The benefits of using OpenDNS

There are a lot of programs out there which monitor and block unsavoury websites, most of them cost a fair bit of money, but OpenDNS is different because it's not only free to use, but it gives unparalleled control over what your kids get up to online.

For those of you not familiar with what DNS is, it's basically how the internet translates our human readable web addresses into something that the internet can understand .... that being IP addresses, when you type in http://www.google.co.uk into your browser or whatever you are using.... that is translated to an IP number at the DNS server in this case http://66.102.9.99 (try it !!) then sent to your PC for use... and it is with this number that your browser is directed and eventually shows the google search page.... simple eh ? .... you could browse the internet by putting in the IP numbers of the website you want to visit but remembering every website by it's number unless you are some kind of memory man/woman is pretty unwieldy for most mortal humans......

Now things start to go wrong when DNS fails, sometimes that can happen at your ISP and any requests for translation into an IP addresses (a DNS request) are either rejected or ignored because the server(s) aren't responding or down.... your request for Google simply evaporates into thin air, or in this case the ether !!

That said, this is how OpenDNS works instead of directing you to the asked for web page (IP address) your request is directed  to a web page which says why that web page is blocked. The really brilliant thing about OpenDNS is that you can specify what type of things you want blocked  for instance :-

 Adult Themes

 Adware

 Alcohol

 Auctions

 Automotive

 Blogs

 Business Services

 Chat

 Classifieds

 Dating

 Drugs

 Ecommerce/Shopping

 Educational Institutions

 File storage

 Financial institutions

 Forums/Message boards

 Gambling

 Games

 Government

 Hate/Discrimination

 Health

 Humor

 Instant messaging

 Jobs/Employment

 Lingerie/Bikini

 Movies

 Music

 News/Media

 Non-profits

 Nudity

 P2P/File sharing

 Parked Domains

 Phishing

 Photo sharing

 Podcasts

 Politics

 Pornography

 Portals

 Proxy/Anonymizer 
 Radio

 Religious

 Research/Reference

 Search engines

 Sexuality

 Social networking

 Software/Technology

 Sports

 Tasteless

 Television

 Travel

 Video sharing

 Visual search engines

 Weapons

 Webmail 

You simply tick the subject matter you don't want on your internet connection and OpenDNS does the rest for you, OpenDNS is driven by user input so if enough people complain about a website then it's put into the appropriate category automatically for you. You can also see system statistics about top domains visited etc, the best way to install it is to set your router to use the OpenDNS DNS servers which are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. Once installed you create an account at https://www.opendns.com/ and start controlling what flows into your network. if you are particularly worried about P2P filesharing you can block that and your network will never receive another MP3 file.... like all things it's not 100% efficient, but it's up there in the very high 90%'s which is usually more than enough to stop the average teenager as they will probably give up after the 20th rejection and move onto something more savoury.....I have tested it thoroughly and can assure you if say you wanted to block MSN or Social Networking then MSN or any website based around social networking is completely blocked, you can't even use MSN web messenger or any of the clones out there... they simply don't work.... which is great for banning stroppy teenagers off the net and effectively ending their social lives for the predetermined punishment time allotted by you  ;¬)

OpenDNS also quickens your internet connection response times because it utilises caching.... bringing you your web pages from it's own servers where it can.... you can also create your own shortcuts whereby you can enter a shorter name for say google.co.uk, such as G or g and all you have to type into your browser is g or G and it will take you there :) all in all a brilliant FREE tool :) at the moment I just use it to cut down on the adware and phishing scams that seem to be drowning the internet.....

Feathered Dinosaurs.....

It seems in China they have unearthed a series of fossils which date further back than "Archaeopteryx" and clearly shows well formed feathers that dates back 150 million years, which is a good 10 million years before old Archi arrived on the scene. This of course upsets the apple cart on the tree of life where palaeontologists thought that Archaeopteryx was the earliest reptile with feathers..... I have no doubt that feathers arrived earlier than this latest fluffy dinosaur, but because creating a fossil takes specific things to happen for an animal to be preserved in this way it ie/ tripping over in a shallow river bed after eating too many fermenting fruits then banging their heads and consequently drowning in the shallow water and being covered with sediment... ;¬) it may be a long time before we unearth an older example.... but this has happened before where markers have been moved backwards and forwards.....when something new has been discovered...... it's not inconceivable that some of the larger carnivorous dinosaurs produced cute fluffy chicks... only later turning into massive meat grinders ;¬)

Personally I'm waiting for the God killer fossil(s) something which turns Christianity on it's head and effectively re-writes creation as nothing more than a man made story.... for that I'll buy pop corn and sit and watch the fireworks from afar ;¬)

Nothing overly exciting to report today.....

Although I did give Xbox boy a lesson in cooking, in preparation for his university days, when I explained that being able to cook would mean more money in his pocket to drink beer instead of wasting it on incessant takeaways and pot noodles.... He seemed to agree with that :) Mind you I say university days, a few months ago it was the Royal Marines, then the Royal Signals and before that it was a games designer.... to be honest I don't think he even knows himself what he wants to do.... Well I do but sitting in front of the computer/xbox isn't going to happen on my shift! ! he's currently looking for a job, well he doesn't have much choice about it really because that's all he can look for on the internet because everything else is banned through OpenDNS on the router between the hours of 9am and 5pm :)

Cruel I know but much better than him hastily trying to close a website or clumsily switch between windows when he should be looking for a job when I walk into the kids lounge :) The kids probably hate the fact that I can manipulate the computers in this house as easily as they pick their noses... but it cuts down on so much shouting...."Get off that bloody computer NOW!!!" simply doesn't happen in this house.... Once or twice they've tried to circumvent the security and scripts and policies I've installed, but any attempts are monitored 24/7 by the computer and if so much as a byte is changed or even a time stamp......they get sent an immediate shutdown .... makes trying to kill the security a lonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng winded affair.... plus it self heals after every reboot... so kind of pointless :)

The only other thing of note is that I made some cakes with Freya this afternoon .....she really does like cooking and beats a mean egg although she does refer to cakes as Kikes or Kike, the hardest part is stopping her from scooping great wads of cake mixture out and eating it......she spent the greater part of the cake making episode saying "NUMMY, NUMMY.....KIKE !!" she really is a little darling and has the wickedest sense of humour.... She definitely got her good looks from her mother but unfortunately her warped sense of humour from her Dad, her latest madness is shouting "I .....LOVE......BANANAS" from her cot when she is put to bed, she really is an endless conveyor belt of nuttiness and has us in stitches quite often.... it's her 2nd birthday soon on the 23rd of October .... and Rhiannon's as well ... I still miss them both quite badly especially around times like this.... :( Ah well .....

Ohhh now this is funny(ish) for me not for her....... my ex girlfriend Caralyn is coming down to see me, well not specifically to see me, she had a bit of a mishap with her all singing and dancing laptop which I supplied to her last year.... she was watching the TV with a glass of red wine in her hand with the laptop on her lap relaxing a bit..... and yes you've guessed it she flinched and promptly dumped a full glass of wine onto her laptop keyboard.....Now Caralyn's wine glasses are a little bit bigger than red fire buckets...needless to say it blue screened.... (shock horror) ... she then rang me up after attempting to dry it with a hair dryer....(blonde mistake number one) I immediately told her to tip the laptop upside down and remove the battery.... I should have been more specific and said "remove the battery AND the power cable" (you've guessed it ....blonde mistake number two) needless to say as she was talking to me about what could be done....and I was just saying "ohhhh that's expensive and tutting...." when it started smoking quite badly.... I had to laugh because she made a squeak and literally threw the laptop across the room and shouted "MY LAPTOP IS ON FIRE !!!" I couldn't help it and had to say to her that was the worst rendition of a Kings of Leon song I had ever heard....she fell about laughing...which is no mean feat to make somebody laugh with their smoking laptop by their side......

Anyway the upshot is she has bought a new laptop and wants me to transfer all her data across to her new laptop..... I'm hoping the old hard drive isn't as pissed as a fart or it will be a wasted journey, but she is combining it with a visit to her Nan and Aunt who live locally (small world eh ?) so probably won't be a "completely" wasted journey should I not be able to administer paracetamol to the hard drive ;¬) we shall see.