How far will one dish stretch? (by sarah)

I decided to make a huge rat-a-toeey so in went the six tins of chopped tomartoes, four cloves of garlic, four large oinions, four cougettes, an aubergine, two peppers and half a bottle of tomatoe suace. Slow cookers are so handy 🙂

Then I thought well I can use this as a base of other dishes instead of freezing it and lo!

First of all we were going to have tacos so in went in some of the rat-a into a frying pan followed by some canallini beans and a tin of re-fried beans. Add some fajita seasoning and away we go!!! This was tasty and was great cold the next day as an accompaniment to salad.

Second, I served it actually as ratatoee with some rice.

Third, I used it as a base for pasta bake - now I was also planning on turning it into a soup but we've had lots of guests including Als cousin Phillipa and her boyfriend and my mum and dad - so I sort of run out!

Flo and Matthew’s Visit (by sarah)

Flo and MAtthew visited us this weekend, this was great as I hadnt seen Flo since her and Matthews wedding and they hadnt seen the baby yet!!!

They bough a cool white cabinet thing for me to keep craft stuff in 🙂 and a little bath duck including a little duckling that sits on its back - Jean adores them and gave them a good ol' gumming (the ducks not Flo and Matthew!).

I took this oppurtunity to give them part of their wedding presant! Just a bit late and wrapped in typical Sarah style - ie carrier bags feactured heavily!

As always we forgot to get them to sign the visitors book - please guys when you visit try to remember for me 🙁 Oh well theres always next time 🙂

Too Much Worm Food!!!! (by sarah)

Well Al is off feeding the worms rice and egg shells - we produce way to much kitchen waste for the wormery to cope with, this will sort it self out to a certain extent as the worm population increases. I only got the minimium amount of worms so they could build their numbers up.

But even then we just cook to much stuff from scratch! Well unlike most people we tend to have three meals a day at home, at least one of which tends to be complex and involving vegatables.

The solution!

When we have enough money we will get another wormery and have more little freinds to feed, and more compost! The only issue we are having at the moment is that we have more 'Worm Juice' than we need. This is the liquid you drian of at the bottom (this has to be done regularly or the worms drown and the environment is two damp and little white disturbing worms appear - I think they might actually be the type that produce condrities for those Geologists out their - or at least that type of thing!). This liquid is excellent plant food - unfortunatly there is more of it than we can currently use - but it does get better with age!

We're thinking of selling it - 4ltr bottle for £1!!!!

VoIP (by alaric)

Well, while I still don't know where my CD-ROM drive is, at least I now have Asterisk working.

Since I work from home, we have two phone lines, work and home. What I hope to set up is to have the phone lines from BT terminate in "FXO ports" on a little box, which then has an Ethernet interface it uses to connect to my Asterisk server with SIP. The Asterisk server will then answer incoming calls, as well as being able to route outgoing calls to BT.

Also, the Asterisk server will be connected to from SIP and IAX telephones on my LAN, and software telephones on our desktop and laptop machines - even when the laptops AREN'T on the LAN, but out on the Internet.

Given this, Asterisk can then function as a PBX. It'll be possible to call extensions from each other by dialling the extension number, or to dial out via the work or home line by prefixing the number with a 9 or an 8. Also, when I dial friends of mine with known VoIP addresses, the system will notice that their number is listed in a local database or any of a number of global ENUM databases, and route the call over VoIP for free.

When people dial in on the home line, all the connected extensions will ring, and the first to answer gets the call. The same will happen for work calls, except that I'll send a different caller ID string so the phones will show what line the call is from, and if I don't answer in four rings it'll go to voicemail. Similarly with incoming VoIP calls.

The voicemail won't be one of those horrible systems where I have to ring in to get my voicemail, either.The server will record the message to the file, and email it to me.

Since I hate my mobile phone's voicemail system, I'll reconfigure it to route calls to my work number when I don't answer, so all my voicemails will end up in one place.

NetBSD upgrade (by alaric)

Bah!

I've upgraded my main home server from NetBSD 1.6.1 (ancient) to 3.0 (current), for two reasons.

1. There was a bug in the VIA Rhine network driver, causing it to drop packets and/or stop working (drop ALL packets until brought down and back up again) under load
2. I need to install Asterisk, and 1.6.1 wasn't up to it - Asterisk requires a native pthreads implementation.

So I bravely reinstalled. NetBSD's upgrade process is a bit ropey, so I had to hack around a bit to get it all up and running.

But now I've lost my CD-ROM drive!

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