Footballs are meant to be kicked around in the centre of a big grass field, they're not really supposed to be booted anywhere that has sharp stuff. But, kids will be kids, so inevitably they end up in a brambles and similar.

If you're unlucky, then they'll manage to puncture the bladder and the ball will no longer hold air. I got presented with such a ball and asked if I could repair it.

Footballs aren't particularly expensive - I could probably have replaced it for less than £10, but that'd mean the old one contributing to landfill.

Still, I was sorely tempted to chuck it - this ball is cursed. Despite the worn appearance in the photo, it was only actually 2 days old - first it wouldn't scan through at the shop, then it ended up in an electricity substation. Hours after UK Power Networks kindly returned it, it ended up in brambles.

Still, I figured the environmentally conscious thing was to at least have a go at repairing it.

Although there are kits (essentially gunk you inject into the ball) available online that claim to be able repair punctured balls, reviews on them are extremely poor, and they often say they don't work for balls with a bladder.

This post details the process I went through to repair the puncture.

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Эта статья размещена как на английском, так и на (плохо переведенном) русском языках.

This article is posted in both English and (poorly translated) Russian.

Всю последнюю неделю или около того я (как и другие, гораздо более способные, чем я) пытался продвигать информацию в Россию, чтобы русский народ мог увидеть правду о том, что происходит. Несмотря на то, что он небольшой, я вижу русский трафик на этом сайте (и кто знает, откуда берется трафик скрытых сервисов), поэтому решил оставить сообщение и здесь.

Это сообщение доступно по адресу

• https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/general/stop-the-invasion.html
• http://e26whn2524322mkxb3cbyk27ev2ihhq2biz35hty7gzgsyrwrygq27yd.onion//posts/blog/general/stop-the-invasion.html

For the past week or so, I (like others far more capable than me) have been trying to push information into Russia so that the Russian people may see the truth of what is happening. Whilst it's small, I do see Russian traffic on this site (and who knows where the hidden service traffic originates), so decided I should put a message here also.

This message is available at

• https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/general/stop-the-invasion.html
• http://e26whn2524322mkxb3cbyk27ev2ihhq2biz35hty7gzgsyrwrygq27yd.onion//posts/blog/general/stop-the-invasion.html

Мы знаем, что российское руководство лжет своим людям о войне на Украине, даже отрицая, что война есть (а не «спецоперация»). Мы знаем, что подконтрольные государству СМИ повторяют ложь правительства, а те, кто осмеливается говорить хоть часть правды, удаляются из эфира (как «Эхо Москвы» и Дождь).

We know that the Russian leadership is lying to it's people about the war in Ukraine, even denying that there is a war (rather than a "special operation"). We know that state controlled media is repeating the Government's lies and that those that dare speak even some of the truth are taken off air (like Echo Moskvy and Dozhd/RainTV).

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Although they're currently only allegations, a claim has arisen that OnlyFans misused a terrorist blocklist to blacklist stars using rival services.

Whilst I appreciate that most of those campaigning for mandatory age-verification are unlikely to feel much sympathy for adult performers, it's important to look beyond the profession of those affected and understand the underlying issues.

The list (ab)used was implemented with the very best of intentions: preventing the dissemination of terrorist recruitment material and propaganda via social media networks.

There's overlap with the Online Safety Bill here, because lists like this are one of the mechanisms which would need to be used to control the flow of content in order to try and comply with the duty of care that the bill imposes.

This isn't the first time that a well-intentioned censorship mechanism has been abused, and (unless human nature changes) it certainly won't be the last.

Rather than simply listing examples, this post is intended to look at the ways by which censorship mechanisms ultimately end up diverging from their stated purposes. For convenience, I'll use the term "misuse" as a substitute for "used in ways not originally intended" - it's not intended to imply judgement over the eventual use.

It's also not my intention to deny that there are wider issues which need to be addressed. It's all too clear that there are serious problems and that many providers aren't doing enough, but we still need to ensure that measures are proportional and effective. Understanding the failure modes of censorship is absolutely essential to that.

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A little while ago, I posted about creating an In Home Display to track our energy usage. It allows us to see an overview of our current and historic usage (much like the IHD supplied with a Smart Meter would, but without all the negatives of having a remotely addressable meter).

I've recently acquired some TP-Link Tapo P110s which I'm using to track energy usage on appliances such as our dishwasher and washing machine.

In my previous post about creating the IHD, I mentioned that in future, I wanted to add an additional page/view to show usage per device.

I'm monitoring consumption on a range of devices and at 748x419 the display's resolution is quite space constrained, so allowing selection of individual devices could be challenging (and realistically, I can always look them up in Chronograf anyway).

I decided instead to add a pane to show usage by category of device

Because the Tapo (and my older Kasa plugs) don't track cost there were some challenges around implementing the cost per day graph without hardcoding costings.

This post discusses how I constructed the interface and (more importantly) the queries.

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I recently did some exploration of dishwasher power usage to see how Eco mode compared to Normal mode in terms of power consumption.

At the end I noted

I am curious to see whether the same holds true for the washing machine - our machine doesn't have an explicit Eco mode, but it does have a short-cycle

First, a correction: It turns out our washing machine (a Bosch Serie 4) does have an eco-mode, it's just not well marked.

As before, I'm using some Tapo P110s to meter usage, and writing the data into InfluxDB for easy analysis.

There are many, many more options on a Washing machine than a dishwasher - if I were to try and test them all, I'd still be at it next Christmas. So, I'm going to constrain myself to just a few

• 60 Degree (centigrade) cotton cycle
• 40 Degree cotton cycle
• 40 Degree cotton cycle with eco mode enabled
• 30 minute short-cycle (runs at 30c by default)
• 15 minute short-cycle (runs at 30c by default)

To see how they compare.

The same load was used throughout - it was given a run through prior too to ensure it was soaking wet at the beginning of all runs (so that the first run didn't get a weight advantage by having dry clothes).

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Our dishwasher (a Hotpoint Experience thing) has an Eco-cycle - the idea being that it does $things in order to save energy.

Quite some time back, a repair engineer told me that Eco was a false economy because it ran things twice as fast/hard to be able to run for less time. That explanation's never sat particularly well with me - it'd be the same amount of work/energy, just compressed into a shorter time.

As I'm on a bit of an energy saving kick anyway, I was curious to see just how much difference Eco mode actually makes compared to a normal cycle. As I've previously set up to monitor our electricity usage I figured it should be relatively easy to check.

Both runs had exactly the same load in them - I don't expect it makes too much difference in practice, but seemed an easy thing to control.

I don't have a water meter, so wasn't able to check whether the Eco mode also uses less water (it's quite possible that it does, so that the smaller volume of water can be heated to the same temperature with less energy).

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For quite some time now, Firefox has had a function called Multi Account Containers built into it. This allows you to launch tabs inside a container (whether dedicated to that tab, or shared with some others) so that cookies, locally stored objects etc are only available within the container.

Essentially, it allows you to isolate sites/domains into their own little playground, away from anything else you might want to visit.

The functionality allows you to (quite trivially) set a domain to always open within a specific container - so you could (for example) set Facebook to always switch to a container, making it harder for them to track you when you visit other sites (because you'll not be logged into FB in the referring container).

Which is, to say the least, very useful.

It's not just privacy benefits you gain though, particularly if you're in IT.

Individual containers can also be configured to use different proxy settings. If you're supporting widely distributed kit that you reach through different proxies (SSH tunnels for example), rather than messing around switching Firefox's settings around (though I used to use FoxyProxy), you can simply configure the relevant domain to open in a preconfigured container.

However, there's a pretty key (IMO) bit of functionality missing: there's no native way to set a bookmark to always open in a specific container. There's been a feature request open against Firefox for quite some time to enable this, but there's been no real movement to date.

This documentation details how to set Firefox up so that a bookmark can specify the container it should open in, using a small third party addon to provide a custom protocol handler.

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I remember being told (in fact, you still hear it said today) that Linux has problems with hardware support - you'll buy kit and find you can't use it on Linux. It's not really been true for quite some time, but an experience over the weekend made me think about it.

I have a Canon Canoscan Lide 60 Scanner, I've owned it for somewhere between 12-15 years. It's about as portable as a flatbed can really get, and still up to scratch for the vast majority of scanning needs (I have actually since got a Brother DS-740d for more portable needs, but some things really do need a flatbed.)

Even back when I bought the Canoscan, using it on Linux wasn't much of a challenge.

Although Canon didn't support Linux, SANE supported it out of the box, so with a simple apt-get (actually, it's possible it might have been an rpm -i back then) I was up and running. Despite multiple desktop replacements in the ensuing decade, I've never really thought much about being unable to use it: until this weekend.

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I'm not a plumber, in fact, I generally try to avoid jobs that involve plumbing - I don't like the idea that a single mistake could lead to a slow, steady drip that eventually costs you a ceiling (or expensive damp problems), so I leave most plumbing jobs to the professionals.

But, I found water on the floor around one of my water supply stopcocks.

Dealing with it is a pretty straightforward job (I didn't even need to turn the main off) and takes about 10 minutes - it's hard to justify calling a plumber out for that, and you obviously don't want to leave it to get worse and/or ruin everything in it's path.

This post details the process of repacking a stopcock (water shut off valve to the Americans) gland nut - if I can do it, then anyone with a couple of spanners can.

Although this is on a main supply stopcock, the same process can be applied to stopcocks elsewhere in the house - whether it's a shower isolation tap or something else.

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The Nextcloud Desktop Sync Client does a fantastic job of syncing files between your desktop/laptop and Nextcloud's storage, but you don't always want everything synced down.

For example, we have some fairly sizeable volumes mounted as "External Storage" in Nextcloud. We wanted to be able to browse through those from desktops without having to sync >200GB of data down to each and every client.

This post details how to mount your Nextcloud instance as a remote drive, using WebDAV, so that files are only pulled over the network as and when they're opened.

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