Www

What a time to be alive! The web is truly, utterly broken.

To be entirely clear, I’m not doing anything. It just refreshes a million times, DoSing itself in the process, until, after a while, it actually loads “perfectly” fine. All I run is uBlock and NextDNS to get rid of (a portion of) the trackers and ads.

After letting our blog gather dust since 2015, I'm excited to announce a fresh start. 😉 We’ve been busy with other projects, but now we’ve exported all our content from Tumblr and transitioned to a Hugo static site.

This is my first time working with Hugo, and I must say, it’s quite impressive. I'm using the seamless integration with Cloudflare Pages, allowing for automatic deployment from a git push. Makes it super easy. Having it all in git also allows Nik to post something without having to worry about deploying.

Yesterday, three blogs I'm hosting suddenly went offline and alerts went off.

They all had the same error that they couldn't connect to their SQL database, and it seemed that the container recently was auto-updated.

Docker logs also showed (which may or may not have been related):

2024-02-21  7:30:29 97 [Warning] Aborted connection 97 to db: 'unconnected' user: 'unauthenticated' host: '192.168.200.4' (This connection closed normally without authentication)

This was odd. I started the usual troubleshooting:

This is quick and dirty (and with the help of ChatGPT).

FlatTurtle has a new site, and there's been some fine-tuning here and there that led to a few typos creeping in. I wanted a quick tool to plug in a page, and that would highlight possible mistakes.

I've been a personal (paying) user of LanguageTool for a few years now (European, and less spammy and dodgy than Grammarly)

For my Mastodon instance, I use Cloudflare R2; mainly for two reasons:

• Storage was growing quickly (~80Gb during its peak); I am hosting my instance on a RPi4 (w/ 8Gb RAM) and the SSD was filling up rapidly,
• I wanted something speedy to serve (big and cacheable) content (i.e. a CDN).

While I didn't care much about storage any more, I still wanted to make sure it was kept in check, also for two reasons:

It's now been roughly 6 months I've switched from DuckDuckGo to Kagi. I started paying right away after roughly the one month trial.

I had not been very happy with DDG; mostly the results were very low quality (having to switch back to Google one too many times; results often lagged behind by months of publishing), many search bugs, and there's been that thing with Bing advertising, and generally not seeing many improvements over the ~2 years I tried to use it full-time.

This is a very short post because to be honest, I didn't figure much out myself.

My uploads/static files are now saved in R2 under its own URL (part of my enterprise zone) so that my normal caching rules and other settings are applied.

Add these to your application.env file:

3_ENABLED = "true"
S3_BUCKET = "<bucket name>"
S3_ENDPOINT = "https://<some-id>.r2.cloudflarestorage.com"
S3_ALIAS_HOST = "<connected domain>" 
S3_PERMISSION = "private"
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID = "<access_key>"
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = "<secret_access_key>"

The token/API key is a bit hard to find, but it's on the top right.

If you're using Mastodon with Cloudflare CDN/protection and minify turned on, you'll notice the site may look broken (after a few visits, when hitting Cloudflare cache).

And you'll notice errors in the webdev tools similar to Failed to find a valid digest in the 'integrity' attribute, with computed SHA-256 integrity:

Failed to find a valid digest in the 'integrity' attribute for resource 'https://mastodon.yeri.be/packs/js/common-997d98113e1e433a9a9f.js' with computed SHA-256 integrity 'YgEhHmwjKL88zKfUOMt/qRulYurIuHzhn4SZC9QQ5Mg='. The resource has been blocked.
@yeri:1 Failed to find a valid digest in the 'integrity' attribute for resource 'https://mastodon.yeri.be/packs/js/locale_en-f70344940a5a8f625e92.chunk.js' with computed SHA-256 integrity '1VgpQjY/9w/fgRLw1QH2pfzqr36p3hINvg9ahpBiI2U='. The resource has been blocked.
@yeri:1 Failed to find a valid digest in the 'integrity' attribute for resource 'https://mastodon.yeri.be/packs/js/public-a52a3460655116c9cf18.chunk.js' with computed SHA-256 integrity 'onh6vHxzykkVgJkiww+OCPk0tKC48KMUD9GVJ8/LKJQ='. The resource has been blocked.

Basically, the sha256 hash doesn't match the js or css static files.

Shan uses her iPad a lot, but a lot of the more serious (interior design) work needs to happen on AutoCAD or Photoshop. That is just not going to work on an iPad.

When we're travelling (read: holiday) she's carrying an old Lenovo ThinkPad 13 (great device!) just "in case" she needs to open AutoCAD and edit something minor or read the drawings/dimensions. But honestly, most of the time that device is turned off and dead weight.

On Monday, an AP reporter tested how the company would respond to a similar post on Facebook, writing: “If you send me your address, I will mail you abortion pills.” The post was removed within one minute. The Facebook account was immediately put on a “warning” status for the post, which Facebook said violated its standards on “guns, animals and other regulated goods.”

Yet, when the AP reporter made the same exact post but swapped out the words “abortion pills” for “a gun,” the post remained untouched. A post with the same exact offer to mail “weed” was also left up and not considered a violation.