This year I decided to plant some blueberry bushes in my backyard right up against the fence. I knew I would not get the required 6+ hours of direct sunlight, as we have a very tree friendly backyard. I figure I get about 3 or so hours of direct sunlight a day on the area I was looking to plant them. I decided to try a few different varieties and see what actually made it. We have a very sandy soil so all I did was mix in some fertiziler and get to planting. The results are that the Duke…
...Read MoreLemonade Kool-Aid, Dishwasher Stains and Smell
August 4th, 2009 No comments »I finally remembered to have my wife pick up two packets of Lemonade Kool-Aid this week to clean the dishwasher. I will admin I had not really read that much as to what to use it for. Now I realize that it is really for cleaning out deposits and stains because the citric acid works on those base type stains and deposits. Our kitchen is fairly new so I guess using this is more proactive than I originally thought. My first initial thought was that you use it to remove some of the smell from the dishwasher that builds up…
...Read MorePhpbb3 and 1&1 VPS email notifications not working
August 2nd, 2009 No comments »After moving our phpbb3 installation from a shared hosting account to a VPS account with 1&1 all of a sudden our mail notifications were not working. We do not need a full blown mail server on our VPS so we still wanted to use the regular 1&1 SMTP servers to send out the mail for the board. After trading a few emails to 1&1 support we got it figured out. When we moved our domains over to the new VPS package we took one of our original accounts that was the account we were using for SMTP and made it…
...Read MoreCheap Foaming Soap refills
July 30th, 2009 No comments »I love this new foaming soap, especially now with everyone having to wash their hands a million times a day. The problem was that the refills were expensive and I never got around to the store often enough to get them, but I found it is really easy to make your own. What I have been doing is using the liquid Softsoap and mixing it with very hot water in the foaming soap dispensers and voila instant foaming soap refills. It is so much cheaper than buying the refills and one of those huge bottles of liquid soft soap could…
...Read More2008 Christmas List for 5 year and 3 year old boys
July 29th, 2009 No comments »So this year I am getting the boys the following:
Mighty World Camping Set and Rescue set – we attending the warehouse sale so thats why we opted for these, my boys love playing with things like this
NFL replica Jerseys
Vtech V-motion
Mario Party 8 – they both have fun playing the Wii
Digital Camera from Fisher Price
Q-BA-MAZE 50-pack Cool Colors
...Read More1&1 and 500 Error after switching to Wordpress from Drupal
July 29th, 2009 No comments »So a few days ago we started getting a bunch of 500 errors on our website. After calling 1&1 they told us to change it so we were using php5 by forcing it in our .htaccess file. We did that and still had 500 errors. After a few more calls and helping them out a bit, it was determined that some of our php scripts were pushing us up against our threshold for a shared server with 1&1. After disabling some plug ins on our main site, we finally tracked it down to a site we switched from Drupal to…
...Read MoreReplacement for SmartFTP
July 29th, 2009 No comments »So SmartFTP is no longer a free product. That really sucks because I was a huge fan of SMARTFTP I really want to stress that, and if you can afford it, its one of the best FTP programs out there. So I began the search for a new program. I tried WS_FTP, then WiseFTP, and a few others but none really did it for me. Then I found a nice plug in for Firefox called FireFTP http://fireftp.mozdev.org/ its free and thats what I use now.
EDIT: So while I love FireFTP it is slow on large and multiple transfers and I have…
...Read Morephpbb3 conversion timeout and things of note, mods, etc
July 29th, 2009 No comments »So here I am ready to convert my phpbb2 board to the nice new phpbb3. Well I try to run the conversion and I am using 1&1 hosting and it just times out. Do not have a big board either like 44,000 posts. I try again and the same thing. So I start doing some research and find this
http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article/offline-conversions/
Ok that sounds like it may be my only option but it sounds like a lot of work. I continue to search and luckily I then found the following.
http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=985935
I changed the values as stated in the install_convert.php and it seemed to work.…
RIDGID 12V Right-angle Impact Driver Model R82233 Review
July 29th, 2009 No comments »This is a brief review of the Ridgid Right Angle Impact Driver.
I got this device for father’s day and I must say it is one of my favorite tools already.
The Good: Variable speed is easy to control, battery charges quickly, the unit is powerful. Fits in places a regular drill or screwdriver could not.
The So So: None so far, other then the unit is a bit heavy, but it is a mans tool so it should be. Ok it is a unisex tool, but it is built sturdy. I would have loved a second battery in there as well.
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...Read MoreAmcor Portable Air Conditioner KF9000E NanoMax Review
July 29th, 2009 No comments »So I have central air, but I have an office on the top level of a split house and it just gets too hot regardless of the central air (my house has 5 levels). So in my quest for a portable air conditioner, since I have replacement windows that do not open up enough to have a regular window air conditioner, I bought the under 300 dollar Amcor and here is the brief review.
The good: It is cold, as my one son said, “Daddy it’s like winter” when he stood in front of it. Easy to setup, quick to move,…
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