Blocking link referral spam with nginx

Over at the official website for the At Least You're Trying Podcast, I've been seeing lots of weird Russian domains appear in the analytics reports. Some of the domains are Darodar.com, Blackhatworth.com, and Hulfingtonpost.com. Have a look at the large contingent of Russian visits (yes, I am…

Standing Desk Situation

I like standing. I've been standing in front of my computers for a few years now, and while my feet might feel tired at the end of the day, my back and hips are less stiff. This is anecdotal, I'm not going to tell you that you're going to get…

windows explorer renames files with lower case

Are you a windows user who suddenly finds one or more of your files have been mysteriously renamed using all lower-case letters? Note, this occurred on a Windows 7 system, but I'm unsure what updates may have been installed at the time because now I can't duplicate the bug anymore.…

vim and vigor

This post represents some notes and thoughts while learning vim. It's been updated and rearranged countless times, so it might seem a little disjointed. Note, I originally started writing this sometime around 8-15-2012... I'm finally learning how to use VIM. It's quite possibly the most geekily arcane thing I've ever…

Open science

Can science get more open? I mean really in the open. Peer reviewed publications came about as a way to disseminate and review knowledge. That's great but their time may have passed. I think a decent web platform can do all of that and more for science. Maybe the process…

Docker setup for containerized ghost blogs

Toward the end of 2013, I was shopping around for some kind of system to use for my personal blog. The easy choice was (and probably still is) WordPress. I've never been one to do anything the easy way and I didn't want to deal with any of the PHP,…