Archive for the 'Site Updates' Category

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Hotlinkers!

Published on 7/7/2005 in Site Updates. 0 Comments

I discovered that many people have been hotlinking images from my site, basically stealing my bandwidth. For some reason, this picture of a beer keg from my homebrewing page is very popular. Stolen Beer Keg Image.

I only just noticed this, because the hotlinkers were buried way down in my referrer log, under an avalanche of referrer-spam. For some reason, the referrer spammers appear to have given up, I don’t see nearly so many referrals from online poker shitheads anymore.

I just turned on the “hotlink protection” feature of my web hosting service, which will immediately result in broken images for all the people who have linked my keg. It will be interesting to see how much my bandwidth drops off after this.

Behringer Patchbay Labels

Published on 5/18/2005 in Music and Site Updates. 3 Comments

I have added a page to my project-studio pages about how I created labels for my Behringer PX3000 patchbay. I have also provided the MS Word template for the betterment of mankind. That’s just the kind of guy I am.

They look pretty good, if I do say so myself…

Patchbay Labels

Strange Noises in the Basement

Published on 4/17/2005 in Music and Site Updates. 0 Comments

I have just updated my Music page, removing the links to a bunch of our crappier stuff, and adding a whole lot of good new material that was recorded over the last year. We’re getting better, I think, at making shorter pieces (where short means around 7 minutes… at least it’s better than 20.)

I love this improvised stuff. It’s amazing sometimes what kinds of things can emerge spontaneously, once the right mood is found. Often, it takes hours of pointless noodling (all recorded for posterity, of course), to find that nugget of collective inspiration. Our best jams always leave me surprised and puzzled by what we just did. And often surprised that I actually found the talent to hold up my end of the music.

The new music is mostly done by my brother, his friend Jari (who used to play bass for a fairly well-known band called Warsaw Pack), and myself. Matt and Jari play improvised shows in Hamilton sometimes, going by the name “Hellephant.” So, that’s the name I’ve given to these tunes. Other guests pop in now and then, most recently, Chad Faragher dropped by to add keyboard parts to Hancock Knot for us.

The new Hellephant songs are Accelerando Jam, Plant Food – Phase I, Plant Food – Phase II, El Gusano, Hellephantom, and Hancock Knot (or it’s backing tracks).

There’s more information about each track on the music page.

The end of my comment spam!

Published on 2/24/2005 in Site Updates. 0 Comments

I’m delighted to report that as of Feb. 20, when I changed all old articles to disallow pings, I have been 100% comment-spam-free!

On the other hand, I have also been 100% comment free, but that’s normal. I think since I started this blog, I’ve only ever had one legitimate comment. But that’s ok with me, I have enough hobbies already, without having to spend a lot of time on blog maintenance.

Captcha!

Published on 2/20/2005 in Site Updates. 7 Comments

Continuing my struggle against comment-spam… I just installed a “captcha” plug-in, called AuthImage.

Try to add a comment, you’ll see the captcha in action. Personally, I’m finding some of these captchas rather difficult to read myself, they are often rather off-centre in the image and chopped off at the bottom. But if they keep that online-poker shit-head out of my moderation queue (by himself, he accounts for 90% of my comment-moderation workload), then it’s worth it.

Captchas are not an effective solution for “trackback” spam, but I have not enabled that at all. I don’t really know what RSS, trackbacks and pingbacks are all about. Can’t be bothered with any of it. I think I’ll allow pings on this post, just to see what happens. They will, of course, go into moderation as usual.

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