[Dave Rice]

I like how they’re calling it “craft ale” now ?

South Wales was part of my patch in Royal Mail so I’ve had plenty of Felinfoel over the years. Portsmouth next week, usually lots of Adnams there. Will probably end up in Wetherspoons but I have found a Belgian beer bar not far from the hotel.

[Dave Rice]

BL it’s power over Ethernet so it’s all going back to the same place anyway.

As a general point I have mesh networks out there that are by their very nature powered from different buildings. The same with building to building links.

[Dave Rice]

I’d put an AP in each loft on the underside of the landing ceiling.

If there is mains in the loft they could be powered from there and only 1 cable run down to the router. If no mains then they will all need to be cabled back. The power could come from an appropriate PoE switch or the included power injectors. The PoE switch is the most elegant solution.

Shopping list:

N – 3 x Ubiquiti UniFi UAP £60 / Ubiquiti TS-5-POE TOUGHSwitch 5-Port Gigabit PoE Switch (60W) £85 or NETGEAR GS305 5-Port Desktop Gigabit Switch £15 and the power injectors.

AC – 3 x Ubiquiti UAP-AC-LITE GEN2 AC1200 £80 / Switch with PoE TP-LINK TL-SG1008P 8-Port (4x PoE Ports) Desktop Gigabit Switch (53W) £60 or NETGEAR GS305 5-Port Desktop Gigabit Switch £15 and the power injectors.

The reason for the different PoE switches is the N is 24v passive and the AC is 48v active (802.3 af).

You’ll also need Cat 5e cable and RJ45 plugs plus drill capable of going through the dividing wall(s) in the loft. You may get away with external cable and hopping outside to get around the walls, but you’ll need a ladder and head for heights.

Good luck with routing a cable (or three) into the middle of the house to get to the router.

Broadbandbuyer will set up the cloud controller for you. Free for 3 years then £15 a year.

EDIT As this is a business situation, just thinking about any potential GDPR issues if 3 different tenants can see each others devices, which they will be able to do.

The APs can run 4 SSIDs so it would be easy to give each house it’s own SSID but they’ll still be in the same IP subnet. You could set up Guest protocols what would isolate each device and only allow any device to only access the internet but that would knacker any wifi printers etc.

The way to do it would be with VLANs. I would only contemplate this with the AC as a managed 802.3 af PoE switch is available from Ubiquiti for £110

 

[Dave Rice]

They’re so damn cheap now it’s hardly worth looking for bargains at the lower capacities. Even E-Buyer are £22 for a Kingston 120 and £35 for a 240.

[Dave Rice]

I use platinum (?) Barclaycard as they bought out Egg (remember them)? The windows and android apps are very good and provide an overview of spending and a free Experian credit score. I used to have a First Direct gold card too but after redundancy I rationalised everything down and moved my current and business accounts to Santander for the benefits of the 1-2-3 account.

Santanders banking apps are excellent so I would think any credit card ones would be too.

[Dave Rice]

It’s getting near that time of year when I cash in my monthly wine bank subscriptions for the Christmas box. I always used to get a 20 litre box of Thatchers Cheddar Valley too but the Mrs had the kitchen done and I’m not sure where I could put it now.

Cheddar Valley is proper cider. No bubbles, orange colour and cloudy. Tastes like apple juice and doesn’t taste like it has as much alcohol in it as it does. This catches out the unwary (freshers week is always a laugh) and I have never managed more than 4 consecutive pints. Luckily this is the size of the jug we use for squash so I can decant the maximum amount ?

[Dave Rice]

I bought a Brother HL-L8260CDW from Printerland back in April. I always look at cost of ownership over headline price, but at £190 ish then and now that was good too especially as it includes full size carts. Beware the cheap Dell deals.

Cost per page I work out for myself if it’s not shown. As I always buy printers that can accept third party cartridges I find myself on ink suppliers sites and they always show this.

Maintenance items are a waste toner and transfer belt units, £70 for both @ 50,000 pages .001 pence per page.

I regularly print CCTV surveys of 40 pages plus and it’s a quick as it claims and I’ve not had any paper handling issues. Quality is what you would expect and it’s not eating toner. You can configure it through a web interface or the BRAdmin windows app.

As it’s currently on offer at Printerland with £75 Cashback, 3 Year Warranty and free next day delivery I’d be biting their hand off.

I use a Canon MG6600 for photos, but when this expires I’ll not replace it as online photo printing shops (or a quick trip to Asda or Jessops) make more sense these days. The ink drying issues on the CCTV reports are the reason I decided on a colour laser (I’ve always had a B&W one which I’ve kept in the workshop).

[Dave Rice]

Meanwhile Supermicro stock is down 30%.

I think this is what the story is really all about. As I said I have seen Hikvision have the same treatment and salesman from their competitors tried it on me in the space of 2 minutes after meeting them. Our kit is made in Korea, not China etc. etc.

If there is one nation we need to be worried about spying on us it is the USA closely followed by ourselves. The recent Russian attempts in the Netherlands was a laugh. Their car park interception of wireless traffic would only have worked on unsecured network and so the fault of the targets admins, but that wasn’t mentioned. It is always that the bad guys have some sort of secret sauce unknown to the West that magically unlocks our networks. As we know the tools used in the wild are written by our own side who therefore must be up to exactly the same tricks themselves.

Now let me see, to be sure I must buy CCTV cameras manufactured wholly in Europe or the USA.  Most of the big US brands now purchase their equipment from a factory in China. With the “The Big Three” Chinese manufacturers: Hikvision, Dahua, and TVT making about 90% of IP cameras on the market.

[Dave Rice]

I’ve met Dwynne, he was kind enough to show my daughter and I around Bangor when she was looking at going to University there (she is). He and his family have helped us on other occasions I won’t go into here.

He is a very kind and generous man and I don’t think I’d be insulting him by saying I think he falls into the “old fashioned copper” mould. Not a Dixon of Dock Green , they never existed, but someone who cares deeply about the community he served and gets immensely frustrated when things get in the way of that. Personally I also feel his frustration having to clean up after the self imposed mistakes of others and that being seen as “your job”. It’s not enough to say well that’s what you’re paid for, it’s not. It takes time away from what is your job and that is improving the lot for everyone in your sphere of influence.

Ed is right, it’s the politicians we need to be looking at. I’m reading Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island. If you want an impartial view of how his adopted country has changed in the last 20 years read this (it’s quite funny too). Why can we no longer afford, or it seems care about, the little things we once took for granted, never mind the big things. Then there’s the lack of personal responsibility for your actions, or inaction.

[Dave Rice]

Tonight’s tipple. Proper job.

[Dave Rice]

Read the comments from the real world, they are the bit that makes sense to me as to it’s feasibility or not. Also the story relies on anonymous sources and no physical evidence.

Sorry but I’ve seen at first hand the doing down of Hikvision by competitors claiming just such tricks. They turned out to be total borax but Hikvision now have everything certified by third parties.

Given the current trade wars with China and the “reds under the bed” sentiment being whipped I’d take this with a pinch of salt until real evidence comes to light. Supermicro boards aren’t exactly rare, you can go and buy one yourself right now from many vendors.

It’s easy to inspect every packet on your network and to implement firewalls and VLANs. If anything is “phoning home” you can detect it. As mentioned you run your servers in different networks to your clients, it’s a simple precaution that has been common for decades, it’s how we stopped the olde fashioned port attacks.

This all smacks of propaganda to me.

[Dave Rice]

#2 sons birthday today. Got him a Beer Hawk Oktoberfest box. All the official beers and a Spaten stein.

[Dave Rice]

Goto = spaghetti code, never stopped me though ?

I did all my stuff in Atari Basic with some assembly code that ran in Page 6 – W-o-F will know what I mean. You could do stuff with Atari Basic, especially with strings, that you couldn’t with others. IIRC it was written by Microsoft.

[Dave Rice]

There was a ton of stuff, they are certainly going places. I’ll wait for the slides to come through, but everything has got more intelligent. Facial recognition on the photo album, advanced analytics in the surveillance software i.e. recognition of a human’s / animals / cars shape to include / exclude as an event trigger. The example was catching cyclists on a busy pavement. People walking won’t trigger the camera.

There will be a mesh router and units available soon. The parental / employer controls for their WiFi kit are the best I’ve seen.

There will be a free VMWare backup module. More Active Directory integration. Central management of thousands of remote boxes. More collaboration software.

For the prize draw WD gave away a couple of 8TB Reds and a 10TB Red Pro. So Seagate went one better with 14TB Ironwolf drives. Needless to say I didn’t win anything ?

[Dave Rice]

#2 son coming home for his birthday this weekend. He lives in Leeds now so we tend to push the boat out a bit when he visits as it’s only a couple of times a year. Anyway, looking at somewhere to go for Sunday Lunch and saw this on the drinks menu at the local gastro pub and immediately thought of you BL:

SIREN SOUNDWAVE IPA
This hazy orange IPA has a zesty lemon aroma followed by flavours of grapefruit, mango & peach, subtle bitterness and a clean, moreish finish. Soundwave carries her drinker to the west coast, to the golden shores of California where craft ale is nectar.

Pretentious? Moi?

They do a cracking roast though and always have something drinkable on the hand pump and usually Doom Bar too.

[Dave Rice]

I love these things. My Dad and his mate did a lot of work on the alignment of stone circles, I’ve been to loads.

The highlight of my year was the Stonehenge Free Festival until it was violently suppressed in 1985 in the Battle of the Beanfield.

[Dave Rice]

We have a Wychwood pub here, The Hobgoblin in Gloucester Road (the main road into town from oop north, the A38). Good beer and mega burgers and tex mex food. The challenge is the Kraken – a Triple Bypass burger, a portion of Dirty, Dirty Fries, 12 very hot hot wings, as well as ’slaw, pickles and sauces, all for £25. You must sign a disclaimer, and if you eat it in an hour you win a T-shirt, get your picture on the wall. No I haven’t. The Triple Bypass burger is well named.

It’s a good boozer but so is the Prince of Wales on the next corner, however that’s been reclaimed by the brewery and I haven’t been in since.  They have promised not to muck it about and still have local beers and Sheppy’s cider, ooh arr!

[Dave Rice]

It gets worse.  Their kitchen was shut 4 – 6 and with rush hour approaching couldn’t risk going to find somewhere else. So another pint of Doom Bar and a packet of salt & vinegar crisps please. 90p a packet and it was salt, vinegar and cider. Not cider vinegar, cider. And Kent’s idea of what cider is never mind adding salt and vinegar to it. Weird place.

[Dave Rice]

Sat in a pub in Euston killing time for the off peak trains. Doom bar £4.55 a pint. At these prices I could have afforded a peak time train ticket!

[Dave Rice]

Ours is OK but I realised the insurance cover had run out two years ago. We had a controller and a radiator pump out of the old one as well as annual services. The boiler is now 17 years old but it’s a dead simple one, still just taken out a policy with SSE.

[Author]

Posts