My playfield design is SO close to being finished! Managed a lil’ session on design last night on the sofa thanks to the Vision Pro!
Started work on designing the ‘Backglass’ part of my virtual pinball table, where the scores go. First things first, making a beautiful production still of ‘Norbot’ turn into ‘Gnarlybot’ via good old layer masks, adjustment layers and shape blends!
just setting up my srvr
Martina Flor’s Open Studio
• Martina Flor
Gustavo Ferrari: Tradition and Innovation in Fileteado Porteño Sign Painting
Join us in this episode with Gustavo Ferrari, a renowned fileteador and sign painter from Buenos Aires.Gustavo shares his journey from a history student to a master of the traditional Argentine art of fileteado, discussing how this vibrant craft has shaped his life and career...
“Why don’t you put your site behind Cloudflare to deal with those LLM bots?”
Okay, they’re back – that was quick this time… 😁
New Dawesome Digest going out tomorrow. Sign up here https://substack.com/@brendandawes?r=dgruy&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile
Tom Stoppard #RIP
The improbability of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and the way scenes from Hamlet are woven into the narrative, captivated me the first time I read it, and made me a Stoppard fan for life.
Work’s super busy and at night I’ve been juggling a few passion projects so haven’t had any time for vpinball… until tonight!
Earlier this year I had the absolute pleasure of speaking at @marcthiele.com's BEYOND TELLERRAND festival in Düsseldorf, you can watch me whole talk right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmTNxGwdnIo
If you’re into #audio #plugins: Universal Audio is giving away a free plugin right now – options include many classics like the LA-2A, 1176, Pultec EQ, Galaxy Tape Echo, the (great-sounding!) PolyMAX Synth, and more. 🎛️✨
https://www.uaudio.com/products/pick-one-free-plug-in
My son was just trying to find the right tempo for a song he’s playing on the violin. So I started to clap in time.
I’m his dadronome.
Delighted to learn that my Accessibility and the Agentic Web post was included in the first edition of a new newsletter for the design curious, thoughtfully curated by Siddharth Jha:
https://subgrid.kit.com/posts/subgrid-issue-001
Thanks to my friend Liz, who created this awesome “kickflippin’ chicken” illustration, I’ve now got a bit of Feathers action going on in my virtual pinball table. That grey skull ‘grip tape’ will actually have a flashing pinball light behind it, so it should look rad!
It feels really wrong – and also a bit naive and crude – that I am now forced to block individual IPs and even countries like CN, RU, or UA (💙💛) to mitigate the current LLM bot “DDoS attack” on my site. This shouldn't be something I have to do manually in my .htaccess IMHO—that’s firewall territory.
In my current shared web hosting setup, I am not “owning” my web enough to be able to change server settings, access more detailed monitoring tools, or try tools like Anubis (https://anubis.techaro.lol/). So I’ll probably tackle a move of my website to a managed server very soon. 😅
Alright – my site seems to be working again for now. After I added a few filter rules to my .htaccess that block a few countries with high bot and spam traffic (like CN, RU, BY, KP, IR) as well as quite a few IPs of LLM bots and crawlers, the all-inkl.com support team removed their filter again! So I'm happy to report that my site should be accessible from countries like Canada, the Netherlands, Czechia, and Costa Rica again. 😊
Somehow, I'm still seeing an error for Coventry, UK when checking with https://check-host.net/. But I’m writing this from a London (VPN) IP address and just opened my site, holding a teacup. So I hope my friends in the UK can access the site again as well? Or is the site returning “🫖”? 🧐
Anyway, glad everything seems to be working for now. Although it feels weird to have to mitigate and manage this stuff myself in the .htaccess…
Good night, everyone! And thanks for all the kind replies and the suggestions! 🤗💚