felipe.lavin.blog

Personal site of Felipe Lavín, co-founder & partner at bloom

I’m a web developer with a passion for the open web, WordPress and UX, crafting fine digital goods from Viña del Mar, Chile.

Notes

  • Firefox Flatpak fonts workaround

    Since switching to Debian stable, I’ve been using the Flatpak version of Firefox to use the latest version, which has a font rendering issue with some sites such as the web client for WhatsApp, some web mail clients, etc; showing pixelated fonts.

    To fix it, edit ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.firefox/config/fontconfig/fonts.conf and paste the following:

    <?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'>
<fontconfig>
	<!-- Disable bitmap fonts. -->
	<selectfont>
		<rejectfont>
			<pattern>
				<patelt name="scalable">
					<bool>false</bool>
				</patelt>
			</pattern>
		</rejectfont>
	</selectfont>
</fontconfig>
    , , ,

  • I’m not paying for big tech data leeching

    I recently found that Bytespider (a bot from the owners of Tiktok) was consuming more than the combined 2 through 10 top user agents. Bots and humans. Not on this site, but one where bandwidth is actually expensive.

    It ignores robots.txt so you need to block it with a firewall. In our case I had to block the 47.128.0.0/16 range.

    GPTBot is consistently a top 3 traffic consumer as well.

    They will not only index the text from your site, but all of the images and files as well.

    With search engine bots, you exchange bandwidth for users.

    With closed or AI bots I don’t see a reason why site owners must pay to train commercial language models or for some other (apparently secret) reason.

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