A few years ago I decided to get a routine skin checkup (you know, check out all my weird bumps and spots to see if any of them are trying to kill me). My doctor recommended a nearby location, Mystic Valley Dermatology, which is apparently a branch of APDerm, some kind of regional dermatology network. Honestly, it was just the closest place.

...but today I'm recommending that you find some other, less shady dermatology practice. You're not going to see anything totally egregious in this post, but I'm hoping that if you take my advice, you'll find a practice that's more respectful, and more focused on medicine than on selling you shit.

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After my fourth Bontrager bike headlight died too soon, I've made the switch to Fenix. While it's too early to have personal experience with the durability of Fenix, I'm really happy with the switch, and I wish I had done it sooner—it's clear that Fenix stands behind their products in a way that Bontrager/Trek does not.

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Yesterday I installed updates on my Ubuntu 24.04 work laptop and rebooted, and was annoyed to find that I was being logged into the Unity desktop, not XFCE. Not only that, but after logging out again I discovered that there wasn't even an option for selecting XFCE. The login screen also looked different.

The solution seemed to be to select a different greeter. More details under the cut.

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Over this winter break I've had some more time to work on Cavern, the social journaling protocol I've been developing intermittently for a few years now. If you're not familiar with it, it takes some inspiration from blogs, feed readers, dead-drops, IPFS, Dreamwidth, and self-hosting sensibilities.

It's pretty quixotic but I think it could meet the needs of a bunch of people. I don't get as much time to work on it as I would like, but I've been putting more time into it recently and I thought I'd make some notes on what I've been up to.

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Inspired by Foone's suggestion this week I decided to start serving poisoned versions of my blog posts to any AI scrapers that I could identify—because I don't think it's enough to politely ask them to stop with a robots.txt file. They've already scraped my posts without asking; it's too late to undo that. But maybe I can hurt them just a little bit, going forward.

This post is about the technical side of implementing this.

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We have some slightly odd Easter traditions in my household. This year I made it a little weirder.

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I received some Blink outdoor security cameras a while ago but haven't been able to make use of them because they require a smartphone and internet access to set up, and I don't have a smartphone and don't want these things streaming video of my comings and goings to Amazon.

According to what I've read, I should be able to turn off cloud streaming and have the cameras instead stream to the sync module, which will store videos on a thumb drive. That's what I'd like to do, but without the cloud connection. Maybe I could set them up on a temporary wifi network and then remove their internet access again? But again, I don't have a smartphone. I'd have to borrow one.

In the meantime. I've decided to try reverse-engineering them to see if I can make them into something useful—and also just for the fun of it. I haven't succeeded, but I've made a little bit of progress, so I'm posting what I have in the hopes that someone else will be able to build on it.

I'll update if I learn more.

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