All the couples are back for a wedding in Las Vegas, but plans for a romantic weekend go awry when their various misadventures get them into some compromising situations that threaten to derail the big event.
In the evening Alice, Esme, and I watched Think Like a Man Too. We soon realised it was a sequel to a movie we hadn't seen. I didn't like the movie much, the trailer was about the funniest part. I give it a 5 out of 10.
In the early afternoon I finished Fatal Intrusion by Jeffery Deaver and Isabella Maldonado. I was disappointed by this book. Mostly because of the Hollywoodesque portraying of computer related "skills". For example, what does
I ran one of my traceroute programs and whaleboned through the proxies
even mean?
Always apprehensive about working fire scenes, Tempe is called to Washington, DC, to analyze the victims of a deadly blaze and sees her misgivings justified. The devastated building is in Foggy Bottom, a neighborhood with a colorful past and present, and Tempe becomes suspicious about the property’s ownership when she delves into its history.
The pieces start falling into place strangely and quickly, and, sensing a good story, Tempe teams with a new ally, telejournalist Ivy Doyle. Soon the duo learns that back in the thirties and forties the home was the hangout of a group of bootleggers and racketeers known as the Foggy Bottom Gang. Though interesting, this fact seems irrelevant—until the son of a Foggy Bottom gang member is shot dead at his home in an affluent part of the district. Coincidence? Targeted attacks? So many questions.
As Tempe and Ivy dig deeper, an arrest is finally made. Then another Foggy Bottom Gang-linked property burns to the ground, claiming one more victim. Slowly, Tempe’s instincts begin pointing to the obvious: somehow, her moves since coming to Washington have been anticipated, and every path forward seems to bring with it a lethal threat.
In the evening I started to read Fire and Bones by Kathy Reichs.
An astronaut becomes stranded on Mars after his team assume him dead, and must rely on his ingenuity to find a way to signal to Earth that he is alive and can survive until a potential rescue.
In the evening Jaiden, Esme, and I watched The Martian. Esme and I had seen this movie already years ago but wanted to watch it again. I really liked the movie and give it a solid 8 out of 10.
Today, while waiting for my iPhone SE to update to iOS 18, I tailed the access log of Plurrrr. I noticed that I got many requests by crawlers announcing themselves as Bytespider and as SemrushBot. I decided to return a HTTP status code of 403 Forbidden to those bots.
To achieve this I added the following to a server section :
if ($http_user_agent
~* "SemrushBot|Bytespider") {
return 403;
}
The above code has been formatted to fit the width of this blog.
The if statement tries to match in a case insensitive way one of
either SemrushBot or Bytespider. If there is a match a 403
Forbidden is returned to the bot.
Note that you can add as many bots as you like by adding another pipe symbol followed by the name of the bot as stated in its user agent string.
After I had added the above code I verified the configuration files
using nginx -t. When no error was reported I issued systemctl reload nginx to reload the configuration files into Nginx.
Hopefully, this will reduce the amount of traffic I am getting from those two bots.
Finally, another option is to slow down those bots by using the
limit_rate directive. This limits the rate of response transmission
to a client.