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!

Read more »

The Weekend in MK (by sarah)

On Saturday we went to Milton Keynes to Becca and Olly's flate warming/come beccas birthday party!

We got lost right at the end becuase there was a big gap in the instructions - it turns out though that stupid word hadnt worked and there was a map with the route marked on! Oh well and there was us thinking that becca was just really bad at instructions!

It was a great party - Becca had made loads of food which was all yummy but I think her and Olly are evil as they have a chocolate fountain and next to it was a huge box of marshmellows - mew!!!! How are you supposed to resist!

There flate is really nice and I can see Becca desinging some cool decor for the place 🙂

i spent most of the party passing Jean round to be cooed at and to strick fear into my friend Keith who seems to be scared of under fours cos they cant put their hands on their heads! Oh well he ended up with our spare bedding which me being me was Care Bears! Jean loved the party and finally fell asleep - her and Al endevoured to take up the whole bedroom so there was no room for me!

Oh well - I blathered at Astrophysisicsts and read. When all the boys had become light weights and flaked me and becca discovered the joys of eating erm I mean cleaning the chocolate fountain.

Becca made the silly mistake of showing Jean her Piglet cusion - that was it Jean had a great time - the cusion however definatly needs cleaning due to a)baby drool, b)baby puke and c)snotty baby with a cold!

(I know this blog isnt in order now cos I'm a muppet and forget to post so I'm trying to make up for that!)

Rain Rain Rain (by sarah)

Yesturday it rain not constantly but in heavey quick down pours of the sort that you cant see anything and the rain hurts!

When we went to leave to take me to my appointment we discovered that we had an extra river running under the van - and an extra waterfall next to the little garage!

Though this stopped shortly after the rain the waterfall was fearsome and strange brown foam about 1 ft high appeared in the stream were the chicken wire is?!? What was this stuff? Was it were the water was so turbulent full of mud and cow doodoos?

Babara said she had never seen th water like that ever and she's lived here for more than 50 yrs!