Digitalquill

Eva is rapidly growing up (2 years and 4 months) and it will not be long before she is surfing the web. She already asks for websites to be brought up, she loves the night garden website and asks ‘press the night garden button’ every time I am sat with the laptop.

Although I like the idea of NetNanny and similar products, they are all focused around one PC and controlling that one PC or one profile on that PC. As an IT professional I have a number of computers all over the house, A Media Centre, a laptop for both Cheryl and myself and a PC in my office. With the new kitchen extension we will have another LCD TV along with a media centre PC. So the access to computers in the house is rather open.

I want to control the network we have at home rather better anyway. Currently I allow the router to do all the work, it handles the DHCP and the control of the network. I would like to have more control over that and as such a Linux server to control the network would be ideal.

This being so I would then be able to use Squid proxy to filter content on the network, I could then install Dansguardian on top of Squid to filter our Adult content and provide me with more control.

The only problem with this is that I do not like the idea of a server type PC, this both because I do not like the idea of having it running constantly as that could become costly, but also the size and noise of such a machine does not lend its self to the home environment.

I have been looking at low power PC options and have found the Sheeva plug system which is an ARM based mini PC which is the size of a standard power supply.There are a few options but the one that I was looking at was the Sheeva Plug Multi which takes an SD card for the OS. You can optionally buy an SD with an OS pre-installed Debian 6 or Ubuntu 9. Or you can download the CD Card Images from their site.

Sheva Plug

This is ideal as I want to have a system running Ubuntu as my tests with Dansguardian in VirtualBox have all been with Ubuntu and the install went very easily.

The system has a 1.2Ghz ARM processor with 512Mb of Flash Ram and 512 Mb of DDR2 Memory.It has a Gigabit Ethernet port, USB2 port and ESATA type II port. It does not have a VGA or other monitor port, the idea behind this is that you would access it via SSH which suits me. It also has the ability for another SD card to be plugged in or the USB and ESATA ports give the opportunity to add storage to the device effectively giving you a NAS solution.

The power consumption at about 19w is a little higher than some ‘Low power PC’ options, but at £89 I do not think that you can argue that, especially for the size of the device and being able to hide it away in a draw or behind a desk somewhere without it causing trouble with noise.

My only concern about this is that once I setup this system, I will change all the browsers settings of all the PCs on the network so that they run through the Squid proxy rather than directly to the router. I need to figure out how to stop the router accepting traffic from anything else other than the Squid proxy server so that you can not simply take out the proxy settings.

I have a fairly advanced Billion router (I forget the model) but I ams sure that somewhere on its configuration this will be possible.

I will be placing an order for this device and I will post her how my trials go with setting it up as both a home network server and as a content filter or net nanny.

One of the reasons I have been quite on this blog (and on Earning From Affiliates) is that I have started yet another blog.

On The Allotment blog is a blog about all the activity on my new allotment plot. I have taken the tack of using it to record everything that happens on the plot.

To do this I intend it to be very visual, rather than having lots of words in the blogs, so this weekend I produced my first ever video blogs. I really went to town and produced three in one weekend. Go over to On The Allotment and have a look to see what you think.

I used YouTube and created a channel specifically for the blog. It was very simple to do, I have  Sony HD camera, and was able to upload the files directly from the camera to YouTube in HD format.

Ideally what I need to do is find some software that will allow me to edit those files. I was able to do some simply trimming and joining of the clips using the camera but I really want to do a better job with things like audio balance and putting intro clips and copyright notices onto the clips.

You may also be interested to have a look at Earning From Affiliates where I have just posted a blog post about the marketing of this new blog and how the posting of the Video Blogs and the use of YouTube has had a positive impact on the numbers of hits to the blog.

I have suffered several computer failures in the past month or so, including a big failure of my web server. This has caused allot of problems for me personally and my businesses.

I have therefore been looking at online backup services which seem to have been popping up all over the place recently.

My first port of call was the most well known one from Amazon S3 however their payment options do not suit my requirements, so while searching I found Memopal.

After signing up for their free trial, I was quickly impresses and signed up for their 150gb service which should allow me to backup most of my important stuff.

The service comes with a client which you install, the windows client has a GUI which is easy to use and setup, you just choose the folders you want to backup and it just does it in the background, it monitors those folders for changes or new items and backs them up as well.

It also keeps revisions of your files, although I have yet to test this.

They also have a linux client, which can be run from command line. This is ideal for backing things up from my NAS drive and directly from my web servers.

The system is fairly quick althought I have asked it to backup my 60gb digital photograph archive which says it will take over 5 days, whcih I gues is not bad, and this will only be an issue at the start as it catches up with the archive of files.

In the lead up to Christmas I have been bidding on a number of items on Ebay. I have been frustrated by the number of canceled bids and ending of auctions early. It seems that if the seller is not happy with the value that the item is selling for that they think they have the right to cancel the item and re-list it int he hope it will make more the next time round.

I thought that bid on an item constituted a legal contract between the buyer and seller. If the seller wants to ensure that they get a certain amount for an item then they should enter a reserve price at the outset of the auction.

It seems that you can no longer pick up bargains on Ebay as sellers simply cancel auctions if they do not archive a large enough sale price.

I suspect that this is due to Ebays affiliation with Paypal that relies on a percentage commission of the sale price, meaning that if items achieve a higher price, Ebay makes more money.

Frustrated…