I am sure that parents will know how growing toddlers and young children know far more than their parents ever could know!

Eva is going through a phase (hopefully a phase) of contradicting what Mummy and Daddy say, she has a habit of saying it in such a way that sounds as if she thinks we are stupid!

A funny example came last night when we were watching the screen saver on our media centre which shows random photographs from our photo archive.

Daddy on Ben Nevis... That's in Scotland right?

The picture of Daddy (above) came up and the exchange went something along the lines of:

Mummy: That’s Daddy on Ben Nevis, Ben Nevis is in Scotland

Eva: No it’s not!

Mummy: It is it’s Daddy on Ben Nevis

Eva: Ben Nevis is not in Scotland

Mummy: It is sweetheart, its a mountain in Scotland

Eva: It’s not, it’s in Wales

Mummy and Daddy fall about laughing! Where does she get these things from? There is some knowledge of geography there somewhere. Early in her life we did have a holiday in North Wales so perhaps she is associating mountains with Wales which for a 2 year old is rather clever, but it still made us laugh how adamant she was that Mummy and Daddy were wrong!

Cheryl bought me an SDS drill for my birthday. I used it for the first time this weekend.

Up to now I have done everything with my 18v Dewalt XRP which is a fantastic drill for most applications. Event hough it is a battery drill the hammer action and the power of it is amazing, I have drilled 18mm holes through brick walls with it no problem.

Bosch BGH2-26dre SDS Plus 2kg Drill

With the extension work coming up I wanted something with added power and with the chisel only action. Cheryl was fishing around form something to buy me for my Birthday so I suggested an SDS drill.

She got me the Bosch GBH 2-26DRE, and I must say how good a piece of kit it really is. This weekend I wanted to cut a hole in the under stairs toilet wall to put a 32mm waste pipe out. I used the chisel action on the new drill which cut through the bricks like butter.

It will prove very useful for the work on the extension, especially for descaling the walls, it will save a great deal of hammering with a lump hammer and bolster chisel.

I would defiantly recommend this drill, it is not the cheapest in the 2KG range but it’s 800w, really does give you the power you need for the bigger jobs and the hammer action, giving up to 3J of force for the chisel is powerful enough to cut through bricks as if they are not there.

I think that Cheryl got it from Screwfix but it is also available on Amazon for around the same price

Well  this weekend saw our one year wedding anniversary. It seems only yesterday when we first met and that was 4 years ago, the memories of the wedding are still fresh.

It has been a busy year what with the planning for the new kitchen extension and other things. Eva is growing up rapidly and taking a great deal of our time, but that is only right.

We went away for the weekend, Nanna and Gramps kindly offered to look after Eva so we could have a weekend to our selves. On Saturday we went to Aysgarth for a walk. We revisited the location of ‘the proposal’ and had a mini bottle of Champaign by the lower falls. After lunch at the cafe we made our way to Simonstone Hall where we got married a year ago.

Simonstone Hall

There have been a lot of changes at Simonstone, the whole place has been decorated and they have created a wine room. They also seem to be specialising in Single Malt Whiskey, and if it were any other weekend I would have sampled as many as I could before i fell over!

We have a beautiful meal, the food at Simonstone was typically stunning. We have never had a bad meal there.

After a walk on Sunday we made our way home and had a meal with Nanna and Gramps.

All in all a great weekend and a great year, we are now looking forward to many more!

In my last post I talked about how I setup ClamAV, Squid proxy and Dansguardian on a SheevaPlug. Overall this has been a great success. I have been testing it on my machines before I role it out onto the rest of the network.

I have encountered one problem. When I go to sites such as Google Keyword tool, or I run some of my more complicated scripts that take longer to run it seems to create problems. I am wondering if this is some sort of time out fault that I will be able to change in the setup of Squid or if it is a power issue with the SheevaPlug.

This is not an issue for most normal users, I have tried it on things like YouTube and BBC Iplayer and it works fine with those so I suspect it is something specific to the style of those pages that causes a problem.

I took delivery of my Sheeva Plug Sata Multi today. I bought it yesterday online and it came first thing this morning. Indeed I made a mistake on the order when I bought it with an EU plug so I emailed and then called NewIT who were very helpful and changed over the order without any fuss.

If you remember from my previous post I wanted this device to run a network content filter, Squid and Dansguardian and also to take control of the network I have at home. I therefore, went for the 8GB SD card with Ubuntu 9.04 pre-installed. I will take an image of this before I start to play with it although one can be downloaded from the NewIT website if I need to. I also went for the Sata version so that I can add hard disk space to the device in the future to make it into a NAS drive as well as a network content filter.

First Steps

So my first step was to simply plug the device into my home network, a very simple task of plugging in a network cable and plugging in the power.

I then logged onto my router which currently runs my DHCP and found that a device called Ubuntu had been given an IP address.
Opening up Putty (My preferred SSH client) and ssh’ing to the ip address, I was able to log into the device with the root login and the default password of ‘nosoup4u’

The first impression of the device while navigating around the system via SSH and running the ‘top –d1’ command seemed to be fairly quick, ok the device is not doing anything other than running base Ubuntu but still a good sign at this stage.

I also ran ‘free -m’ which showed 472mb of free memory and df –f to find the free disk space showed:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs                 251M     0  251M   0% /lib/init/rw
varrun                251M   36K  251M   1% /var/run
varlock               251M     0  251M   0% /var/lock
udev                  251M  116K  251M   1% /dev
tmpfs                 251M     0  251M   0% /dev/shm
rootfs                7.4G  443M  6.6G   7% /

All looks in order and I was ready to start playing with the system to see what it could do, but first I wanted to take an image of the system as a backup.

Imaging the SD Disk

I was not sure how I was going to do this so I did a little bit of research for the best method, but I plumped for a simple TAR of the whole system using linux its self:

tar cvpzf backup.tgz --exclude=/backup.tgz /

remembering to exclude the backup file its self otherwise it would get into some sort of loop! The tar of the whole system took only 2 minutes and created a file that was 135 Mb. I then sent this across to my Western Digital MyBookWorld NAS drive which has a hacked Linux operating system on it

scp backup.tgz root@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:/shares/internal/backups/

Happy that I had a backup of the system I then went ahead with a system update before trying a setup of Dansguardian.

System update

I ran apt-get update and then apt-get upgrade and upgraded the whole system. It wanted to upgrade the following:

The following packages will be upgraded:
 root@ubuntu:/# apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
cron dhcp3-client dhcp3-common dpkg file gzip language-pack-en language-pack-en-base libcurl3-gnutls libgnutls26 libkrb53 libldap-2.4-2 libmagic1 libnewt0.52 libpam-modules libpam-runtime libpam0g
  libsasl2-2 libsasl2-modules libsqlite3-0 libssl0.9.8 libvolume-id1 libxcb1 lsb-base lsb-release ntpdate openssl perl perl-base perl-modules sudo tzdata udev wget whiptail
35 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 18.2MB of archives.
After this operation, 1565kB of additional disk space will be used.

This process was again fairly quick taking just 5 minutes most of which was taken downloading the 18mb as Karoo Internet is simply rubbish!
I restarted the device just to check everything was still ok

Shutdown –r now

It took less than a minute to start back up and was back with me.

I then changed the root password ‘passwd’ and I was ready to start my install of dansguardian.

Install of Dansguardian

The setup I wanted was one with Squid for the proxy, ClamAV for virus scanning and then Dansguardian for the content filtering. I followed a tutorial guide on how to forge
http://www.howtoforge.com/squid-proxy-server-on-ubuntu-9.04-server-with-dansguardian-clamav-and-wpad-proxy-auto-detection
but I would skip the auto-detection part as I did not need this and could always add it at a later date.

The first step is to install ClamAV

apt-get install clamav-daemon clamav-freshclam

I then needed to edit the ClamAV conf file so I ran

Vim  /etc/clamav/freshclam.conf

And found that vim was not installed so I installed it

Apt-get install vim

Once installed I could then edit the conf file above. FreshClam is the part of ClamAV that downloads the new virus definitions. The config file contains a line ‘checks 24’ which indicates that FreshClam will check for new definitions 24 times a day or once every hour. I decided that would be adequate o accepted the default values, So my freshclam.conf file looks like this:

# Automatically created by the clamav-freshclam postinst
# Comments will get lost when you reconfigure the clamav-freshclam package

DatabaseOwner clamav
UpdateLogFile /var/log/clamav/freshclam.log
LogVerbose false
LogSyslog false
LogFacility LOG_LOCAL6
LogFileMaxSize 0
LogTime no
Foreground false
Debug false
MaxAttempts 5
DatabaseDirectory /var/lib/clamav/
DNSDatabaseInfo current.cvd.clamav.net
AllowSupplementaryGroups false
PidFile /var/run/clamav/freshclam.pid
ConnectTimeout 30
ReceiveTimeout 30
ScriptedUpdates yes
CompressLocalDatabase no
NotifyClamd /etc/clamav/clamd.conf
# Check for new database 24 times a day
Checks 24
DatabaseMirror db.local.clamav.net
DatabaseMirror database.clamav.net

You then need to restart ClamAV

/etc/init.d/clamav-freshclam restart

It was then time to install Squid, again an easy process with apt

apt-get install squid

Then to make some modifications to the squid conf files:

Vim /etc/squid/squid.conf

Just adding ‘http_port 3128’  to the bottom of the file and then restart squid

/etc/init.d/squid reload

Finally it was the turn of Dansguardian, again a simple task using apt:

apt-get install dansguardian

Again some modifications to the dansguardian conf files

Vim /etc/dansguardian/dansguardian.conf

I simply added my SheevaPlug Server IP address to the ‘filterip =’ line
Uncommented the line:

contentscanner = '/etc/dansguardian/contentscanners/clamav.conf'

to enable the ClamAV virus Scanning and then commented out the line:

#UNCONFIGURED - Please remove this line after configuration

Then restarted dansguardian:

/etc/init.d/dansguardian restart

Testing the install

The system was then ready and I added the proxy settings to my web browser with the address of the SheevaPlug server and then a port of 8080

I then tried Google which was accessed no problem, and then google’d for some adult terms which were blocked.

I do not like the default ‘blocked site’ template that dansguardian uses but I am sure I can change that as it looks like a simple HTML page.
I also need to re-configure the router to stop it handing out ip addresses and limit access to it to the ipaddress of the Sheevaplug and then add DHCP to the sheevaplug but I will carry on with this at a later date.

The SheevaPlug review

I am very pleased with how well this has gone and the performance of the Sheevaplug. I will continue to use this content filtering on my own laptop to see how it goes and test the performance of the Sheevaplug. The first impressions and results are very good indeed.

EDIT:

I should have given a link to NewIT who sell these little SheevaPlug systems they can be found at http://www.newit.co.uk defiantly worth a try.

UK TV Proxy was a service I setup in 2008. It was designed to complement my Super Proxy service. Basically what it does is allow people who are outside the UK to view online TV services in the UK, which are blocked if you are connected to the Internet from any web address other than a UK based one.

Over the last two years it has been ticking over with a few sign-ups. Some whom have stayed to use the service on a monthly basis some of whom who close their accounts after a few months for whatever reason.

Recently however I have seen a rise in the number of sign ups to the service. I have created 10 new servers in the last week. I wonder what the reason for that would be. Its profile has been raising in Google for some time, but I do not think that is the sole reason. The rise in Googles ranking is probably more to do with my buying a .co.uk domain to add to the cheap .info name that I started with.

It has now become something that I am going to dedicate some more time to promoting as it appears worthwhile to invest the time into this project.

If you are interested in the service please go to the UK TV Proxy website.

We now have a yellow poster on the lamp post outside out house. This states that any objections must be raised by the 7th September. We therefore can deduce (yes I’ve been watching Sherlock!) from this that the earliest a decision will be made is the 8th September and the latest will be 7th October as that is 8 weeks from the date our planning application went into the planning department.

Planning Permission Poster

In my recent post about using Coroline Corrugated Bituminous Roofing Sheet on the shed, I promised that I would write up about using this material in other roofing projects.

Since that post I have been asked for some more information about using the Coroline Corrugated Bituminous Roofing Sheet, so I thought that I would try and write this post sooner rather than later.

Fortunately when I did the second of the projects I used the Coroline Corrugated Bituminous Roofing Sheet for, I took some good pictures that showed how I put the roof together.

I had a prefabricated garage that I used as a workshop at another property which I was renting so I wanted to move it to our current property to give added space in the garage. This was originally a stand-alone building, but I wanted to add it to the back of our garage. This would mean that I only needed 3 walls which gave a larger area, but obviously this in turn would mean that the roof that came with the building would not fit.

The original building had a flat roof, but as I was building a new roof I thought that I would create a pitched roof to match the Garage.

This is where the Coroline really came into the picture. I had known about it from another project I worked on, and I knew that they did several colours. One of which was the deep red which would match in with the tiles on the garage roof.

The first step was to erect the walls, this was a process of bolting the first section of the front and back walls to the brick wall of the garage. I used Shield Anchor bolts to achieve this.

Shield Anchor Bolt

These slot into the relevant sized hole and then expand when tightened to create a strong binding. They are not the cheapest but I only needed three on each side.

Once the first panel of each side was fixed I could then begin coupling the rest together and form the rest of the walls.

Walls Erected

I filled the gaps between the panels with a black mastic to make a waterproof seal. I then fitted the door and window frame and the base was complete.

Filling the gaps with Mastic

As I already said, I had to create a new roof as the shape was now different. I started by creating a wooden ‘pan’ around the top of the walls. This was easier said than done as the panels are made of concrete so I burnt out several drill bits doing this but eventually I got it secure.

I then created the roof rafters, a simple A frame construction made from CLS timber.

A Frame Rafters

I then secured the A frames to the wooden pan around the top of the walls and connected the top of the A frames together with a beam.

Securing the A Frames to the top of the walls

The structure of the roof was then finished. I then added an interior wall construction to divide the space up. One side would be for garden storage and would be accessed through the door on the extension and the rest would be storage for wood and other materials and this space would be accessed via a new door that I would cut out of the back of the garage.

Finished roof construction

It was then time to start creating the actual roof. I covered it with sterling board which both gave rigidity to the rood and would eventually support the Coroline Corrugated Bituminous Roofing Sheet.

Covering the roof with sterling board

Sterling board from the inside

Once that was done I could cover with the Coroline Corrugated Bituminous Roofing Sheets and the Coroline hip tiles. Unfortunately the weather broke and I ended doing this in the rain, but at this point in time I could not really leave the construction so I carried on and got it covered and water tight. The first sheets closest to the garage I actually cut a groove into the wall so that they would actually slot into the wall by an inch or so. I could then bed them in with some mortar to create a water tight join between the buildings.

Covering the roof with Coroline Corrugated Bituminous Roofing Sheet.

The Coroline sheets are very easy to fix, you buy some Coroline fixing nails which come with a cap which when hammered in and you close the top of the cap create a water proof fixing.

Coroline Fixing Nails

Make sure that you overlap the Coroline sheets, they are 1000mm wide but they only cover 900mm so make sure that you take this into account with your calculations.

The length of my roof was longer than the 2000mm length of the coroline sheets so I had to have two rows. Install the bottom row first and then any additional rows will overlap the bottom row so that water will flow off the roof.

If you need to cut the Coroline as I had to use an old panel saw as the bitumen sticks to the saw and it will not be good for much once you have used it. I did manage to clean some off using some petrol on a rag but it is better if you can use an old saw.

Following that I had to cut the door way through into the garage, a nice and dirty job! However before I went ahead and cut the bricks I needed to support the rest of the wall so I installed a wooden RSJ.

Installing a wooden support above where the door would be

Cutting the door opening with a bricksaw

After some additional finishing, adding guttering, glazing the window, and painting the prefabricated concrete panels the garage extension was finished.

Finished Garage Extension

I have just got the following email from Affiliate Window:

Affiliate Programme Closure: Confetti (2002)

Dear Affiliates

Affiliate Window want to inform you that Confetti will be temporarily closed today, the 17/08/2010.
We apologise for the short notice period but this is only ever done in extenuating circumstances.

Please ensure you have paused all activity for this merchant as affiliate links will be deactivated until further notice.

We will update you as soon as you can re-start your campaign.

Kind regards

Affiliate Window Support

I find this quite worrying, is there something going on that we need to know about. I use the Confetti scheme on several of my sites and giving me this short notice means that I have not way of removing my links. I understand that there maybe extenuating circumstances, but I hope that more information will be forthcoming in the near future. Will this programme be coming back online?

It is not as if I earn a great deal from this affiliate,  however, I would like more information so that I can make a decision if I need to replace them or make do until they are back with us.

Just one hour ago I posted a blog post about work I have done today on the shed. My post talked about the product I have used for this which is Coroline corrugated bitumen roofing.

I use the Google Bot Bling plugin for WordPress which tells you when Google has visited your site and emails you a log of what was indexed. I noticed this email and saw that my latest post had been indexed so I tried a search in google for ‘Coroline corrugated bitumen’ and this site came 5th in the search engine results page (SERPS)