The Bakfiets bikes come with two straps for the children’s bench. Unfortunately the buckles on my second hand bike had worn out and broken which meant they were completely useless. The buckles are sewn into the straps and you can’t get replacement straps for the Bakfiets. Luckily there are fantastic side removable buckles … Read more
I am just having to replace a few of the spokes on the rear tire which have worn out. Without a set of callipers, I found it quite hard to work out their width. The spokes on the Bakfeits are 1.55mm diameter. The nipples are 4.8mm diameter. The length will vary from bike to bike … Read more
I’ve just brought a second hand Bakfiets from a Dutch man in Oxford. It’s a little different than standard bike. I’ve found it quite hard to find information about servicing it or even removing the rear wheel… so I’m going to blog the various things that I do to it as I go…
I have a Volvo V50 and started noticing that with heavy rain the drivers side foot well was becoming damp. It turns out this is caused by a blocked tube that goes from the sun roof to the bonnet. Sometimes the tube gets blocked or shrinks and therefore doesn’t reach the bonnet. I took it the … Read more
I have a Volvo V50 1.6 Eco Drive. Over the past few months, it has started to lose fuel efficiency dramatically. It dropped below 52 MPG and ended up around 42 MPG. It turned out that this is caused by a semi blocked diesel particulate filter. This was probably blocked because of soot caused by … Read more
I just updated to Ubuntu 16.04 and tried to make a Skype call. It said that “Skype can’t connect”. The error message looks like this: To fix this you need to remove Skype completely from your system including your settings. 1) Remove the skype and it’s settings sudo apt-get remove –purge skype skype:i386 2) Remove … Read more
I’ve just migrated this blog to Digital Ocean. The blog is now located in their New York data centre because most of my visitors are from the US. Hopefully this should make it faster for the majority of my users.
You can make a user a sudoer in Ubuntu 14.04 by adding them to the sudo group. Obviously you need to have root permission to do this. adduser youusername sudo
I just upgraded one of my Ubuntu Servers to Ubuntu 16.04. The media wiki installation shopped working because it now comes with PHP 7. I tried upgrading mediawiki to the latest version but this didn’t seem to work either. I can’t seem to find out if Mediawiki support PHP 7. So, I thought I would … Read more
I have just started to upgrade some servers to Ubuntu 16.04. It looked good until I rebooted to the server and the Apache2 service didn’t start up properly. I view the logs in systemd. Using the command: systemctl status apache2.service ● apache2.service – LSB: Apache2 web server Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/apache2; bad; vendor preset: enabled) Drop-In: … Read more