this will be my 50th move. i'm 39.

as i have £20,000 of debt and earn about... £800 to 1000 per month, i don't have very many choices of places to live, so my family and i have been accepted by the westminster housing coop, who specialise in very short-term housing.

myself, my partner and our two-month-old baby will be moving beginning of june to a property that is scheduled for demolition at the end of the year. it's a block of 70s cheap housing that lacks ventilation and adequate thought as to the design of the windows.

we've yet to arrange internet access: so, temporarily and in an emergency, i bought a vodafone 3G USB modem. it's a Huawei K3565. yes i had done a little research in advance, and there's a fantastic python-based application which was commissioned by vodafone somewhere for ubuntu-based netbooks.

the application was badly designed to shoe-horn specifically into gnome, which i despise. about an hours' judicial hacking and exploration removed the dependencies on gnome, substituting xfce-notifyd which answers the freedesktop.org standardised "notification" requests that the modem-management program generates.

all in all, for £34 and about an hours' work, i was stunned to have this all working under linux.

... here's the problem though: the cost of the access. so - i resurrected rproxy.

rproxy 0.5.7

rproxy is designed to send _changes_ to web pages, not the entire web page. it doesn't work on HTTPS, and i don't think it supports HTTP 1.1, but who cares!

the cost savings are just... augh, i don't even want to think about what i'd have to pay for, without it.

updating rproxy to use modern gcc was fiddly but straightforward.

... welll.... better get on. have to find a cooker and a fridge, get a pump for the airbeds...