Central Heating
Current boiler is a Glow Worm Fuelsave 60B Mk II – which SEDBUK has listed as a 65% efficient boiler costing approximately £550 a year to run. A typical 90% efficient boiler would cost £400 to run – however might need to increase size of the radiators, increase system flow rate and would not work very well with ‘mains flow’ hot water system.
Ever since we moved house and subscribed to Virgin Media for our broadband connection I have been amazed at how much call rates are for the phone package we are on. For example over 5p a minute for national rate, 15p for mobiles and 33p for international.
However the 10Mbit broadband is pretty decent overall, and a few test SIP calls proved that it was good enough at prioritisation to give good call quality. This inspired me to get the cheap ATA I bought out of storage and re-instate our ‘black’ phone. The phone is no longer black – having been consigned to the dustbin long ago, but the name has stuck. This gave us much cheaper calls over the internet (1p National, 9p Mobile and 2p International).
I estimate this will save us over £200 a year on call charges, but some stuff still niggled and I wanted better call logging and accounting than SIPGATE provided. So I have install the Asterisk PBX software on the server in the loft to do some more clever stuff.
So I now have the ATA registering with the Asterisk server, the asterisk server has registered with the SIP providers and routes calls according to least cost (Currently it distributes the calls between SIPGATE and VoipCheap). Additionally it will automatically re-direct 0845 and 0870 numbers to cheaper national rate numbers, using the script written by Martin Smith to query the saynoto0870 database.
Once the system proves itself to be reliable, I will be tempted to use this as our main incoming phone number as well. Then I can set up other cool stuff, like host my own voicemail server, set up auto-redirects to other numbers when I’m away from home. Automatically filter out junk and cold calls using the phone spam filter database.
Certain members of the household still can’t remember when to use the black phone and when to use the normal landline (National calls are free at the weekend with Virgin). So am tempter to get a PCI FXO card to allow me to connect and route calls automatically to the landline from the SIP phone.
I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that George is in fact a zombie cat. He certainly seems to have an unnatural taste for brains. For instance this duck that he brought in, is missing only its head. Why choose a skull and beak combination over a succulent duck breast?
Not 100% sure on my identification, but I think this duck is actually a Teal, no common-or-garden mallard for George. Although he is quiet partial to pigeon breast…
Moving to Fixes Branch, so Grab initial SVN copy, see MythTV SVN
svn co http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/branches/release-0-21-fixes/
This can be updated periodically with svn up as required.
Make a clean copy using svn export release-0-21-fixes/ clean-release-0-21-fixes_18185, where 18185 is the SVN revision. Then on the server and all client take a copy of the latest SVN in /home/mythtv/18185.
Run the previous configure recorded in config.log, updated as appropriate. Run qmake mythtv.pro and then make.
On server backup myth database as described on the MythTV Wiki using mythconverg_backup.pl.
Shutdown all clients and the backend using /etc/init.d/mythbackend stop, then run make install on the server and one client. Restart the server using /etc/init.d/mythbackend start. Restart the client and check it is working.
If successful, install mythweb on the server:
mv /var/www/htdocs/myth /var/www/htdocs/myth.old
cp -R mythplugins/mythweb /var/www/htdocs/myth
Back To Bedlam Cover
Type: CD
Artist: James Blunt
Details: Back to Bedlam
From: www.amazon.co.uk
Another favourite from Jamie at Home, cooked by David using courgettes from the garden, delicious.
Recipe is available on Jamie Oliver’s website
Pollo alla Cacciatora (Hunter’s Chicken Stew) (Serves 4)
A great traditional recipe, from Jamie's Italy, published in the Guardian, which is where I first found the recipe.
1 Chicken, jointed,
8 bay leaves, 2 sprigs rosemary,
3 cloves of garlic – 1 crushed, 2 sliced,
1/2 a bottle of Chianti,
6 Anchovy fillets
Handful of stoned green and black olives
2 x 400g tin of plum tomatoes.
Season chicken with salt & black pepper.
Add bay leaves, rosemary, crushed garlic & the wine.
Leave overnight to marinate.
Remove chicken, pat dry, dust with flour, then in oven proof dish brown the chicken all over and put aside.
Fry garlic till golden brown, add anchovies, olives & tomatoes (broken up), chicken & marinade. Bring to boil, cover and put in oven for 1 1/2 hours.
Skim off oil, stir, season, remove bay and rosemary, serve with salad or cannellini beans.
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