I’ve previously posted about how slow my ADSL connection is (5Mbps max!) and that I bought a 4G router just over a year ago (https://blog.v-s-f.co.uk/2014/10/fed-up-of-waiting-for-superfast-broadband/). Before I bought the 4G router, I decided to look at how to load balance the connections. There were two reasons for doing so. One …
For the last few years, I’ve grown wildflowers in the back garden to attract bees and butterflies into the garden. The flowers were really successful the first year I grew them, with the border full of cornflowers and poppies.Since then I’ve not had quite as much success – despite throwing …
Last night I put out in the garden half a banana which was quite old, but still edible to go off and attract butterflies – yes probably a long shot, but I love watching butterflies. This afternoon I checked on the state of the banana to see if it had …
Back in 2013, I blogged about losing faith in BDUK after Hertfordshire published the upgrade map of exchanges for the project that would end in 2015 (now end of 2016/beginning of 2017!). Last month Connected Counties who are running the upgrade for Herts and Bucks published a new map showing …
If like me your house has a few rooms and you’re finding that the wireless signal from your ADSL modem can’t quite reach the kitchen, it might be worth thinking about extending your wireless network. We had this problem a couple of years ago when a radiator upstairs blocked all …
I’d previously shared on my blog the home made monitoring application I’d built to aggregate pv, meter and weather data – see: https://blog.v-s-f.co.uk/2014/03/home-monitoring-home-made-overview/. Over the last few months I re-wrote the app to not only output the data to PVOutput every minute, but store that same data into an HSQLDB …
We’ve had a Blue Tit bird box for over 5 years and have had a Blue Tit nest in the box every season since it was put up. This year is a little different though as a Sparrow has taken over the box and decided to build a nest. There …
I’ve had my solar panels since October 2011 (details about my system can be found on this post) and I’m always telling people how good they are. When I tell people about my solar panels, I get one question – “how much do they generate” and the second is a …
Just found this website today from a post on the Guardian website which enables members of the public to crowd fund solar panels to be installed on School rooves! Nearest school to me is Maple Tree Lower, who look like they need a little help. But great idea! http://www.solarschools.org.uk/mapletree/
My hot water display decided to print the HTTP response header…
We use tomcat a lot at work and sometimes you will deploy the same application tens of times in a single day. Before deploying a new version of the application I’m about to work on, I like to: Clean out the logs directory – much handier to see what’s going …
Back in March 2014, I posted about monitoring the hot water tank temperature and when the immersion was switched on by the solar surplus https://blog.v-s-f.co.uk/2014/03/home-monitoring-home-made-results/. We have now decided to display the last temperature reading on an LCD next to the shower room and boiler control panel. The previous software …
When creating a flow in Mule recently, I hit an issue that kept me scratching my head for a number of hours, so thought I’d share it… (or in pictorial format) I’ve created a simple flow which receives a request on a servlet endpoint and then adds a variable depending …
I am… It seems to me the original goal of the rural broadband initiative has been lost along the way. My local broadband initiative group (Superfast for Herts/Connected Counties) upgrades cabinets in local towns which already have fast broadband available as it gives them the numbers required to hit targets, …
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