Bedrock

Archive for the ‘Andalucia’ Category

I won’t say it hasn’t been a struggle but as of today I’ve just about cracked the TV thing with one exception.

If you’re not a frequent visitor to Spain you may not know that SKY and the BBC do not like you watching their stuff when you are abroad – this is indeed being fought as I understand by the EU as it is highly uncompetitive – and as someone who pays the TV licence and pays for a Sky subscription – I find the restrictions utterly unacceptable.

Right now the only thing I have not cracked is Sky on demand (well, sort of) – so if you have a SKY HD box they’re not about to let you record on-demand stuff as you did in the UK – I’m still working on that.

VPNs are a way around most of the issues – but you need a fast VPN to the UK and this tends to slow down access to other stuff – so I’m using a service recommended by a neighbour of ours called Unblock-Us. In UK terms it’s around £3 a month – and so the way it works is you make a minor update to your router (DNS settings) and those services that need it – iPlayer and Sky – go through that and are handled as if you were in the UK – other services go un-affected. No setup on individual PCs etc.

Also I have a Now-TV box here and that too works thanks to Unblock-Us. The good part about that is that it is relatively easy to unlock that box into what it really is – a Roku media server – so with the addition of PLEX on my PC and on the Now TV box not only can we access our media here – but also on the phone anywhere – remembering that THREE now include data with roaming accounts – such as Spain and the USA. Now I have PLEX operating – I’m looking to see what other goodies the Roku system has to offer.

Sky Go also works using this system and so with a decent tablet, SKY options are now much wider. I’d still like to crack getting the Sky broadband downloading working – it’s likely on a Port that the American company doing Unblock-US are unaware of. 

So all in all a step change from where we were weeks ago. All we need now is a decent TV a

A quiet day today… this morning, Maureen went downtown to help at the dog shelter, I stayed at home and worked on my controllers. I decided for once to take a proper holiday and it is paying off – I’m feeling quite relaxed.

This evening we sat outside and enjoyed a nice tapas in the Pergola – despite forecasts of rain the weather has been great. Not stunningly hot, maybe 25c but with the sun blasting I took the opportunity to supplement the tan for a while. This has to be the first trip we’ve done where there are no pressing repairs to attend to – marvellous.

TV is on, she’s watching soaps and I’m just putting the finishing touches on some code that has been months in development and which is now about to get it’s first trivial job – watering the plants.  Thanks to a friendly local policemen we now know what to do with the speeding fines and it turns out we got the early payment discount on one, once we figured out how to use the Spanish website. It appears the back route to Murcia, despite looking innocent is riddled with police with cameras as others have suffered the same fate. Once bitten twice shy (or in my case, twice bitten…).

The plan tomorrow, weather permitting is to leave the car at home and do our jobs for the day in the village on foot. Only thing is.. the weather, right now at 10pm is changing rapidly…

7am here in Bedrock as we start our second full day here in May. It’s been a challenge organising this holiday break,between turmoil in our professional lives and the new cottage extensions, which took a detour last week when the new bathroom plumbing burst, soaking the place and requiring professional de-humidifiers running around the clock to fix.

Thankfully as I sit here the builders are correcting that issue and in a couple of weeks we expect to be able to get on with the job of converting Hollyberry Cottage into not only a fantastically improved holiday rental cottage but also a great place for us to shack up in the winter.

Missed the all important G7 drinking session last night. Between overdoing it when we arrived here on Wednesday and just so much to do, we decided to give the first session a miss – no doubt we’ll make up for it over the weekend.

We arrived mid-Wednesday at Alicante airport and for the first time managed to find our way to Brico-Depot in Crevillent just a short hop on the way here from Alicante. The place is great, all the major stores are there including Carrefour and Aldi etc. When we arrived Wednesday night the weeds had taken over (it’s hot here but it hasn’t been hot for long enough to kill them off yet) so as well as readying the place we’ve been clearing the path. It’s starting to look good already and this morning Maureen is of with some of the women to have fun while I sort out some tech work I have to complete via Skype with my friend Aidan in the UK.

My other jobs for this weekend include getting the watering system back up and tested. I’ve brought much more meaty power supplies with me to Spain this time to handle the rather unpredictable power here – though I suspect I’ve not brought enough.  As an experiment I brought another solar regulator along with an alarm 12v battery and panel –I want to see if I can run the router and new Raspberry Pi controller off the sun entirely. I suspect that’ll have to wait for our June/July run in which we’re bringing the car from the UK as I just could not fit the second large solar panel into the travel case!!

I’ve recently started to work on my tech blog which now regularly achieves around 750 users a day and the new tech Facebook page just tipped 1000 likes – all of which imposes a slight responsibility to keep them up to date but first, we need to get into that lake and enjoy the fine weather Spain is having right now, it’s a little misty but typically sailing past 30c in the afternoon with peaks around 40c which might sound a bit much to Brits starved of sunshine but trust me – you get used to it and it beats the pants off the UK, in particular because that means you can sit outside at night without a jumper on!

Thankfully as you see in the graph (my systems have been logging temperature and humidity for a couple of years now) the humidity is finally dropping rapidly – we picked a good time to arrive.

So looking forward to a couple of weeks at least of fine weather before any more painting. We’re off to Baza this afternoon so that Maureen can pick up some supplies at the garden centre after we’ve had a soak in the lake.

Lake Negratin as you may not have seen before – thanks to a keen eye and the wonders of modern technology – the quadcoptor.

For once these are NOT my photos – I’ve simply done the post-editing and present them here courtesy of my neighbour John who was out and about this week and kindly took these excellent photos for us to enjoy. Those of you who are here will no doubt recognise the area.

Click on the smaller images to enlarge.

Yesterday we got into our cars and took the drive out beyond Castril – firstly stopping at a Pizzeria which Maureen and I have been to before – which for reasons beyond me does NOT serve pizzas at lunchtime despite a HUGE sign outside saying “Pizzeria” – only in Spain as they say. 

Throughout the day, temperatures were in the lower thirties and so we welcomed the water – no matter how cold – and Rio Guadelentin is COLD and mostly where we were, just knee deep.

The various waterfalls were amazing.

Despite her continued issues with the broken foot, Maureen managed with help to join us through the woods to see some stunning views.

As this post is mostly about the beauty of the area – I’ll keep the dialog to a minimum and concentrate on the photos – suffice it to say we all had an absolutely wonderful time and will repeat this in the future.

Everywhere you looked the water was different.

In some places it was perfectly, crystal clear.

And that was that, after hours of enjoying the view we headed off to the lake.

We then headed off to Embalse De La Bolera for a swim – during which I managed to swim from one side to the other – all but for 100 metres – the sun was starting to wane and the last part of the run was in shadows – I prefer my water bright so I turned around.

By the time I got back to shore (below – swam to other side all but for the shadow), everyone except Maureen had cleared off as we had a birthday celebration session that evening – the result being we got there an hour late – but at least we got there – happy birthday Les.

What a great day.

It’s been a good weekend. We’ve had our friends Jonathan and Suzanne over at the cave for a few days – sadly all too short as today we’re off to drop them at Murcia airport first thing. We spent a relaxing weekend with some time spent at Lake Negratin and the Baza Sunday market (wherein Maureen bought a window frame for me to repair and her to eventually stain before fitting it internally as a lighting feature) – and of course the Medieval market in Galera – though to be fair it wasn’t that medieval – with a “rock band” in place in the square or example – but the weather was nice and everyone had a good time by the look of it.

Yesterday we did some work on the Ethernet-controlled watering system here (a trivial job but thanks to the hot weather, taking a while like most things. I needed larger piping to take into account the fact that we have fairly hard water – for reliability), neighbour John popped up with his quadcoptor to give Jonathan a quick demo and after a quick dip in the hot-tub we ended up having dinner at the Parador Hotel just outside of Galera– very nice too – If I were to be picky – there were a couple of bones in the fish – and I HATE finding bones. Starter and deserts  – excellent.

Been brushing up on my Android programming and finally managed to put together some rather crude thermometer code for an eventual wall-mounted display. With the cost of tablets and second-hand Android touch-phones dropping through the floor it seems sensible to start using these devices as controllers – for now it’s all about learning how to make good use of the tools – while enjoying the sun – and there’s plenty of that.

5:30am I’m up and running – it’s around 22c outside already – likely going to be a nice warm day.