When expire_logs_days has no effect

I’ve spent all morning setting up log rotation in MySQL, except some servers were not erasing old log files.
The idea is to set expire_logs_days to say 7. This means only the logs covering the last seven days will be kept on disk. If you need them, or a slave needs to read from them, they [...]

Review of Rare Restaurant in Norwich, Norfolk, UK

One week ago, it being my girlfriend’s birthday, I decided we had to visit Rare.
Rare is a grill and stakehouse restaurant in Norwich, Norfolk. It is essentially a restaurant within a hotel, being located inside the Georgian House Hotel at the top of Unthank Road not far from the city centre.
Inside there is a very [...]

Screwfix Laser Fluid Extractor – Perfect for oil changes

One word: Awesome.
Earlier this year I decided to tackle the job of changing the oil in my girlfriend’s car myself. This involved making use of my Dad’s trolley jack, axel stands, sawing some small blocks of wood to spread the weight between car body and stands, then actually getting the sump plug undone, and clearing [...]

Second Gmail Outage in a week

Well, I just managed to log in using the Gmail https web interface but the past couple of hours both my accounts have been rejecting me with login failures via IMAP. The http interface was too slow and timed out minutes ago.
This is the second major problem in a week which for Google is a [...]

Amazon Cloud Runs Low on Disk Space

Another unthinkable (maybe in my mind only) has happened – errors uploading files to S3 led me to the AWS status page which reports the US East Coast facilities running low on drive space.
Am I the only one to have assumed someone or some thing was checking constantly, at least hourly, to ensure a sufficient [...]

Normal Bloke’s Identity Stolen

A colleague of mine recently received an email from his bank (genuine for once) thanking him for updating his card password.
Which he felt was strange because he hadn’t.
He called his bank and the automated line told him his balance was over GBP2,000. He then got through to a human who said it was under GBP200. [...]

Karcher K294MD Pressure Washer

Decided the car really needs a clean. As does my girlfriend’s. The good old bucket and sponge may be cheap and cheerful but fun it is not.
And so after reviewing various resources about pressure washers, went to Argos and brought home a Karcher K294M Delux unit, feeling £99.99 poorer as a result.
I assembled the machine [...]

The car in front is a Nissan

No, it is not a Toyota, despite what their marketing materials may claim.
I made an observation late that week. I am often driving along single carriageway roads to and from work. The UK’s road speed limit for such out of town roads is usually 60mph. Often, I am in a queue of vehicles traveling at less than this speed. [...]

Spying on your neighbour

Can this really be legal?
Today I heard of the case where someone had planted a small microphone in their side of a hedge, wired to speakers inside their house, for the purposes of listing to everything their neighbours say in their back garden.
Obviously, upon discovering the listening device, the neighbours being bugged called in the [...]