Jae's Blog

To all the non-furry readers of this humble blog, brace yourselves.
I’m very tired from the end of the year, and couldn’t get myself writing more technical stuff, so a socks review is what you get.

Recently, I was looking to replace my old socks, bought on SocksDreams years ago, those started to really show their age, as well as not being really that soft to start with.
To this end, a friend recommended me Angy Paws, a company basically by furries, for furries which offers a ton of designs.

Sadly, when I ordered, tons of designs were out of stock, so I ended up buying the classic striped purple and black ones.

First, the shipping, Angy Paws being based in Australia, I was expecting the socks to take some time to arrive, the site even estimating them to arrive around December 25th. Well, to my surprise, shipping was extremely fast, doing the trip from Australia to Finland in just 10 days. Shipping itself was around €20 which isn’t the worst I’ve paid.

So, what’s in the box? Upon receiving your socks, you’ll be greeted with of course your items, but also a business card to exchange for a business card, and a small (and a bit corny) care card on how to wash the socks and remove the tags.
Overall, bonus points on the packaging for being entirely customized. I saw an option to have more discreet shipping as well, but not it’s not for me.

So now, the most important thing: how are the socks?
Being straightforward, those are probably the most comfortable socks I’ve ever worn. The previous socks had the issue of being too large for me, meaning those would slide off with some time.
Those are tight enough that they don’t slide, but also not too tight that they are uncomfortable. Same with the arm warmers, they fit correctly, not much else on that front.

Overall, I’m giving the whole experience a nice 10/10, which means I’ll 100% be back once more designs are back in stock.
And if you’re looking to invest in socks, look no further and give Angy Paws a try.

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:

*
!/.well-known/*
!/wp-json/*Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

All in all, from the short testing I’ve done, ALTCHA is probably the best option I’ve stumbled upon so far.

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.