#weeklyreview 20/2025

Good running on Sunday with Jan. Wasn’t as chilly as the week before.

bee stings

I was recording the buzzing of our bees in front of their hive when I got suddenly stung by one of the bees in the arm. Usually not a big deal for me. It hurts for a few hours but then it’s gone.

This time however I seem to have had some allergic reaction to the sting. My arm kept swelling until the next day and despite taking anti-histamine and applying cooling stayed pretty swollen. Only towards the end of the week it was mostly gone.

https://hub.uckermark.social/@maxheadroom/114490101484047978

Mac’n’Cheese

No, not the hardware from Cupertino. This time the American version of pasta topped with cheese. I tried the recipe for the first time. Quite heavy. Next time I need to use proper cheese with more taste and color. This was me just using what was available in the fridge.

Car service

This week I had to take my car in for it demanded oil service. Driving through the city is always fun – not. The good thing is… the dealership cleaned the car on the outside AND the inside for free

Hacker Stammtisch

After a pause last month due to other appointments I went to our monthly grey beard get-together. Hans enthusiastically explained how he wrote a mouse emulator for his latest hardware archeology project using AI code generation. And of course we all concluded that for the simple things AI code gen is useful. Especially for people who know what they’re doing. For all others … it will be the begin of disasters to unfold.

Traefik upgrade

Finally upgraded my Traefik instances to Traefik v3. Fortunately the only thing I had to remove in the config of the Traefik container itself was the InfluxDB I no longer use anyway. All other configuration just kept working.

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Cheap printing on T-Shirts

A few weeks ago I stumbled over YT video showing someone using bleach and 3D printed stamps to put logos on T-Shirts. Thought that is a neat idea and started to experimenting with it as well.

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Crisis mode

This is actually a post scriptum to last week. Since last year I was taking part in disaster recovery training for one of our departments located in India. In case the whole of India should be be unable to work a team in Europe and the US would have to take over the duties of that department until their capacity is restored. Since the department is redundantly set up in India we thought this scenario is highly unlikely. But nevertheless we did the training and even insisted on regular dry run sessions to practice and stay up-to-date.

Now last week that disaster recovery plan was actually activated in standby mode due to conflict between India & Pakistan.

And we’ve just recently seen in Europe that it’s not totally unlikely that a whole country goes offline.

Blocking AI Agents

I’m running all my services behind Traefik as reverse proxy. Lately I’ve got the impression that AI scrapers are making a up a good portion of my traffic and wanted to block them centrally. Services like Pixelfed and Mastodon bring their own robots.txt to address the problem. But others services do not. I fiddled a bit with Traefik config and think I’ve found a way to centrally serve a robots.txt file via Traefik for all my services.

I’m using a lean nginx:alpine container to serve this static file. I’ve set up the Traefik labels for this service so it matches the Path /robots.txt for all entry points. Explicitly not putting a Domain name rule. I also gave this rule a very high priority so it’s evaluated first in Traefik for incoming requests. This practically catches all requests for this URI for all my services. No I can centrally manage that file without having to update each individual service.

services:  robots:    image: nginx:alpine    container_name: robots-server    volumes:      - ./static/robots.txt:/usr/share/nginx/html/robots.txt:ro    labels:      - "traefik.enable=true"      # Router für *alle* Hosts + /robots.txt      - "traefik.http.routers.robots.rule=Path(`/robots.txt`)"      - "traefik.http.routers.robots.entrypoints=web,websecure"      - "traefik.http.routers.robots.priority=3000"      - "traefik.http.routers.robots.service=robots"      - "traefik.http.routers.robots.tls.certresolver=letsencrypt"      - "traefik.http.services.robots.loadbalancer.server.port=80"    networks:      - external_network

I also found a Plugin for Traefik meanwhile which claims to do just this: https://plugins.traefik.io/plugins/681b2f3fba3486128fc34fae/robots-txt-plugin

Also a GitHub Repo with a list of bots: https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt

The Traefik Plugin is using this repo … and might not work anymore since GitHub blocks anonymous access to public repos after a few requests.

Jugendweihe

On Saturday we attended the “Jugendweihe” (a secular coming-of-age ceremony of eastern Germany) celebrations of my niece. Really lovely lunch and even more awesome river cruise with a charter boat through Berlin. Although it was quite chilly outside on the upper deck we had fun nevertheless.

I was surprised to see so many herons along the river in the middle of the city. I counted more than 6 in the inner city area between Märkisches Viertel and Charlottenburg.

It’s a custom to give money as a gift for this special occasion. So I prepared a copy of “Das Kapital” of Karl Marx as a gift box.

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