Salamander

  • 240 Posts
  • 459 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: December 19th, 2021

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  • It depends. In my experience: in an academic laboratory I have been able to use common sense.

    For example, gloves go on when working with strong acids/bases. The statement:

    gloves apparently only give researchers a false sense of security that can dull the sense of touch and prevent you from recognizing chemical exposure

    Does not apply as much when you are working with such corrosive agents, because you really should never be in a position where spilling 4 M HCl into your hands would go unnoticed.

    When working with large quantitites of oils, even if non-hazardous, gloves go on and they will probably get oil in them.

    When working with cell cultures, the goal is often to not contaminate the cultures. Some people prefer to wash their hands thoroughly and not use gloves, and they have been working at it for many years and they seem to do just fine. It’s a risk mitigation strategy - if the cultures have antibiotics and fungicides, risk is already not too high.

    In an industry setting it is different. Companies often comply with specific standards and health and safety regulations. While the individual can use common sense, the people in charge of ascertaining compliance (sometimes ‘EHS’, Environment, health and safety personnel) aren’t necessarily chemists themselves, nor should they need to be aware of the identity of the transparent liquid in the flask that you are holding. So, generic rules are often set in place not only because of their practical utility but also to simplify enforcement. In some cases external auditors can come in (announced or not) and verify compliance - this, again is much simpler when the rule is ‘lab coat behind yellow line, gloves always on when touching a container with a liquid’ than having to interview each person to understand what they were touching without gloves and to understand their philosophy of why they chose to do so.


  • I have experienced issues both over tor and over clearnet. The tor front-end exists on its own server, but it connects to the mander server. So, the server that hosts the front-end via Tor will see the exit node connecting to it, and then the mander server gets the requests via that Tor server. Ultimately some bandwidth is used for both servers because the data travels from mander, to the tor front-end, and then to the exit node. There is also another server that hosts and serves the images.

    What I see is not a bandwidth problem, though. It seems like the database queries are the bottleneck. There is a limited number of connections to the database, and some of the queries are complex and use a lot of CPU. It is the intense searching through the database what appears to throttle the website.


  • By hand. We are only two people, and we usually clean after we cook/eat. When one is cleaning only 2 plates + a pot/pan at a time, it is easy to use little water. Spray of soap, metal scrub, sponge scrub, and then turn the tap on to rinse for a few seconds. Utensils get individually scrubbed and then all rinsed together for a few seconds.

    Maybe when we have kids a dish washer will make sense.









  • For mander.xyz it has been bot scrapers. That time that you are mentioning it was scraping via the onion front end that I am hosting for easier access over Tor. Yesterday an army of bots scraping via Alibaba cloud servers made the server unusable for a few minutes. The instance would receive a bunch of requests from the same IP range (47.79.0.0/16), and denying that full IP range fixed the problem.

    Some instances implement anti-bot measures. For example, https://sopuli.xyz/ makes use of Anubis. I think that instances behind Cloudfare get some protection too. I am considering using Anubis for mander.xyz, but for now I have just been dealing with this manually as it does not happen too often.


  • Thanks!

    I don’t see those specific IPs, nor 16514. But now I see what scrapers tend to look like in the logs :)

    I am now pretty sure that the cause was scraper-like activity coming from the Mlmym front-end that I am serving over an onion site. I am not sure if it randomly started mis-behaving or if a tor scraper was using it.

    After blocking this, federation was restored, performance increased, and CPU use came down:


  • So far, I have been able to ‘control’ the CPU use by setting limits to the process that pulls stuff from the database (pool size, CPU, memory).

    This does release some of the CPU for other tasks, but I think that that what creates the lag might actually be the clogged database queries. So, constraining those resources might not solve the lag problem.


  • I can see that since October 13 the CPU use spiked to 100%…

    I just reset the server to check if that would fix it quickly. It don’t think it did.

    I can see the processes that are taking up a lot of CPU (parallell database queries it seems), but I still don’t understand what is causing these and why they have spiked since Oct 13. I will need to investigate.



  • I would take a portable CD player, place a CD with Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up on it playing backwards, hook up solar panels, remove the ability to shut it on/off, and set it up a circuit that will:

    • As the device solar charges, keep it off until some voltage threshold is exceeded
    • Once the voltage is high enough, start a random timer (8 - 100 hours), so that it is not immediately obvious that the sun activated the device
    • When the timer ends, turn the music on on repeat mode
    • Sometimes turn the music off at random, and then turn it on again at random after a long delay, so that in some cases you can have turn ‘ON’ events without the device being exposed to the sun
    • When the voltage drops below a low threshold, turn the device off until it is charged again












  • I would give the Letharia dye another try

    Would love to… When I was in Oregon this lichen was super abundant. At the moment I am living in Amsterdam (Netherlands), and I see mostly Xanthoria, Evernia, Rhizocarpon, and a few other lichen species that grow on city trees, but they are very small and spotty, nothing compared to the wolf lichen in Oregon. I do miss the Oregon forests with the old growth sequoia redwood trees and all that lichen.


  • 9ft of snow?! I only experienced such deep snow in an urban setting while living in Connecticut for a year. I spent a few years in Oregon but the snow in the area never got so deep while I was there. When I was in the US I was not yet able to identify many fungi as I was mainly obsessed with animals (especially salamanders) back then, so unfortunately I did not really appreciate the diversity of fungi there. Although once in Oregon I did attempt to dye some socks using a wolf lichen (Letharia vulpina) and a pressure cooker. That did not end well.



  • Cool! I just read their wiki page and it says

    A snowbank fungus, it is most common at higher elevations after snowmelt in the spring.

    Snowbank fungus is a new term for me. Not sure yet what makes a fungus thrive through snow. Maybe they have anti-freeze proteins?

    Does your area get a lot of snow?