Taking photos of the moon with an iPhone
One of the best methods of taking photos of stars, planets and satellites is with a webcam, like the old Toucam Pro, and processing with Registax. That’s not the easiest method though, and when you want photos of the moon, an iPhone does the job very well.
The Moon, shot with an iPhone using Cortex Cam
Celestron C5 with iPhone 4S for scale
Effect of using a polarising filter
The following pictures were taken with the same lens (f1.8, 50mm Canon) with a polarising filter at different angles. There’s not much more to say about this as the effect is immediately visible.
#EdBallsDay
Ed Balls
— Ed Balls (@edballsmp) April 28, 2011
Who is looking at my profile?
I made a web thing that will tell you about people looking at your profile. Go look at it.
Who is looking at my profile?
Securing WordPress using fail2ban
With the recent dictionary attacks on WordPress, I installed a simple configuration for fail2ban that requires no access to the backend of each site you host. This should protect all the sites on a server from being attacked by the massive botnet that’s doing the rounds.
Add this to /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf
[apache-wp-login] enabled = true port = http,https action = iptables[name=WP, port=http, protocol=tcp] filter = apache-wp-login logpath = /var/www/vhosts/*/statistics/logs/access_log maxretry = 3
The logpath should include every access log on your server, or at least the WordPress ones. Mine is ideal for Plesk installs on Linux.
Add this to /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/apache-wp-login.conf
# Fail2Ban configuration file [Definition] failregex = <HOST>.*] "POST /wp-login.php ignoreregex =
Restart fail2ban and you’re set.
