Wisdom of a 2 year old
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.
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!
Bosch GBH 2-26DRE SDS Plus Drill
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.
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
One Year, who’d have thought it!
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.
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!
SheevaPlug with Ubuntu and Dansguardian Update
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.
Installing ClamAV, Squid and Dansguardian on Ubuntu on the SheevaPlug
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 Proxys Raising profile
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.
Planning Permission update
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.
Creating a Garage roof with Coroline bituminous roofing sheets
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
After some additional finishing, adding guttering, glazing the window, and painting the prefabricated concrete panels the garage extension was finished.
Shield Anchor Bolt
Temporary closure of Confetti Affiliate scheme
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.
One hour and indexed in google ranking 5 in the SERPS
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)

















