AGUCUAGCAUAC

I have been happy with my Garmin. It is functional without having to connect to anything, and data can be easily exported to a computer for more advanced processing. It is a handy GPS receiver that lets me monitor heart rate and log running metrics.

Did this spike for you these past weeks? I’m not sure if it just happens to be our instance’s turn or if they have up-scaled their efforts. I have been playing wack-a-mole with IP ranges.

When you mix different components into one of the boxes, do you have a system to label them? Or are the components easy enough to recognize by looking at them?

This morning I woke up and a new IP sub-net (43.173.0.0/16) was excessively hitting the site from multiple IPs, probably scraping, making the site unresponsive. I blocked that sub-net and the site is responsive again.

Woah! Congratulations!!! 🥳 🎉

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.

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.

And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_fluctuation

Edit: I guess it’s these two are kind-of the same thing

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.

I see. So it is not necessarily that their mycelium are better at surviving the freezing temperatures, but rather that either they fruit quicker once conditions are acceptable or that their fruiting bodies are more cold tolerant. Thanks, it’s interesting.

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?

Alright! Some other tips:

• Your current microscope is a 160 mm system, so make sure that the objectives are 160 mm and not infinity.
• Make sure the objectives have an RMS thread
• Once you move into higher-end objectives, you will have objectives that are specialized. For example, ‘phase contrast’ objectives have a dark ring inside of them. For the olympus brand their name often ends in ‘PL’. These work with bright-field too. My 40/1.30 objective is actually a phase-contrast objective because I did not know this and ChatGPT told me it meant something different 😂 However, the objective does work well for me and I am now considering upgrading to a phase contrast-capable microscope (the BH2), so I made a good choice by accident.

I first purchased some Plan objectives from China (40x, 60x), and they are alright. More recently I have been looking into objectives with high numerical apertures to increase the resolution of my images, and I think that the best source of good high-quality used objectives is Ebay. The Olympus apochromatic objectives with high NA are listed for a fraction of their original price, but they are still in the $200 - $500 range, so not very cheap.

Wow, those spores are so bumpy, they are very interesting! Thanks for sharing :D

Hello ✌️ 😄