firetree.net

I’ve switched away from BT to using a VoIP number provided by my ISP. AAISP strongly encourage their customers to avoid NAT for VoIP, but I wanted to give it a try anyway. Here’s how I got it working.

Update 2013/4/10: Although this NAT set-up does work, it only seems to work for a day or two. After a while, the audio connection stops working, so the phone will ring, but there is no audio in or out or both. After playing around with it a bit, I abandoned NAT, and gave my base station a real IP address. So, you can follow these instructions, but you will probably have the same problems… Read the rest of this entry »

My wife Hilde and I are just embarking on our house renovation project. It’s a huge change of direction for me, I find it exhilarating and a little bit scary.

I’ve created a new category on this blog for the project. I’ll be using it to discuss various technical aspects of the project, and progress. All the content is syndicated across to the Project Site, and from there it goes out to Twitter & Facebook. (Hilde’s been reading up on marketing!)

Have a look at things to come with the Teaser Trailer.

Ubuntu has an irritating habit of turning off Firefox’s middlemouse.contentLoadURL setting. Recently, it’s got even worse – whenever I turned it back on, Ubuntu would immediately turn it back off for me. So, today I finally worked out that the problem was Ubuntu’s “firefox extensions” – turned that off, and finally my contentLoadURL setting sticks…

Except, now I realise that the Firefox devs have crippled the behaviour anyway. The clipboard now has to contain a full URL, complete with the http://, or the middle click is ignored. Humph. What use it THAT??

OK, so I then found these instructions for hacking FF’s internals, to recreate the old behaviour. Amazingly it works, but I’m starting to feel that they’ve got it in for me.

I did this ages ago. I don’t know why I never posted it. Anyway, here’s an interactive timeline of Ancient Egyptian history.

Republic of Rome is a great boardgame. Or at least I think it is — I’ve never really been able to play a proper game. The rules are so complicated, and so badly written, that I’ve never really felt I understood them. So, I decided to write a cheat sheet. One that would be useful for someone who is trying to learn the rules while playing their first game.

Republic of Rome: Cheat Sheet (PDF)
Republic of Rome: Cheat Sheet (Open Office)

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The UK’s Digital Economy Bill will introduce the concept of orphan works which may effectively abolish copyright on most photographs. Is this a foretaste of the future copyright in general? Read the rest of this entry »

confused.com is a price comparison web-site. They gather lots of information about you, and offer no way to cancel your account. They also take the opportunity to spam your e-mail address with lots of unrelated offers.

Avoid.

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/PowersofArrest/

I’ve just added double-glazing film to the windows in our hall, landing and living-room. It’s fantastic!

The windows in our house are the original single-glazed wood frames. We’ve kept them for three reasons – we like them, they’re in good condition, and all the advice suggests that new double glazed windows are bad for the environment, and not cost-effective.

The glazing film is really cheap though. It looks virtually invisible and it has made a huge difference to how warm our house feels. It’s fun to put up too – you stick the film around the window and then stretch it flat by heating it with a hair-dryer.

So, double-glazing film for the win!

I’ve decided that I hate Wordpress’ multi-widget “API”, so I’ve written a cleaner interface for it: class MultiWidget

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