Out and about for a walk yesterday afternoon the winter light was just so perfect I had to take this snap of my own shadow, the warmth of the hue from the trees beyond was truly remarkable

Usually when you buy a scented candle the scent is released from the wax as it burns, however there are others available which have a twin layer of glass, the internal “cup” containing the candle and the outer “cup” containing a gel which, when warmed by the internal cup candle, releases the scent.

Over Christmas my parents had purchased one of these and had it burning on the coffee table, releasing seasonally inspired scent into the living room. All of a sudden a large, tall flame was observed. While it was possible to extinguish the flame simply by firmly blowing on it, the flame was quite large and could have ignited other objects surround the the candle on the table. When extinguished it was clear what had happened; the outer layer of gel had somehow ignited and had started burning at a furious rate (shown in the photo below)

Having mentioned this to friends I’m now aware of at least one other of these types of candles which has caught fire, as such I’d recommend anyone that has a candle of this type not to use it and to dispose of it for safety.

Recently I had cause to connect to my home VPN from my laptop, being out of town and on a connection not part of my usual trusted network. I tried to connect as usual using PPTP via the network manager on the Xubuntu desktop but no dice – the connection was failing every time. After establishing my iPhone was able to connect from the same network, I realised that the last time my laptop had successfully connected to the VPN was prior to my upgrade to Ubuntu 15.10 and therefore something must have changed with the default settings under the hood to cause the problem.

To cut a long story short, after much digging and hair pulling, I established that you need to enable 3 kernel modules to get the PPTP VPN client back up and running in the latest version of Ubuntu. Add the following to /etc/modules and reboot

nf_nat_pptp
nf_conntrack_pptp
nf_conntrack_proto_gre


After that you should find that your PPTP VPN connection invoked in the usual way from the network manager no longer fails. Happy days!