Anyhow, this time, she had discovered a very odd link to me with another member of her tree. The surname of this person was “EberSpacher” which, at least to my ear, is not a common name and certainly not one I have in my tree. The link she discovered was in an archive of a newspaper and it was posted as part of a will/probate search for relatives, the strange part? well, it turns out that before going into a nursing home on the IOW for the last few year of her life, this lady lived in the house that Sue and I have now!

When we took on this place, the building society used by the previous occupants contacted us and asked if we would like a pile of historical documents about the property, its previous owners and the original builders etc. Of course I grabbed the pile quickly and following the recent email was able to use it to confirm that the “Eberspacher” mentioned was in fact the sister of a lady who had married one of our house  builders, and that I could also confirm that she had been left the house in a will as I have a copy of the probate document in the pile of stuff I was given.

I was able to fill in a load of holes for the emailer and I’m sure I have some more stuff for her somewhere (might even be a few photo’s of the people involved). She was over the moon with it all and I now have a lot more interest in the history of our house as well as completing a very odd circle of ownership via unknown relatives in the outer spiral arm of my family tree…..

This blog uses built in WordPress tools to ensure that I don’t see any spam posted in the comments but keeping control of my mail client’s filters isn’t quite so easy – I should say wasn’t quite so easy!

All my registered domains have spam filtering on their mail servers but increasingly this doesn’t always catch the latest rubbish, that still makes its way through to my desktop and, in my case, Outlook. The inbuilt Microsoft filter isn’t that bright and for some years now I have relied on a little add-in called SpamBayes which is an Open Source solution to the problem using Baysian filters to “score” each message and filter it accordingly. All fine and dandy then? Well no, not really. Unfortunately updates to SpamBayes have been few and far between over the last 2 or 3 years and the project seems to have stalled. This means that recent updates to Windows and Outlook have started causing proiblems with it.

I have noticed that Outlook often doesn’t fully quit when I shut it down. That means that when I restart it, I actually get two copies, 1 hidden from the previous session and 1 for the latest startup, this causes resource problems by the end of each day as I have seen 5 or 6 Outlook sessions running in Task Manager. There are various add-ons to cure this but so far I haven’t found one without its own problems.

Enter SpamFighter! I came across this when I decided to ditch SpamBayes for something more up-to-date and have been using it for the last few weeks. It works a treat and doesn’t interfere with Outlook at all, so I decided to lash out the £17 for a years subscription to the system. After a very simple download/install, I now have aclean inbox again.

SpamFighter works as an add-in to Outlook, Outlook Express or Thunderbird and for the main part operates as a basic spam filter, putting all bad mail into its own folder and marking it. The clever bit is that it is user supported and anything it misses which makes its way through to the inbox can simply be marked by me as spam and that action is relayed to several million other SpamFighter users who systems will also mark that message in the same way. Of course they do the same for my inbox! In addition to the “community” rules I can also add my own white or blacklist for senders and the software uses those rules to override the community ones if needbe.

There’s a free, fully functional, 30 day trial available at the website. Download SPAMfighter today.

Yes, I like Apple products and yes, I did follow the bloggers covering today’s event; but I have a small problem before parting with my hard earned cash. Why? well take a look at the US Apple site (today anyway)… looks good eh?

Well yes it does until you look at the “Environmental Requirements” down at the bottom right….

The first line makes sense but, what the heck does he second mean?  Current temperature here on the IOW is about 2°C, according to the spec published, the iPad wouldn’t be working here….

Yes, of course I know what they mean, but surely they employ people with enough intelligence to avoid this kind of confusion?

My BT broadband speed seems to have settled at 2,720Mb/s over the last few days. It seems that BT are playing games again….

When I phoned them today to ask what was going on they promptly offered to reduce my monthly payments…. took me almost 2 seconds to accept!

These are the views from our house in Winford this morning (click on the pics for bigger versions):

The back garden probably best shows the scene, but here’s one of the front too.

Thank goodness I have a colour camera eh?

Checked the BT HomeHub again today and now find it’s reading 4,320 Kbps!

Somebody at OpenReach is fiddling with things again…

UPDATE: Mmm… I spoke too soon, today Wed 06/01/2010 it’s back to 3,776 Kbps….. ;(

I have no idea what BT have done to get the improvement, they haven’t moved the exchange, that’s a certainty, and I haven’t seen any Openreach vans along the road. I can only assume they found a fault somewhere and I have gained 600Kbps from the repair.

I seriously doubt anyone from either BT or Openreach will ever read this post but, in case they do, well done men…. may you repair many more similar faults

The single thing which causes most problems for the WordPress users I know is uploading and positioning images in their posts. Hopefully I have found a solution which will make things quite a bit easier – it’s called “Freebie Images” and is a WP plugin – you can get it here.

I just installed it and it shows up nicely as a panel in the WP “Add New Post” dashboard. From there it’s just a case of:

• Searching for a suitable picture from the included stock library
• Dragging its thumbnail from the panel into the post
• Finetuning the result

Up at the top of this post is a pic chosen after searching for “F1″ and dragging my choice into position.

So far it looks a very useful tool – I’ll report back after a few more tests….

Those clever people at Ventnor Blog have today launched a new Island Events site at http://events.onthewight.com/.

In their words….

People often say that nothing happens on the Isle of Wight but having run VentnorBlog for the past four years, we know this is far from true – so we’ve setup the Events On The Wight Website to prove these nay-sayers wrong.

Crammed full of Island-wide events from Art exhibitions to Zumbatomics (that’s aerobics to salsa type music to uninitiated), we hope that the uncluttered, easy-to-use site gives you many ways to find an event – whether it be by the day, venue or type of activity.

Great work and a really useful site to add to your bookmarks.

About a year ago I applied to help with a UK broadband speed survey at SamKnows, I now have access to the results and can see how a stack of measurements actually turned out for my connection.

Perhaps the most obvious statistics are those regarding straight speed, so here’s the result for the year:

As you can see it’s been far from the 8Mb maximum to which I’m entitled although, of course, the clever guys at BT insist that 8Mb is an “up to” figure! Looking at the graph shows a wiggly line between 2 and 3Mb with a maximum somewhere around 2.7.

I have just finished a call to BT about the numbers and they insist that all is well and is “up to” 8Mb which of course it is but then 57Kb would be as well. They promised to carry out some extra diagnostics on the line but could offer me no clue as to when my line would be upgraded to something over 6Mb – the sort of connection I could be convinced was “up to” 8Mb.

Thanks to SamKnows and the extra customised router/software they supplied, my system is still being monitored and the results collated and added to others to give a true representation of what is happening across the UK.