Sandbox
Oba! our net connection just got WAY better!!![edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 29 November 2015 at 10:52 |
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This post has the following tags: Our third year on the land
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 But then this morning when I connected I noticed that it was a four bar connection, and we're on 3G!!! I tested the bandwidth to see if it was just some weird glitch and we got a consistent download speed of 2-3 megabits! We've never once had more than a single bar on 3G, and the absolute best bandwidth we've ever had is 1 megabit, and that was very intermittent! All I can think is that a new tower must have finally gone up near by :-) (At least I really hope that's the case, rather than it being some strange short-lived atmospheric condition or something!) Update: By midday the signal had gone up to full strength and our bandwidth was consistently over 3 megabits peaking at over four! |
Copy-to-sent bug finally fixed after two years![edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 24 November 2015 at 15:37 |
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This post has the following tags: Server
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| A couple of years ago I configured the server to do the process of copying user's sent emails into the "Sent" mail folder on the server-side rather than the client having to do it since that effectively involves sending the whole message to the server twice. Not only does it have to be sent twice, but for some reason the Thunderbird email client tends to lock up during the copying to sent process for some reason. So I created this addition to our email configuration procedure which gets the server to do the job instead.
But there's one complication. The message that's copied doesn't have the Bcc header as it's been stripped by the time the message gets to the stage of being copied. It's very important that the messages in the "Sent" folder have their Bcc header because you want to know who the message was sent to, and you may also want to modify and re-send the message again. So the Exim system-filter that copies the message also calls this copy-to-sent.pl Perl script which finds the message that was just copied to the "Sent" folder and then re-builds its Bcc header by getting all the recipients from the Exim $recipients variable and removing the ones found in the To or Cc headers of the message. The only problem is that it hasn't worked properly ever since it was made two years ago! It's always added the Bcc header even if there wasn't one and put all the recipients in there including those from the To and Cc headers. I finally got around to adding detailed logging into the script so I could track down the problem - which turned out to be nothing more than a "+" symbol needing to be added into the regular expressions that extract the email addresses from the To and Cc headers. |
Yocaholics![edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 3 November 2015 at 20:06 |
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This post has the following tags: Our third year on the land
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 It turns turns out there's two different types of Manioc starch, sweet and sour. We've been using sweet, but they use sour, and that makes all the difference. The sour has a sort of cheesie smell when it's raw, but they both taste pretty much the same after you cook them. But the sour starch is a very different consistency and is much easier to work with. So now we're having Tapioca as part of our meals almost every day instead of bread since it's so easy! And we also add some corn flour too to make it a bit more nutritious :-) |
The tarantula in the well[edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 30 October 2015 at 21:21 |
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This post has the following tags: Our third year on the land
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I was just doing my emails today when I noticed a movement in the corner of my eye, I thought it would probably just be our flatmate Fattie collecting stuff for his new apartment, but it wasn't - it was a huge tarantula! It came from under the house and made its way over to the edge of the vegie patch. She's about 25cm long with her legs stretched out! I got a photo and then went back to my email. Then a couple of hours later it was time to get some water from the well, so I lifted the lid off, and guess who's sitting in there! We carried on collecting out water keeping a close eye on her (actually I don't think they're poisonous or anything), but then she decided it was too much activity for her and she left for the swamp :-)
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The super-hail is coming!!![edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 16 October 2015 at 15:21 |
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This post has the following tags: Our third year on the land
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 Two days before she was due to leave (cycling 50km with a heavy load) the weather turned bad - really bad! It kept pouring and pouring until the river was only a few metres away from our house. The night before we decided to go together to the hill to call our friend Vladimir in Barragem do Salto (the dam) to see if it was passable - we had to wade through a hundred metres of waste deep water to get out of our island to the hill first. Vladimir said the dam was definitely NOT passable, but that he had a boat and could give her a ride to the other side! So we decided not to let the rain beat her and to confront the rain and mud and go for it! Luckily the next morning the rain was lighter, the river had receded and the path out through the forest was only a foot deep, so the bike could be wheeled out with the panniers all attached and ready. Then more good luck! Beth emailed a few hours after she'd left and said that Maneco (one of the locals) had passed by and gave her a ride with her bike in the back of the car - he took her to Canela and then she got the bus to São Francisco with the bike on board. So in the end she only needed to ride less than 10km from São Francisco to Arca Verde :-) Beth said that the Agro-forestry course went really well and that she'd learned a huge amount and that the people there were really like-minded, always talking about things we're really interested in such as alternative currencies and alternative power etc. We've actually been there before when Mum and Dad came over for their holiday, but we didn't get much chance to get to know anyone then. Then after the first course finished disaster struck! An intense storm rolled in with super-hail as big as eggs which badly damaged their roof causing water to pour in and soak every thing. The only reason they didn't cancel the course was because they needed the income from it to pay to fix the damaged roof! But last I heard they had all worked together and got tarps covering the roof and were drying everything out. We had a hail storm the night before Beth left which was about the size of marbles with a few gob-stoppers thrown in. I was certain the solar panels would be completely smashed, but amazingly when I went up to check in the morning they were all fine! But we have to think of some way to protect the roof and panels from the super-hail, because apparently it's going to get worse and more frequent for the next few months due to el-nino :-( |
