Imablog

April 23, 2011April 13, 2025

Turnips au Gratin

Had some amazing scalloped turnips at Tomato Shed Cafe when I went to pick up this weeks CSA. It was a little bit on the salty side, but still tasted really good. Good enough that I swapped a few items in my share for a couple extra bunches of turnips so I could try making my own.

I decided to do them au gratin rather than just scalloped. Found a fairly basic recipe for potatoes au gratin and just used turnips instead. Used my V slicer to slice up the turnips and tossed them in a pan with some ground pepper.

Sweated some onions (also from today’s CSA) and a couple cloves worth of chopped garlic in butter. Add some flour to make a roux and then some milk. Stir until it thickens then start melting some shredded cheddar into it. Pour it over the turnips and toss in the oven for about an hour.

Turned out very tasty. Next time slice the turnips thinner.

April 21, 2011November 27, 2024

Hail in my yard

A pretty intense thunderstorm moved by and dumped a pretty significant amount of marble sized hail on the house.

April 19, 2011April 13, 2025

Can I block China?

For some reason computers with Chinese IP addresses have been hammering the blog.

First they were beating on the comment script with attempts to spam all the entries.

Now they’re trying to repeatedly suck down every single page from the blog. According to Dreamhost’s stats, bandwidth on the blog has gone from around 40 MB/day to over 1GB/day as a result. It’s like they’re trying to DoS me.

For now I’ve got a Deny from All directive in the .htaccess file to just block all access until I can figure out what to do. Maybe I can find some mod_security rules to help block this crap.

Update: Thanks to Country IP Blocks, I filled up an .htaccess file to Deny all the IP blocks assigned to .cn (China). Probably inefficient, but effective. Even with an 87kB .htaccess file to process with each request, blog access actually seems to be a little faster. Guess that shows how much the blog was being hit.