Pretty much immediately after sending the last issue, my website was hit with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.  Apologies if this prevented you from reading any of the content.  This attack went on for days and I'm not sure what the purpose was.  One of the reasons I stopped building Android apps was because my apps were repeatedly targeted by similar attacks in an effort to shutdown my Google Ads account.  I probably had my ads account suspended (and lost all money that wasn't yet paid out) at least 12 times before I finally decided I'd had enough.  Fortunately, Google's web based ad network doesn't appear to be as easily exploited (or else no one has tried to do that to me yet).

Before this attack, I never really considered my website 'critical'.  Because of this, I never really spent the effort to protect it from this style of attack.  After my site was down or unusable for the better part of a week and I had exhausted everything I could do with my current hosting provider, I decided to finally setup CloudFlare in an effort to mitigate future damage.  Coincidentally, I happened to get this all mostly setup and running about a day before CloudFlare's major outage 🤣 There are still a few issues related to AWeber's feed reader which I'm still working through perfecting.

This series of issues got me rethinking how I monetize many of the things that I do.  Honestly, making any sort of real money from ads hasn't worked in quite some time.  I found it interesting that a lot of people started discussing the HTTP 402 error response in the last few months.  This is basically a mechanism that has existed in the HTTP infrastructure since the beginning for telling a client that a payment is required to access a resource.

The people recently discussing this are doing so in the broader context of x402.  This is a movement arising at the intersection of AI agents and blockchain technology.  People have started building the necessary infrastructure to build and index services that use the 402 error response, blockchain legos and the clearer guidance around stable coins in order to facilitate a non-ad based future for the internet.  I'm sure there are a lot of interesting things that will come out of this that aren't just tailored to LLMs leveraging online resources.  I've started prototyping some things and look forward to where this is going.  Anyone else playing around with x402?

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Remember my lawn mower nightmare(s) from last year?  That last round of repairs lasted and made me forget about buying a new machine until a few weeks ago.  I basically had an arbor assembly explode and it was completely out of commission.  Initially, I had much difficulty tracking down official parts for this mower.  Eventually, I found a local-ish spot that carried everything I needed.  It's back up and running for now, but the fact that finding parts for it now is becoming difficult just reenforces its days being numbered!

Thoughts On Fasting Mimicking Diets

I mentioned last month that I was trying out the Prolon Fasting Mimicking Program.  I explained why this program in particular was interesting to me.  If you're interested in hearing about my results, check out:

Fermented Solutions

My sauna remote connection is working again!  This wasn't really related to anything that I did directly though.  One day, I decided to actually call the manufacturer and explain to them how dissatisfied I was and the nightmare that I've been enduring trying to get a feature that I paid for to just work.  Most of the folks I spoke to that day didn't really grasp the technical questions I was asking in order to try to 'fix' this.  

Eventually, I found someone who understood the exact problem... and my frustrations.  He told me that he would send me an updated 'power supply' for my sauna model which replaced the previously problematic wifi/bluetooth stack and assured me that once replace, this would definitely fix the issue.  He also sent out a crew to complete the replacement.  The Android app may still look horrible, but the underlying feature now works without any necessary hacks!

Since the last issue, I purchased a ton of leather working equipment and started a leather working project that I'm hoping to finish before the year is out.  If successful, I might discuss this more next month.  Anyone else working with leather?

Happy Fermenting!

J

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