A few months ago, I announced some changes related to comments on this blog following an influx of spam comments. Back then, I chose FriendlyCaptcha as the solution, however, the plugin required some extensive modifications to work with ActivityPub, my custom theme, and custom server, which isn’t really practical on the long run (as it adds to the burden of maintenance).
As of today, FriendlyCaptcha is no more on this blog and has been replaced with ALTCHA.
ALTCHA has a few advantages over the previous solution:
No external calls
Easier to integrate with my custom theme (EG, it just works)
I can whitelist ActivityPub endpoints really easily
For instance, to let ActivityPub through, it’s as easy as setting the paths setting to:
For the first time in a really long while, I have good news to report from the frozen wasteland also called Finland.
As of today, November 24th 2025, the Finnish Red Cross Blood Donation Service will give the same questionnaire, regardless of the gender of the person wanting to donate blood. The question about gender will also be removed altogether. Doing that is a pretty good step in including everybody, and a welcome change in today’s environment.
You can read more about this on their official website. Also donate blood if you can, you’ll literally save lives.
To give a more complete timeline, the restriction of blood donation for gay couples was removed back in December 2023, which the blood donation service requested in 2022.
I recently got a Yealink T42S IP phone to play around with.
To get that question out of the way first, “why”? Because it’s fun to have a proper phone on my desk.
Right now, I have a few PBXes configured on it, in two categories. Proper PBXes where I get a proper phone number:
Callcentric, which you can reach me at +1 (438) 500-2694 from; offers really cheap DIDs through a promotion, though the numbers are North American
VoIP.ms, which you can reach me at +358942459241; offers really low costs in general, DID is a bit more expensive, but has free inbound for residential (I also have a referral code if you’re interested)
Now, most of the PBXes I’m on are hobby projects, those that aren’t routed publicly, but free to join:
HamPY, which is a network running for radio hams in Finland; you can reach me via 17228
Hams Over IP, which is a more global network for radio hams; you can reach me via 200564, my callsign or DMR ID
LiteNet, which is a hobbyist community project; you can reach me via 1059
Another private one by a friend, my extension is 1911, but I doubt any of you is on it
Configuring the phone is generally really easy, it has a web interface from which you can enter all the info (also don’t forget to turn on IPv6!).
Over the past half year, I’ve had the pleasure of Collaborating with Bellingcat as a contributor to their OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) challenge platform.
For those who aren’t aware, Bellingcat is an independent investigative journalism group based in the Netherlands that publishes investigations using OSINT about war, human rights abuses and the criminal underground (this description is shamelessly stolen from the Wikipedia article as they describe it well).
This all started back in March 2025, when I published this challenge in their Discord community. The premises are simple: find where that scan was taken. Just a few minutes later, already three people managed to find the location; a few days later even more. This challenge seemed well-received, and I was contacted by the Producer of Bellingcat to create a few more challenges for their Open-Source Challenges Platform.
All the challenges took half a year to collect, design; and over 6000 km of travel was needed within Europe. Though I’m a bit sad some scans didn’t make the final cut (some of the ones I originally planned turned out worse than I imagined), the challenges turned good overall.
I want to thank Bellingcat for this opportunity to collaborate, and I encourage anyone to check out the Open-Source Challenge platform, and even donate to them. The challenge scans will be made available within Resonite in 6 months time from now.
MeuhMeuhCraft was a Minecraft server opened in 2013 which continued up until its closure in 2015.
Young me, playing Minecraft, joined this server. The factions survival world was where I made some friends, and where I also learned some stuff about the game, such as making potions.
It’s last year that a thought came to my mind: what if I could find a save of the world, and see some of those memories again, my friend’s base, my underwater one, etc, etc.
Sadly, the website only had one usable capture on the Internet Archive, so not much slack to play with.
With this in mind, I bought the old domain, meuhmeuhcraft.fr, and hosted a page saying:
I’m trying to contact the owner of this server to have a copy of the world (even if it might not exist any more).
If you have information on this server, please email me at [my email address].
Almost a year after setting this message up, a surprise came in my email. On 2025/06/30, I was contacted by a friend of the owners, asking me for more information as for why I wanted the map. The next day, I was talking directly with one of the owners of the server, something I wouldn’t have expected ever.
More than that, on 2025/07/06, I received a full copy of the world- and of the full server files. So I booted up the server, a CraftBukkit 1.7.2, a copy of the game, and there it was, the old server, in all its glory.
The spawn areaThe room telling you how to become a full memberThe quizz to become a member
Alas, my old base was completely destroyed, probably a raid shortly after I stopped being active.
More than that, those worlds are now available to visit within Resonite!
All the text on the signs were eaten by the exporter, so sadly those didn’t survive the export to Resonite.
I want to extend my largest thanks to the server owners, mattoo64 and hombeline64, which took the time to find and send me the maps. Even more, their resolute to back the files up for so long.
Without them, this whole thing couldn’t have happened.
I also want to extend thanks to their friend, who noticed my message and was kind enough to put us in contact with each other.
Stay tuned as a read-only version of the server will be hosted in the future.
Sorry for the lack of posts, I’ve been pretty busy with Resonite and in general.
In any case, the recommended albums and artists this month are:
WALKM4N by A M 4 N 音楽: A random discovery from the discovery tab, a good one nonetheless.
Echochamber by Hunz: I already mentioned Hunz in a previous music blog post, Echochamber being his latest album. I’ve been listening to that one on loop for the whole month so far.
Meganeko discography: Meganeko is an artist I only previous had an album from, but listening to their latest tracks, I decided to grab the entire discography. I vividly recommend as it’s great music.
Machinarium Soundtrack by Tomáš Dvořák: This one was a friend’s recommendation. I really love the music in this one, one day I’ll pick up the game it’s from.
That’s all for this month, stay tuned for next month for the recommendations.
