Category: updates

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Tidal playlist of the month – April 2024

https://tidal.com/browse/playlist/f8375032-1401-4078-9b7d-c03d2a265e93

De temps en temps, quand je découvre ou redécouvre de la musique, je vais le rajouter à une playlist du mois.

Tendances actuelles sont trance, rock, industriel. Current listens are trance, rock, industrial. EN, FR, PL, DE and more

And more specifically, I came across https://www.meute.eu that is a techno marching band from Hamburg, Germany. My daughter found that they were on tour and lo and behold, I am off to Toronto to watch them Tuesday. Es sollte etwas Großartig sein! Cherry on the cake, given that the tickets are sold through Ticketmaster, the price was high, but OK, no cheating (looking at you Spoon tickets in Ottawa, what a complete dreckshow that is)

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Gardening in Ottawa! A mini ecosystem guide :-)

These are the two that I am active in. The Brewer Park Garden is a small community and volunteer driven garden with raised beds allocated to the members living or working in the Ottawa South area. Having raised beds makes for easier gardening, the size of the beds is big enough to be able to grow quite a lot of stuff but not so big as to not be manageable by any one person as a gardening pastime.

The Kilborn Gardens are much bigger and closer to what you might find in Europe, being both City run and having a very strong membership,. Plots even become part of the family, so to speak, each little plot of land having its piece of history, crops, successes and failures. Kilborn is a challenge due to its heavy clay soil requiring lots of work every year to maintain, with each garden being a kind of test bed for different methods of dealing with the challenges faced. Straw and woodchips are in very big demand to cope with the wet conditions and provide long term mulch to add to the soil and improve its consistency and aerability.

This year spring has sprung really early. I have transplanted rhubarb from the small garden (Brewer) to the big one, but the soil is very wet and this may affect success of the transplant. Notice that I have placed weed barriers last year in an effort to prevent excessive weed intrusion. The fact that the Kilborn gardens are big and hard to work in means that a lot of gardens get left to go wild. This causes invasions of various weeds and pests every year. The results are always worth it but you do need to be there nearly every day during the growing season.

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Youpi! Nous avons un nouveau provider pour notre site!

www.dean.be and deancan.ca are being migrated to a new platform, please bear with us while the site is being updated.

The new provider is https://ca.ovh.com . In general OVH is proving to be a far better provider than the one we had before, most notably the website functionality is all there and WordPress works really well with it, which was not the case before, it was clunky and slow.

Emails however are a pain, the MX plan that is the default offering from OVH for the Web Cloud plans is not providing proper support for DKIM, which is a problem because the three mechanisms to ensure email authenticity, SPF, DKIM and DMARC are all required, but without DKIM email providers like gmail will classify an otherwise valid email as spam because it cannot find a DKIM entry for the originating email sender.

If you are also having problems with your email setup, you may want to look at DMARCian, this is one of several useful websites that help you setup a proper policy on your servers. It is quite frustrating to understand how it all works. As you can see below the fact that DKIM cannot be configured is causing the failures which is quite frustrating because you simply don’t know if your emails are actually arriving at their destination or are being junked.

DMARCIAN Dashboard excerpt