A Proud Moment

I’ve mentioned (here and here) my “safe environment” for my children to access the internet. This moved on to the second stage the other day when Schwuklet #2 (my 5 year old son) finally got his own computer.

I took a bit of a different tack this time. With Schwuklet #1’s computer I took the easy path of Windows XP because a) I was in a hurry and didn’t have the time to dedicate to customising a Linux install to my requirements and b) she had a Bratz game that required Windows. I know, I copped out. This time – primarily because I was going to be (re)using much older hardware – I decided to invest the time in getting Linux to suit my needs. I started off, as always, with Ubuntu 5.10. I know Dapper is almost here, but Breezy will suffice for now. Because of the machine’s poor spec, I passed over GNOME and instead used Xfce which is much ‘lighter’. I also installed Tux Paint, GCompris and Childsplay then customised the menus so only those apps, Firefox, Thunderbird and Gaim were available to him.

Internet access – as previously discussed – is well restricted. Email is a non-published address and heavily filtered anyway, and Gaim is there so he can chat to me, his mother and his sister (how sad!) when we’re online (which I am most of the day).

This brings onto my “proud moment”: my first IM conversation with my son. How cool is that!

Cleaning out comment spam in Typo

It would appear that this site has become a target for comment spam. This has happened before, but I just cleaned it up (see below) and forgot about it. However they hit me even harder this time, so I decided to make some changes.

From now on, comments will be automatically disabled after 14 days. This may be reduced in the future.

Cleaning Up

Fortunately for me, the spam is all created in a certain time frame (usually greater than 14 days, hence my chosen cutoff period) and because my site is very low traffic these days, I’m confident that simply dumping all comments created during that period will only hit a minimum of real commentary. I could be more specific in my target period (e.g. determine the timestamps of the first and last comment), but I’ve foundthe below Postgresql query to be good enough for my needs. YMMV.

delete from comments where date_trunc('day', created_at) = date_trunc('day', current_date - n);

Where n is the number of days since the spam was created (easy to spot in the Typo admin view).

Right tool for the job

I’ve always had a printer attached to my computer. I don’t always use it – although I have been more recently – but it’s always there if I want it. My current printer is an EPSON Stylus Photo 890 and it’s always done a pretty good job with whatever I threw at it. It is a bit thirsty when it comes to ink though.

Recently I acquired a Canon SELPHY DS810 and I am seriously impressed it with. I never saw the point in a printer that was specifically for printing photos but now I’m convinced. Although it can connect to your computer, I’ve found it be even better when used standalone.

Short Story Competition

This one is only for the benefit of #lugradio dwellers

In response to neuro’s excellent Phated statistics I issued the following challenge:

…and after some discussion I’ve come up with the following rules:

Before I added (and used) the final rule, Phated came up with the following which I think she should be commended for:

Update

h|barbobot’s entry

(More) Content Filtering with IPCop

(Quite) a while ago I talked about the content filtering setup I’d implemented on my IPCop box to keep my kids safe when browsing the web.

All was well until a week ago when I split my network into wired and wireless (Green and Blue in IPCop speak). The separation worked as it should, but whenever I turned squidGuard on no web traffic would flow.

I went looking for a solution (because re-installing the add-on didn’t work) and instead found an alternative: urlfilter (which incidentally also supports SmoothWall for those that use it). urlfilter requires advproxy – an advanced proxy add-on (again also available for SmoothWall) – to function, but a quick look at the features convinced me it was worth a try so I installed them both.

They both do exactly what they say they do, and they’ve given me more control and flexibility than my previous setup. More importantly content filtering is working again, and this time it was easier – there’s an option to block all non-listed sites.

So I would highly recommend both to anyone using IPCop (or Smoothwall).