Finnish Sima

Recipe:

4 litres of drinking water

340 grams white sugar

340 grams brown sugar

4 small lemons

0.5 dl molasses or 0.5 dl honey

5 cloves (optional)

1⁄4 teaspoon yeast

Directions

Warning: Steer clear of glass bottles, as they can explode under pressure.

Wash the lemons, peel thinly, and remove the pith.

Slice the lemons thinly and place them with the peel.

Bring half the water to the boil and add the lemons, peel, cloves, honey or molasses and sugar. I actually boil the peel with the water, but it’s not so important.

Stir until the sugar dissolves, and leave to stand covered for about half an hour to an hour.

Add the rest of the water cold. When the liquid temperature matches the yeast activation temperature, add it.

Cover with a dry cloth and keep at room temperature for about 48 hours, or at 24 hours in a warmer, dry place.

Put several raisins into clean bottles, then strain the liquid into them.

Loosely cork the bottles and store them somewhere dark at room temperature.

The mead is ready when the raisins rise to the surface, but if you want a more alcoholic mead, you should perhaps keep an airlock on one bottle to monitor the fermentation. When it slows, you can tighten the bottle lids and store in the fridge.

Give your home web server a domain name on the web

If you want to host your own web server on the WWW from home, this tutorial will give you a static domain name if you have a dynamic ip address. I assume you have a device to act as a web server, like the RaspberryPi, and know how to forward ports.

Step one, sign up for a ydns account from https://ydns.io/. Google your ip address and input it in the static ip address field (don’t worry about the field being static for now).

Next install ddclient

sudo apt-get install ddclient

Ignore the setup screen for now, we’ll change that later.

Now sign up for an account at https://www.dnsomatic.com/. Select ydns from the list of providers when prompted.

With your account information, edit

sudo nano /etc/ddclient.conf

Have it look like

protocol=dyndns2
use=web, web=myip.dnsomatic.com
ssl=yes
server=updates.dnsomatic.com
login=your_dnsomatic_username_here
password='your_dnsomatic_password_here'
your_ydns_domain_name_here

This file should already be root only access so no need to chmod it to 600. Test everything went ok by running

sudo ddclient

and you should see your ip address output in the console.

Double check by checking the service page at dnsomatic (hit refresh page). Your current ip will now appear in the Status column and History file. Also check My Hosts in ydns, but if it fails only in ydns, it’s likely a configuration issue you made between dnsomatic and ydns.

ddclient will incremently contact dnsomatic if your ip address changes. dnsomatic will contact ydns if this happens too. This is how the static ip address entry in ydns becomes a more dynamic one.

One more note, if you want to change the default time the ddclient deamon activates to check your ip address (default is 300 seconds), the setting is in

sudo nano /etc/default/ddclient

I set mine to 600 (once every ten minutes).

About this blog

Ok, you win google

I decided to move my old blog content to google's blogger.com. Hopefully this will allow me to use Adsense, and also improve my google SEO so people will be able to discover my content more easily. Having a .tk domain made this very difficult as google treats these domains as spammer sites.

So what will I be journalling in this blog? Well, I try to code as much as I can, but I also like to 'make' things. What king of things? Check out the side panel for more info ;)

Update: A friend suggested I list the reasons Google gave. The email I received was in Finnish, so here is a translated version of the specific reasons in English.

• It is important that the Google ads on sites seem to offer significant value to users. As a publisher, you must provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site.
• Do not place ads on auto-generated pages or pages with original content is low or where the original content is not at all.
• Your site should also provide a good user experience through clear navigation and organization. Then users can move easily from page to page and find what they are looking.

What I understood from this...

In the first two points, Google are basically accusing me of ripping-off other content creators. They even mention the method I supposingly use, auto-generated pages as a possible method of doing this. For the record, I have never done this, although I have gone through various free domains in the past years, and content (hosted on the same server) could be cached on those old domains, which I have previously owned.

I have no idea what to say about the third point, but my site used WordPress and all posts were relevantly tagged. The site itself featured the various menus and sidebars to help the user navigate and find content. During my studies, I actually won a client competition for the best WordPress site design, chosen by the client who used the site for their business. So are Google saying WordPress is not a worthy product to feature in its search results?

I'm going to speculate here that the reason my site was rejected here was simply because it had a .tk domain name. I also had problems getting my site to appear at all within search results, usually by copy and pasting either the post's title or a chunk of relevant unique text into the search input. I basically had to put the sentence or title "in quotes" so it retuned only exact matches. Come to your own conclusions -- I already have.