The Tar Pit

The tar pit got a new feature; the attack map. Since every website that is publicly facing gets probed to hell and back I have worked on a tar pit for this site and others I manage. I am sure that the site isn't hack proof but since it is bespoke it is at least resistant to automated probes. Gathering data from them has been a fun experiment but I wanted to see a little more. I was already fetching geo location from the IP so I put it on a map:

This map is kind of useful because it gives me a visual representation of where attacks are coming from. The other part of it is more useful and that is the hosting provider that these automated probes originate from:

I have it set up to sort them by number of probes but it also displays the number of IP addresses that have probed from that service. This is more useful because hosting services are not typically a person browsing the web for poorly written blogs like this one. They host things for customers. So I can block their entire IP range if they turn out to be egregious sources of probe attempts.Same goes for VPN providers.

The Witch

The Witch has received massive updates. I've added campaign hubs for collaborative notes, achievements for community engagement, outreach for messaging inactive members, a soundboard that works through the website and bot to play sounds for people, and expanded the lfg tool to help match players to games, and safety tools to help GMs and players avoid sensitive content and uncomfortable situations.

# The Meat Mines I think I have a pretty solid adventure framework made. I am going to shift to editing and revising before doing layout and then talking to people about crowd funding and publishing.

Roid Rat Fighting League

Haven't touched this since the initial ideation. I will get back to it soon.

This Site

I got sick of the terminal BBS look pretty quick and stole GitHub's look. Its nice and clean and more importantly readable. I tried to look at ways to do package tracking but getting to the APIs just wasn't worth the effort for tracking a few packages a month.

Physical Projects

Working with microcontrollers again! I've got VSCode set up to program ESP32 boards and I'm going to work on a cosplay prosthetic. Not tied to anything specific, just something fun. A brain tumor with a moving eye on a fleshy tendril.

I looked up how people make movable tentacles and its almost exactly how I made a cat laser a few years ago. I will use 2 servos that control the tension on 4 wires that run through a flexible shaft. The tension in the wires will be able to give it a full range of motion and I can use the same method to generate a set of random coordinates to have the eye move to with variable speeds.

With an ESP32 I can also add manual control via a Bluetooth joystick. I'm looking at some cheap ones to try out. and the main consideration is whether I get a button input or a variable from the joystick. If I get a variable number, like between positive 1 and negative 1, I can use the controller to control both direction and speed. If not I can use other buttons to set speed of motion.

D&D

I am on-boarding new players into an ongoing campaign. This involves taking their backstory and iterating on it with them to make it better.