Well, I’ve tried being nice, I’ve tried being reasonable, I’ve tried everything I can think of to stop people from hotlinking to images on this site. It’s all to no avail, so I’ve implemented an extremely rude picture that chastises the hotlinker and is rude enough that hotlinking will likely reduce to nothing. It’s a shame that it had to come to this, but I don’t know what else to do.

In case you want to prevent hotlinking, here’s how. Create a .htaccess file in your images directory on your webserver. Ensure that mod_rewrite is functional on your webserver. Then put the following contents in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://(www\.)?YOURDOMAIN.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ https://YOURDOMAIN.com/SUBSTITUTEIMAGE.jpg [R,L]

The trick here is to make sure that the substitute file you’ll serve is not in the same directory you’re preventing access to and that you replace YOURDOMAIN with whatever your website is and replace SUBSTITUTEIMAGE with what you deem to be an appropriate message to share with the offender. Good luck.

Periodically the asshat comment spammers get ahead of Akismet, that seems to be happening now. Rather than provide a clear text link to what they’re doing, I’ve put a screen capture to the right that is representative of their present douche-baggery. The interesting thing about this attack is that the spammers are generating a unique id in each comment spam submission presumably for tracking and future use. I’ve gotten about 100 of these to moderate in the last 24 hours.

Does anyone have any insight as to what the point is? It seems like a bot-attack of some sort, but to what end? The comments are innocuous in and of themselves. Are they testing some weakness? The originating IP addresses rotate and all seem to be unconfigured web servers leading me to believe that they have been compromised and are unwitting participants in the onslaught. Haven’t seen any news about this and nothing shows up obviously in searches.

Commentary invited…

As usual, the Renewable Energy Journal has been publishing cool stuff this week. Here are a few of the things discussed this week…

Concentrated Photovoltaic Solar – Imagine melding a magnifying glass with a solar cell. What do you get? eXtreme Concentrated PhotoVoltaic.

Texas Does Geothermal – Just when you thought Texans were just blowhards with windmills, they start to do some interesting stuff with hot rocks.

Ormat’s Stock is Hot – The largest pure-play geothermal company in the world knocked the ball out of the park on their earnings for Q1.

More Steam at The Geysers – Western GeoPower announced it’s got a 10MW well on the old PG&E Unit 15 site paving the way for continued development of their project.

California gets a New Plant – The Heber South project entered commercial operation last month bringing output to 92MW.


If you just can’t get enough renewable energy content here, make sure to visit the Renewable Energy Journal where you can find fresh content every day.

Uh, I’ve heard of tow-in surfing, but I’ve never seen anything like this before. This fellow is crazy, inventive, and brave all a the same time. Move over kite surfing, here’s a real sport…

HT: Bruce Turner

As Republican Candidate John McCain takes on Democratic Candidate Barack Obama this fall, they need to focus on solving one problem: the fundamental unsustainable economics impacting the country. Yes, there are many other issues, but this is the one that most can affect our future. Ultimately, the country is suffering from stagflation, recession, etc.; pick the label you like best. The country needs some good, common sense, fiscal discipline coupled with a pragmatic view to foreign policy and a focus on energy independence as a lever to achieve our national aims.

Job #1, the government needs to stop spending more than it takes in and borrowing to cover the gap. The national debt is over $10 Trillion and rising quickly. Whatever revenues are projected, bring spending in at 80% of that level. That means many pet-projects will be cut, that’s the price we have to pay for getting in shape. The first one should be a cease and desist on the policy that the US should act as the world’s policeman.

Job #1a, find as graceful and responsible exit from Iraq and Afghanistan as possible (oh, and South Korea while we’re at it.) Reclaim that funding and re-orient our military to be a strong defense force first concentrated on securing our borders. I’m not suggesting we turn into anti-immigrant wingnuts, but control of borders is an important step in national security. The candidate should facilitate a humane and practical policy to support immigrants, legal and illegal, at the same time stop the flow of illegal material and illegal immigrants into the country.

Job #1b, re-orient the Department of Energy to catalyze and support activities in conservation, transportation, and electricity generation that moves the country toward energy independence. The technology exists today to achieve this goal in 20 years time if we only agree to do it and follow through with it.

Job #1c, take the 20% budget surplus (and any other new revenue/savings) to bring the national debt down to reasonable levels and stabilize the economy and currency.

As I consider my voting decision this fall, these are the issues I’m going to examine with respect to the candidate who will get my vote. Frankly, if we don’t take this course, everything else is just noise. I’m anxious for the positions to be more fully articulated by each of the nominees. I’m also anxious to understand who the running mate will be for each. Should be a fun election season.