Right above Dat Boi is the Distracted Boyfriend meme.

Given the look on its face, the owl may be an O Rly?

I’m drawing a blank on the egg and its army, and the guy in the group of four with the nice hat.

It’s also an incredibly stupid bureaucratic clusterfuck of the magnitude that only customs and border people can achieve. Surely there should be some mechanism wherein you can send a letter or something to the Russian authorities to inform them, “Hey, we’re trying this stupid stunt and here is our plan, let us make our declarations now and we’ll pick up all the paperwork on the way once we get there.” But there probably isn’t, and then you wind up with crap like this.

The tinniest of tin-pot jumped up little dictators are never to actually be found in your nation’s capital. Instead they’re all lined up along its borders acting like these various lines in the sand were laser-etched there by god and aren’t ultimately just arbitrary and, indeed, historically much more fluid than they’d like to pretend.

Same way I didn’t know about the -U update parameter, I’ll bet you. You ask yt-dlp to list its flags and arguments and it spits out a listing into your console that’s about nineteen miles long because apparently it can do anything.

The only command line tool I use regularly that’s comparably capable and even more byzantine is ImageMagick.

I generally upvote stuff to reward engagement and effort. Anything I pass by that looks like a creative work someone is putting forth themselves I’ll upvote. Also pretty much any response to anything I post or comment on. Often times comments I respond to as well.

I only downvote utter bullshit, i.e. people spouting things that are categorically not true, or bad faith arguments, or just people being argumentative in general when there’s no reason to be so.

I don’t give enough of a flying fuck if we hypothetically disagree, only if your position is so odious that it is in fact literally objectively wrong or intentionally misleading.

Or utterly useless bots that no one asked for. I’ll downvote those, too, but I haven’t seen too many of them anymore in the corners that I regularly haunt.

Who wants to be the first to martyr themselves getting turned into Swiss cheese after firing the first shot? Is it you? Why not?

That is your answer.

Well, fuck. Just at this exact second you’ve taught me that I’ve been doing that the hard way for ages, by actually going to the project’s github page.

Anyway, another shout out for yt-dlp regardless. I get a giggle every time I see one of those sporadic news articles involving the music recording industry still whinging about piracy. Er, the record labels themselves pathologically post every single track ever recorded to Youtube to rake in that ad revenue, and it’s all free for the taking. If you decide you’d like to be proud owner of any of them forever you can just hit it with the ol’ yt-dlp -x.

I am continually amazed at the number of non-Youtube sources that yt-dlp Just Works with as well. It seems any video content posted online that you’d like to gaff can be handily vacuumed up with it, regardless of the site operator’s desperate attempts to prevent you from doing so.

You can be preemptively banned from a community or even an instance if the mods and/or operator have decided they don’t like you. The open source nature of the Fediverse being what it is, various tools and clients have been developed that allow select individuals with whackmobile hobby-horse viewpoints with varying degrees of insanity to sweep users’ post and comment histories for opinions or keywords they disagree with, singling you out to add to their ban lists. Merely being known to associate with the “wrong” instance (lemmy.ml and hexbear are popular targets) can score you a ban even if you’ve never posted anything at all.

Ostensibly this type of capability is supposed to be beneficial for keeping known bad actors and bots out of our spaces. But human nature being what it is, more prosaically it’s often used by instance operators or community moderators to… let’s just say, self-gratify themselves over the notion of getting back at their perceived enemies from a position of safety and no repercussions, in order to Teach Them All A Lesson or whatever the hell.

Some people even purposefully create ragebait communities with the express purpose of enticing others to comment there so that the creator can get their rocks off by being nasty to the participants and have a little power trip over banning everybody. We had a rather prominent one of those right here earlier in the year, in fact, which I now notice appears to be gone.

The Internet remains, as ever, a strange place.

IP Over Avian Carriers.

Aperture wide open … Small depth of field is ok.

Be mindful of vignetting around the edges of your lens. Unless you have very expensive glass, it’s likely you can’t get both the center and the edges of your frame in focus at the same time when shooting at a flat surface a short distance away from the lens thanks to our good old friend spherical aberration, and it’s even less likely if you have it wide open. There’s probably no harm in stopping down slightly and taking a longer exposure to compensate for this as much as you can, because your photos aren’t going to move. You might want to take a couple of test shots against a grid background or something to determine just how large the sweet spot of your particular lens is at that distance.

You can avoid this by backing the camera up from the subject some more, too, but I figure if you’re trying to preserve photos by taking further photos of them, you probably want to get as many of your sensor’s pixels across them as possible.

Use a tripod (any old).

I don’t know about yours, but none of my tripods are capable of pointing straight down and truly getting the camera perpendicular to the surface they’re standing on without the center barrel of the tripod itself being right spang in the middle of the frame just below the horizontal centerline. And that’s even if the head on your tripod can tilt down a full 90 degrees at all, and without some part of your camera or lens bonking into it. Even extending the idiot stick won’t help you any, because the mount and pivot head is out at the end of it rather than before the point where it extends from. (Maybe some kind of high dollar, high speed David Attenborough top flight pro rig tripod has a second pivot placed before the extension tube, but I’ve certainly never owned one set up that way.) When I have to do a true top-down shot for one of my myriad reviews, I always wind up hand holding the camera for that very reason.

Other gimcrack ideas involving 2x4s and spirit levels and 1/4-20 screws or mirrors suggest themselves, but the realistic outcome with a normal tripod is that you’ll wind up with your camera not quite square to the table and thus all of your photos-of-photos will wind up keystoned to some degree and this will drive you nuts. Perhaps you’d have better luck and spend less money just propping up one end of the surface you’re putting your subject photos on to get it perpendicular to the lens without getting any of the tripod itself in the shot.

Users with access to a remote shutter release can dispense with the self timer trick (but hey, I don’t knock it — I used to use the 2 second self timer on my camera as a vibration settling delay all the time when I was young and broke) and make their workflow speedier and significantly less annoying.

Penguins are cool. I ride dual sport motorcycles. (And other motorcycles. But definitely those.)

“You yadda-yaddad a homie stock? You can’t yadda-yadda a homie stock!”

Well, my answer is nothing, and as anyone who follows me knows, seeing me not buy any random novelty cutlery trash from China has certainly got to count for something.

Are we still doing “Oh, exploitable?”

Uh-huh. Now ask it how to center a div vertically.

In my case the pattern appears to be some manner of DDoS botnet, probably not an AI scraper. The request origins are way too widespread and none of them resolve down to anything that’s obviously datacenters or any sort of commercial enterprise. It seems to be a horde of devices in consumer IP ranges that have probably be compromised by some malware package or another, and whoever is controlling it directed it at our site for some reason. It’s possible that some bad actor is using a similar malware/bot farm arrangement to scrape for AI training, but I’d doubt it. It doesn’t fit the pattern from that sort of thing from what I’ve seen.

Anyway, my script’s been playing automated whack-a-mole with their addresses and steadily filtering them all out, and I geoblocked the countries where the largest numbers of offenders were. (“This is a bad practice!” I hear the hue and cry from specific strains of bearded louts on the Internet. That says maybe, but I don’t ship to Brazil or Singapore or India, so I don’t particularly care. If someone insists on connecting through a VPN from one of those regions for some reason, that’s their own lookout.)

They seem to have more or less run out of compromised devices to throw at our server, so now I only see one such request every few minutes rather than hundreds per second. I shudder to think how long my firewall’s block list is by now.

I have and there’s nothing noteworthy, other than tons of other retailers selling the same thing of course.

It doesn’t quite work that way, since the URL is also the model number/SKU which comes from the manufacturer. I suppose I could write an alias for just that product but it would become rather confusing.

What I did experiment with was temporarily deleting the product altogether for a day or two. (We barely ever sell it. Maybe 1 or 2 units of it a year. This is no great loss in the name of science.) This causes our page to return a 404 when you try to request it. The bots blithely ignored this, and continued attempting to hammer that nonexistent page all the same. Puzzling.

It is, but none of the four bus drivers have all of the information. You will also need two or three cops or at least guys in fluorescent vests to physically block traffic from entering the circle and or bitch-slap selfish asshats as necessary until the Gordian knot of buses is untied, otherwise said selfish asshats will try to barge into the intersection the second the first bus moves and start everything all over again.

Maybe, but I also carry literally hundreds of other products from that same brand including several that are basically identical with trivial differences, and they’re only picking on that one particular SKU.

Negative. Our solution is completely home grown. All artisinal-like, from scratch. I can’t imagine I reveal anything anyone would care about much except product specs, and our inventory and pricing really doesn’t change very frequently.

Even so, you think someone bothering to run a botnet to hound our site would distribute page loads across all of our products, right? Not just one. It’s nonsensical.