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!

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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

Related posts:

1. 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...
2. 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...
3. Two years of Eva Wednesday last week saw Evas second birthday, on the one had it seems such a short time and in others we look at her growing...
4. Network content filtering 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...

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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Planning Permission Poster

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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

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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.

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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)

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I will try and dig out some of the pictures of the other two roofs that I used this Coroline corrugated bitumen sheets, as I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone needing a roofing material for a similar application.

I decided to use the Coroline corrugated bitumen, this time for the shed roof so that it will fit in with the garage and the garage extension, the shed does not really need the protection that this material will give, but the cost difference between this and a roof of felt is fairly small and Coroline will look a great deal better.

I have also patched up some areas that had been damaged by squirrels and have treated the timber to give it a fresh look.I have added some fascia boarding under the new roof just to finish it off, I will paint this black again to fit in with the garage.

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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.

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Orangery Kitchen Extension Rear Elevation

I am rather busy at the moment working at another of our properties, getting it ready for sale, but when I get some time I want to re-work the project plan as we now know the maximum time that the planning application process will take as the Planning committee have to give a decision within 8 weeks of receiving the application.

As I have said before, if the plans are drawn up, and the go-ahead comes early all we need to do is pull the whole project forward the relevant time, but it is critical that I know this plan as there are lead times on ordering certain items, underfloor heating, kitchen units, hardwood floor etc.

Finally some good news on the project!

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4. Kitchen Building Project – Frustrating delays As you may already know we have been planning a re-development of our kitchen and dining room. The plans for which have developed greatly over...
5. 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....

I of course would promote my plugins at this point, however they are targeted at a specific niche on the WordPress users and as such do not fit into the must have for all WordPress installs category.

I also could go on about SPAM filter this, and SPAM filter that, but in all honesty that has been done so many times before and in my opinion most of the big SPAM plugins for WordPress out there work well so pick one and go with it.

My List is one that give practice benefit to you the blogger. They are all available for free on the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Search Meter

WordPress has a great inbuilt search facility, most if not all themes integrate with this to allow users of your WordPress site to search your content. This information is very valuable, especially if you are using WordPress as a CMS or as an ecommerce site, but also if you are a blogger.

To be able to have an insight into what your users are searching fo on your WordPress site gives you an insight into what they are interested in and as such you can tailor your future content to suit that, providing more content based on the search trends on your site.

Combine this with information coming from Google Analytics which will show you what keywords people used to find your site on search engines and you start to have a very powerful body of data at your disposal.

The Search Meter WordPress plugin records the searches made on your WordPress site and provides you with that information along with how many results those searches had on your site.

This allows you to start writing the content that your users want on your WordPress site.

All in one SEO

You can not have a list of WordPress plugins without the ‘All in one SEO plugin. By rights it should always be the number one plugin that you install every time you setup WordPress. In all honesty what should happen is that this plugin is taken on into the main code of WordPress and maintained by the WordPress developers.

The plugin improves the Search engine optimization of WordPress and allows you to control the meta tags created. Meta tags are things like the title of the page, hidden keywords and descriptions that can be picked up by the search engine spiders.

It is a must for all WordPress installs.

Keyword Density

Ok, so I said that I would not promote my WordPress plugins, what i really meant was I would only promote one of them! Seriously though, I do believe that this little tool is essential for everyone.

If you have done any research into getting search engine ranking, you will know that content is king. It does not matter what your site is, the most essential aspect is the content, its quality and its uniqueness.

The keyword density plugin aids you in writing this content to ensure that you get the balance of your chosen keywords in your text. It is a very simple plugin, you tell it to monitor keywords of your choice. If for example you have a blog about Cooking you may want to make sure that your content is rich with keywords such as ‘Cooking, cook, chef, recipe, kitchen, food, meal, baking’

This plugin tells you how you are doing with the balance of those keywords as you type your content. It also makes sure that you do not include your keywords too often as that would bee seen by Google as spamming the search engine.

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She loves the actual lamp as well it is a Spearmark Winnie The Pooh 3d Lamp it lights up from inside and gives a nice yellow glow in her bedroom.

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This is good news, although, we were hoping that they might come back and say it did not need any planning permission, this is positive.

What is more the planning committee and planning department is legally bound to resolve the planning application within 8 weeks and not the 12 weeks we thought it would be, so as such there is still a possibility we will be able to get the kitchen extension and orangery done this year.

It may mean that we are starting the project and the build in the first week of October at the latest but at least that will mean that the build part of the project can be completed before the end of October thus hopefully avoiding any of the really bad weather or critically the frosts which could cause problems for footings and new brickwork.

This will mean that the schedule is very tight to get the project done before Christmas, however, I will re-jig the project plan with these dates in mind and see where it leaves us.

It maybe that we get approval sooner than the 8 weeks and if so we can just bring everything in the project plan forward, but my project plan will be worst case scenario.

We have already instructed our planner to go ahead and submit the final application to the Planning Office as soon as possible, so we await news that it has been submitted

Related posts:

1. Planning Application Update Regular readers will know that we are planning an extension to our kitchen, there is some debate as to if we will need planning permission...
2. Planning application submitted We have finally managed to get our planning application submitted following the delays of the planning enquiry. Hopefully we will get a quick response. I...
3. Planning Enquiry Frustrations As you will know we are planning some work on our kitchen, this involves an extension to the property and therefore we have got into...
4. Kitchen Extension Project Goes ahead We had our builder round last night to discuss a few things regarding our kitchen extension/orangery project. We needed to clarify some things and change...
5. 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....

1. Remote Potato

Remote Potato has to be my number one must have plugin. Indeed it was this plugin that I was waiting for with the Windows 7 version of Media centre as the one I used to use did not work with Windows 7.  Basically what this plugin does is allow you to access your media centre via a web browser. It allows you to schedule recordings, view your recorded content and even stream it over the web if your Internet connection is good enough.

I understand from the developers website that this plugin has undergone a great deal of development over the last year or so, and is set to have more functionality added, however as it stands it does everything I want.

Imagine you are out and about, at work, out in the pub or even on holiday and you have forgotten to record your favorite program. Simply find a connection (us use my HTC mobile phone) enter the address of your home network (again I use dyndns.org to create a static address) and load up your media centre, browse or search for your program in the listings and click record, and hey presto it will be recorded for you to watch when yo get back home.

Here is a video that the developer has created of the plugin at work:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZd988WyfEY

In my opinion this plugin essentially adds the missing functionality to Windows media centre that I have been looking for.

2. Macrotube

The MacroTube adds the facility to watch Youtube, Dailymotion, and MSN’s Soapbox videos from your media centre. I am a fairly light YouTube user, but having said that there are occasions when I would like to be able to view YouTube on the TV. This plugin adds this functionality to Windows 7 Media centre meaning that you can do it without exiting the media centre and starting a web browser. This also means that I can do it from my Media Centre Remote rather than having to use the mouse and keyboard.

3. Trailer Library

Trailer Library links into FilmTrailers.com to bring trailers of files soon to be released to your Media Centre. We find that this is a great plugin as we are subscribers to LoveFilm and we always struggle to find movies that we want to rent. Having the ability to preview some new releases as and when we want on the media centre gives us ideas to add to our LoveFilm rental list.

I understand that it only currently works for UK and US users, but as I am UK I am happy!

There are many other great plugins out there. These are just some that I use on our Media centre.

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Why would I not want to publish when I write them? Well for various reasons, generally I will write a whole bunch of posts in one go and then schedule them to be published over the coming days to ensure that there is a constant feed of content to the live site, rather than a big chunk and then nothing for weeks followed by a big chunk again.

Having a constant stream of regularly posted content is better for Search Engines (SEO) especially for Google. There is a chance that Google would see a mass of published content as being SPAM rather than being genuine content if it did not fit within the pattern of posting for that site.

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I changed my repros in /etc/apt/sources.list to:

deb http://archive.debian.org/debian etch main contrib non-free
deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-volatile etch/volatile main contrib non-free
deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-security etch/updates main contrib non-free

and then ran an apt-get update again, this updated the repros, before I installed pspell i decided to run an apt-get update to ensure that everything else was up-to-date. It upgraded some minor stuff, but it did upgrade both Amavis-new and MySQL server.

Amavis-new was no problem other than having to manually restart SpamAssasin and ClamAV, however, the upgrade to MySQL changed the my.cnf (/etc/mysql/my.cnf) config file for mysql and seemingly turned on binary logging.

I was happy that the upgrade had gone ok and proceeded to install pSpell and work on the project I was working on when the server became sluggish and unresponsive.

After looking I found that the server was out of space, after and investigation I found that the /var/logs/mysql/ folder was huge with many log files of 100mb and over.

After looking at the my.cnf file I found that the binary logging lines were uncommented:

# WARNING: Using expire_logs_days without bin_log crashes the server! See README.Debian!
expire_logs_days       = 10
max_binlog_size         = 100M
binlog_do_db           = include_database_name
binlog_ignore_db       = include_database_name

So I commended out those lines and restarted mysql and after deleting 64Gb of Log files (created in a 2 hour period!) the server was back.

I will in future pay more attention to these upgrades. I have said this before but this is the very place that opensource software falls down. As a web host who runs several servers with many websites on each all earning money, I can not afford to have those servers go down.

If one can not rely on those updates to leave a perfectly working well configured server still working after the update one has to consider if this is the best OS to be using to host sites of any importance what  so ever.

When the open source community comes to the realization that the software that they create is relied upon by real people making real money and running real projects and it is not just some form of geeks project to see if we can make it work, and it pays more attention to its user base and ensuring continuity of the software then I am sure that open source of all forms will dominate the market, until such time one has to consider what is best for your business.

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It is a cream very much like jiff cream cleaner, you simply rub the cream into the frame in a circular motion with a damp cloth and then buff it off with a dry cloth and hey presto the frames come up like new.

I was very impressed with the results, when I used it on our conservatory, the grayish tinge to the frames was quickly removed and they are now gleaming white.

I would defiantly recommend this product to anyone wanting to revive or clean your tired looking uPVC window frames.

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As it was not at all clear if the work would need planning we took the decision that we would make a planning enquiry. This is a facility offered by the council where you can send them a sketch plan and measurements of what you are planning to do and they will look at it within your situation and give you advice as to if it requires planning and if it does what their thoughts on the likelihood of it being accepted would be when the full planning application went through.

The planning office promise to get an answer to this enquiry within two weeks of of its receipt. Which we considered to be worthwhile. In actual fact the area of the new extension that will be outside the 3 meter from the original house rule would be very small. The extension mostly replaces what is already there rather than creates new. The only part outside the 3 meter rule is a corner area about 1m square. And as such we were hoping that they would come back with the pragmatic approach that it did not need planning.

All that was five weeks ago and we are still awaiting an answer. The person dealing with our enquiry has been on holiday, out on site and too busy with applications. We have been promised a letter several times. The latest being the end of this week so we will see what happens.

This is causing us a great deal of problems. If we do need to go through a full planning application which it is looking it it will do, this process will take between 8 and 12 weeks and as such will take the project into the winter months and the unsettled weather.  This will ultimately mean that we will have to delay this project until next year which will then end up costing us considerably more money due to the raise in VAT to 20%.

I also know that our planner, builder and orangery fitters are all crying out for work in the current climate, this form of delay only serves to damage the local economy. If the new coalition government wants to look at ways of triggering the economy sorting these sorts of issues cutting out the delays and forcing the planning departments to stick to the deadlines that they publish would mean that everyone knows where they are and can plan for these projects.

As you can see I am getting very frustrated by this. We are currently in a limbo where we have a great deal of work that we need to do but effectively can not do any of it.

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2. Planning application submitted We have finally managed to get our planning application submitted following the delays of the planning enquiry. Hopefully we will get a quick response. I...
3. Planning Application Update Regular readers will know that we are planning an extension to our kitchen, there is some debate as to if we will need planning permission...
4. Kitchen Extension Project Goes ahead We had our builder round last night to discuss a few things regarding our kitchen extension/orangery project. We needed to clarify some things and change...
5. Kitchen Building Project – Frustrating delays As you may already know we have been planning a re-development of our kitchen and dining room. The plans for which have developed greatly over...

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