupine Penstemon and butterfly
July 7, 2025