I'm primarily a Linux, BSD and Mac user.

The last time I used Microsoft Windows as a primary OS was more than ten years ago. My employer is now deploying the latest incarnation of Microsoft Windows, Windows 7. Since I am expected to have a reasonable familiarity with the computers on our users' desks - at least enough to find the IP address, open a web browser, ping a host - I thought I'd try out Windows 7 as my primary OS for a while.

The good news is, there's still time to complain to Ofcom.

This seemed like a good opportunity to experiment with a low-power, solid-state system. So I chose the Soekris Engineering net5501 as the basis for my new firewall.

There are plenty of full-featured statistics packages for Asterisk out there. Most of these seem to be geared towards monitoring queue lengths, call volumes and other things that only call centres would care about. I just wanted something light which would give me a quick overview of my most recent calls.

Ever since we rented a Cannondale MT800, my partner and I had been itching to get hold of a tandem of our own. After much cogitating a near miss with an internet fraudster and a long wait, we finally took delivery of a 2009 Dawes Galaxy Twin. Read on for the review.

Here's how I did it:

Having recently rented one and having enjoyed it immensely, I'm interested in buying a Tandem for my partner and I to ride together. Imagine my delight when I found a Cannondale Road Tandem at an amazing price. A little too amazing...

My Dolan Multicross came equipped with Tektro Oryx low profile cantilever brakes, apparently these are pretty much standard equipment on many new cyclocross and touring bikes.

I used Linux to make Time Machine work better than Apple intended. Read on for details of the wonders of iSCSI.

Anyway, by default, the timing of this voltage drop seems to be only 100ms or so which is too short for the FXO card in my Asterisk box.

Like most BT related problems, this can be resolved by speaking to the right person, using the right BT terminology and asking the right questions.

Keep reading for my review...

Read on for my review of this card...

The goal: Change a W5W sidelight bulb in my car. No problem - done it a hundred times, how hard can it be...?

Good old NetBSD.

November 2010: And still it goes on, over three years uptime!

It was a hoot and a half, here are some pictures...

Not any more...

Thankfully, the stock blocks are Tektro's knockoff of Shimano's Dura Ace brakes, so I bought some kool stop salmon cartridges.

Now my bike stops even if it's raining.

I Took a ride from Telford to Ironbridge and back. Shot a few photos on my phone.

14th May 2008

Dear Retail Overlords,

I wish to report the sudden disappearance of common sense from the Stafford 'Tesco Extra' store.

These are the most common mistakes I see other cyclists making. Because I am an obsessive pedant, I made a list. Most of it is stuff I learned not to do the hard way.

It seems that more often than not, when an ISP is having an outage, it's caused by the DNS servers being unresponsive. Let's cut them out of the loop.

In this article, I hope to show you how to set up BIND both as an authoritative and caching DNS server. These instructions will work with Mac OS 10.4.x and 10.5.x.

Why don't cyclists use the cycle lanes?

There is a train every hour, but I live over a mile from the station. There's also a quarter of a mile to cover when I reach the station at the other end. Walking this distance would waste valuable time and taxis are costly. The solution? I bought a Brompton.

NetBSD on the other hand is fast on this little Mac.

Quota support is compiled in to current versions of postfix

Since a fair few people are using my mail server now and also because I am not Google, I thought I'd put some quotas in place. This turned out not to be as simple as I was hoping...

I needed to recompile to get mod_proxy anyway, so I installed it without delay:

This article is outdated. I no longer run a backup MX at all and have not done so for years. The disadvantages outweigh the benefits.

Pro:

• Messages queue up on a server you control.
• You get to choose how long messages are queued before they are returned to the sender.

Con:

• Backscatter: Unless you find a way to synchronise your list of valid users, your backup MX may initially accept a message for delivery, only to find that it is rejected by the primary MX. This can result in non-delivery reports being sent to innocent parties whose email address has been used as a forged 'from:' header by spammers. Synchronising configurations and valid user lists results in...
• ...Increased complexity: Another server, another mail queue, another RAID array -- it's just one more place for messages to go missing or get delayed in an already messy protocol.
• A Vector for spam: Spammers do not respect the priority of your DNS MX records. If your primary MX server is reliable, the only mail that will hit your backup MX will be spam. I think that this skews SpamAssassin's bayes database.
• Not necessary to queue mail: Email messages will queue on your senders' MXes for a few days, which should be long enough to resolve your problems. If an email isn't delivered for three or four days, it's probably useless anyway, so it's better that it is returned to the sender.

Still want to do it? Well, here's the old article:

I've had Postfix/amavisd-new/SpamAssassin/ClamAV/Courier running smoothly on my toaster for a while, thanks to Christoph Haas. Paranoid thoughts have since crept in; what would happen if my toaster were to stop working?

Luckily, I'm the kind of guy who has an old laptop many miles away, quietly humming away under my parents' desk. (No, I don't live in my parents' basement) This would do nicely as a backup MX!

SSH is a secure way to connect to your Mac over untrusted networks, such as the Internet. At its most basic level, it allows you to log into a Mac remotely using the terminal using the sshd and ssh programs. You must enable the SSH service on the Mac you want to log in to: