So, I decided to take her with me.  The question was where too.  I decided to take her to Wicken Fen again.  We’d gone there before (Wicken Fen…) with Lisa’s school.  That visit was good for the kids but we didn’t really get to see too much of the place.  Today when we went back we’d ended up walking about 1.25 to 1.5 miles around part of the area.  Lisa had a good time but sure was tired.  Surprisingly she didn’t fall asleep on the way back home.

There are some pics and a video from the day HERE - here are some samples.

We kept telling Emma she’ll get spots too and she had keep looking for them and tell us as soon as she found her spots.  The day they came, she came running to tell us she’s finally got spots.  About 2 days later she stopped liking them

Emma can’t quite say “chicken pox”, it comes out sounding more like “chin chin box”.

All in all both of the kids have come through this pretty easy.  Lisa has only one spot that was on the verge of getting infected but I don’t think it really did.  It’s quite large and still visible, but it is going away slowly.   Emma so far only has one that looks like it’s going the same way as Lisa’s, but we’ll have to wait and see how it goes.

I’m glad both have gotten it now and it’ll be clear before they go back to school in early Sept.  It also means we won’t have to deal with this ever again.

Well, that’s all well and good, but how do I connect things to it?  I wanted some easy way to connect multiple things to the battery without having to have a number of wires getting attached to the battery.

So, not wanting to spend ARM+LEG and either our first or second born to buy something already made, and it wouldn’t include the cig plugs either.

So, I made this:

Read on if you’d like to see the other pics .. or, you can just go and look at them in my Flickr Gallery

Well you made it here then

Ok, well looking at the picture above what you have is:

- 4 way cigarette plugs

- 4 sets of Anderson Powerpoles

- 4 Fuse holders (15A for cig plug and 20A for Powerpoles)

- 2 Inline fuse holders (40A fuses)

- 2 Quick release battery terminal clamps

These are the fuses holders up close and the Anderson Powerpole block.  This block is arranged in 2 groups of 4’s.  The reason for this is so that the 2 groups back wards from each other.  This means that there can be no mistakes in plugging into them the wrong way.  Each group of 4 makes a single circuit and fused by a 20A fuse.  There is the top group and the bottom group, also marked on the fuses.  The Powerpoles used are all rated at 45AMPs each.  It’s over kill but by risk it.

The 4 way cigarette plugs are connected through a 15 amp fuse, also marked on the front.

Looking inside the box.  On the left side top and bottom are the 30AMP bus blocks I’ve used to distribute the incoming power feed (both the negative and positive are fused with 40AMP fuses).

This is a close up of the Powerpole blocks.  You can see how each pair are ganged together.  It wasn’t too hard, but where the double wires were attached to I had to shave off some of the insulation on both wires to allow them to get closer together and prevent too much strain.  Each and every connector was first crimped then soldered to ensure both a good connection and also security of the connections.

Close up of the fuse connections isn’t very exciting.  Each connection here is also soldered and then taped to ensure the “hot” connections aren’t open to something falling in or on them.

Each and every wire going into or connecting the bus blocks has been soldered to ensure the wires won’t break or wear with movement.  it also means the screws holding them in will have a more secure fit

Just another shot of the front again

I ended up spending the week at home with miserable weather and unable to really do anything productive as we couldn’t take the kids anywhere that they might expose people to the infection.

Thankfully I start back to work on Wed morning, albeit from home as I’ll be working a week of “early shift” (7am-3pm), and we always only work that from home.

Hopefully something more exciting will happen soon so I can post a proper update :)  We are expect Emma to get the pox within a couple of weeks as well, that’ll be fun t do it all over again.

Anyhow, I took a load of pics which you can see if you CLICK HERE.  Some samples of the pics.

Yuki was working and I needed to get out of the house today with the girls, so I decided to take the to this park.  We’d talked about it for a while but today was the day.

You can see the photos from the Flickr Gallery.

The girls had a great time.. they even did some crafts there too.. they painted some paper butterflies, they did some drawing and coloured in a small bit of paper that was then pressed into a badge with a pin in the back to put on their clothes.

Not having any luck at all on the net finding the information I needed to build a cable, I’ve finally broken down and paid £26.00 (including shipping) to buy one.  I’ve wanted a DC cable mostly so that I could a) go camping without the need to have a tent pitch that was powered (extra cost), and b) be able to power my CPAP should we have a prolonged power outage at home (fairly low risk of this, but a risk none the less).

Click on the image below to see the full sized one.  This is a page from the manual that came with my cable.

Basically, should someone have posted something like:

To make your own Respironics Shielded DC Cord, Part number 1001956, you will need the following:

• 1 x 2.1mm (5.5mm outside) X 15mm Coaxial DC plug
  Such as: Maplin’s Part number HH61R (www.maplin.co.uk)
• 2-3m of suitable wire for a max of 7amp DC (depending on your CPAP model)
• 2-4 Clip on Ferrite suppressors, such as Maplin’s part N89AB
• 1 x 12VDC cigarette plug, suitable for upto 7amp DC

The construction of a DIY Respironics CPAP DC Cable, model number 1001956 is quite simple.  Wire up the cigarette plug to the DC plug that will go to the CPAP, be sure to wire the tip of the cigarette plug (Positive 12V, I suggest a multi-meter to confirm this in your car or battery pack you intend to use) to the centre connector of the 2.1mm DC plug.  Wire the negative to the other remaining connections. 

At both ends of the cable, as close as possible to each of the plugs, leave not much more then 3-4cm of cable “exposed” put a couple of the clip on ferrite RF suppressors.  These are quite important as they will ensure the dc is free of RF (Radio Frequency) or Electromagnetic noise.  These, should they get into the machine, could cause damage.  You can likely get away without them, but frankly for the extra £5 it will cost for these it’s worth saving your £500+ CPAP.

That’s all there is to it.  I really hope people find this useful, for some reason there has been a black hole of info about these cables, and I’m not sure why.

**DISCLAIMER** This information has been provided purely for theoretical and personal information.  I will not, nor can not, be held responsible if you are not competent enough to build this simple cable and end up damaging or destroying your CPAP.  I’m pretty sure in the wonderful lawsuit happy world we  live in it’s also most likely a violation of your warranty to attach a home made DC cable to your CPAP machine.  You have been warned, don’t come crying to me if you blow something up, also, don’t ask me to make one for you.  These are beyond simple to make.

Not much else to report..  Now to upgrade the other 5 WP installs I manage ..

I wish they’d do more work WP MultiUser so I could just have 1 single install on the server and then create domain/user level instances as needed (would use a lot less disk for the installs and provide a single central point to update/administer .. it’s a good looking product, but needs updating.

The weather couldn’t have been better for the day.. it was a little overcast, but that kept the heat down which was good.

(click to see full sized images)

You can see the rest of the pics taken yesterday by CLICKING HERE

Click to read on ….

It was a great day out, the kids had such a great time.  We were in the “Diving Beetles” group.  The first thing we did was pond dipping.  This involved using nets on the end of sticks.  The kids (with help from the adults) swept the nets through the water then tipped the nets into pans filled with water.  In Lisa’s first dip she got a large snail and a couple small bugs.  We also managed to get a pretty good sized newt.  The Wicken Fen staff managed to fish out a massive newt that was about 3 or 4 times the size of the one we had.

The second “adventure” was the mini-beast hunt.  This had the kids looking under logs for whatever sorts of things they could find.  There were worms and a few other bugs to find as well.   The second part of this was to use large nets on sticks, sweeping them through the long grass to see what they could catch.  There wasn’t much here as there was already another group that did this before us so everything was already scared off

The final event of the day was a short walk along the spectacular boardwalk they have that winds through the Fen.  The boardwalk itself is interesting, it’s constructed entirely from a plastic material that has been completely made from recycled materials.  The walk on the boardwalk was a guided tour by one of the Wicken Fen staff.  The kids were given pencils and a sheet of paper with several animals, birds and other critters that are found in the Fen, they had to find these.  This was made easy in that they only had to look for the wooden cut outs of the creatures that were left on the boardwalk for them.  The guide would then tell us about these and give other info about the Fen. 

It’s a great place and I think we will go back again one day to explore the boardwalk and other paths that wander through the Fen.

I am, right now, uploading some pictures taken today from around Cambridge and London.

I’ve also added a link to the new gallery in the middle sidebar to the right.

We were given a form to fill out where they asked us to list 3-5 other kids that Lisa would like to have in her class with her.  Lisa was lucky and all of her friends were put in the same class.

Lisa checking out the class	Lisa and her “boyfriend” Connor
You can tell she’s gonna “own” the school	I think Lisa’s calling her peeps

You can click on the photos above to go to the gallery or CLICK HERE to see a few more pics from today

Today is Father’s Day.  First, we went to Ladybirds Pre-School for the Father’s Day Fete.  There were loads of things for the kids to do there.  They had a small bouncy castle, face painting (you’ll see in the pics), draws and prizes and several Tombola’s including a couple for adults where you can win booze.  I got a bottle of wine.  The kids won several little toys and a drink.

After the Fete, we headed to Cambridge to the Town and Country show on Parker’s Piece.  We didn’t even know this was on, one of our friends mentioned it to us. There aren’t a load of pics of the various things going on there.. we should have taken more pics of the event.

There are a bunch of pics of the kids playing on some of the rides.

Click for today’s photos - 2008-06-15 - Father’s Day  - Photos

I didn’t really like much of what I found, or found it wasn’t really what I wanted to do with it .. so I decided to use some of that info and came up with something of my own.

The short story is this. When someone calls my Canadian number, my US Toll-Free number any number that ultimately rings the group of phones in the house, I will now get a direct message in Twitter from a special account I setup for this purpose, which also sends a SMS to my phone (device notifications in twitter).

Read more by clicking below… Be warned! Thar be scripts and technical stuff in them thar parts

Ok, so lets see what’s under the bonnet of this beast now.

First, you’ll need an AGI script. Look, here’s one I prepared earlier - twitter.agi

#!/bin/bash
# Background the curl process incase twitter doesn't respond. It will hang the dialplan.
curl -u username:PASSWORD -d text="$1" \
-d user="recipient" \
http://twitter.com/direct_messages/new.xml &

Put the script in /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin. Don’t forget to chmod +x the script as well.

Pretty simple eh? The only things you’ll have to change in the script are

• username = your twitter login name
• PASSWORD = your twitter password
• recipient = Who will get your direct message

Ok, and to make it work in Asterisk I put this in the extensions.conf file for the exten that I wanted to monitor:

[home_phone]
exten => s,1,NoOp("This is my home phone context")
exten => s,n,Set(_DIDNUM="PUT YOUR DID NUM HERE")
exten => s,n,LookupCIDName
exten => s,n,AGI(twitter.agi|PBX: ${CALLERID(all)} just called on ${EXTEN})

I’ve only shown the first bits of this context, after this is your normal context such as DIAL or whatever else you might now. I actually build in a few seconds of delay to allow the text message a chance to get to my phone before the phone rings. A sort of early warning system

The only thing here you need to change really is the value of _DIDNUM (notice the underscore in front of the var name, this isn’t strictly needed, but if you wish to use that variable else where in the context or exten it’s a good idea. Obviously you can change the message after the “pipe” in the AGI line to customize the message you are sent.

The one thing I have left to work out is what asterisk variable to use to actually get the DID number used to call into the PBX with. If I can get that that would make this so much easier and more flexible. If you know what that is please drop me a comment.

Well, that’s really about it. It’s not rocket science by any means, heck, it’s nothing at all but it works.

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