The lights are up.. yes it is early.. but December the 1st is only 2 days away and in previous years it’s always rained the first week in December preventing me from putting them up.. so while it’s dry I got the ladders out. My main problem was my ladder wasn’t long enough so I could reach the top of the gable… that’s why the lights don’t outline the house properly. There are also some lights in the trees in the garden but they are solar powered and haven’t had chance to charge yet.
Home, home, and school
November 29th, 2008 No Comments »At last the new virtual environment known as Home has arrived. It’s a 3D virtual world which you access through your Playstation 3 an allows you to walk around, meet other people, watch videos, play games together.. It’s a bit like Second Life only on a console and currently with a lot less to do. It has potential anyway and kept me up late last night playing on virtual arcade machines, having a game of 10-pin bowling with random strangers and a couple of games of virtual pool. Anyway, back in the real world, Poppy met Father Christmas at the school fayre last night. I think Santa has spent a while in Wales recently as he has started picking up the accent, but he knew all about Poppy and gave her a present. We had a photo taken which I’ll post here when it arrives.
Today I’ll be getting the Christmas tree and lights up. I’ve decided we need some new ones as I’ve only got two quite measly lighting strips to put outside… one is a mesh which covers a window, the other is a strip of normal coloured bulbs which do random things including, and this is the most frequent feature state, turning off and looking boring. I know it is still November, but December is only a couple of days away and I need to make sure they are up while it isn’t raining.
Quest for a free host
November 25th, 2008 2 Comments »In a bid to keep electricity costs down and with the advent of decently priced raid NAS devices, I am in the process of decommissioning my trusty home server. This meant moving all hosted web sites off and on to hosting elsewhere. For this blog and the tae kwon-do club it was a straightforward transfer to trusty old Supanames (who are pretty good value at £32.88 for two years hosting including a free .co.uk domain… the price hasn’t changed ever and I’ve been using them since 2000). However for the disabled swimming club back in Bedworth I needed a different approach. Although £32.88 for two years isn’t a bad price, domain registration is only between £3-£4 per year on it’s own through 123-reg and I still had (at the time) over 12 months left before renewal was due… so the search for free web hosts was on. The host needed to support PHP, MySQL and CGI scripts, and most importantly run the WordPress blogging framework. My first stop was www.free-space.net who were initially very good, a quick sign up process followed by a site review, then they let you loose with tons of features – everything worked great. Then, 4 weeks ago their server went down. They fixed that problem after 3 weeks but I am still unable to log in to the FTP server to upload files, and the web site content that was uploaded has been lost to the ether. That brings me to stop #2, the current host www.000freehost.com – an equally easy sign up, move my domains DNS to their servers and bingo we have a working site. Phew. I’ll keep you updated on the reliability of the free host because if they still perform well in a year or so I’ll be moving all my hosting across to there.
Oh yes… and this is post #12 for this month, which gives November 2008 the record for the highest number of posts on this blog in a month. Exciting stuff I’m sure. Wake up.
Byebye Sky (almost)
November 22nd, 2008 1 Comment »Finally.. the day I’ve been waiting for, the new Humax Freesat+ box (aka the foxsat-hdr) has been released. This shiny new box will allow me to finally become detached from the satellite hard drive recording monopoly known as Sky+. Sadly, due to web site issues, my initial order at Comet which would have seen the box arrive this Monday (24th) did not happen, and by the time I had replaced the order it was too late. My box will now arrive a week on Monday (1st) so there’ll be a full geek-like review then.
For now, I’ll let you bask in its glossy glory:
It’s currently still available from Comet… click here to take a look. Search for FOXSAT.
If you want any more information then take a look here.
13 weeks and 6 days
November 19th, 2008 1 Comment »Another day, another scan! Here’s the latest picture of sprog #2. The next scan (20 weeks) will be on December 31st. The little blighter wouldn’t keep still so it looks like we have another wiggler.
