Bedrock

Archive for the ‘spain’ Category

A happy new year to everyone looking in. It has been a quiet holiday, I have done a LOT of writing on the technical blog and I have quite a few samples of various kinds of equipment on the way to review as the blog goes from strength to strength.

We’ve been  in the UK in some of the worst weather on record though in Bellingham we’ve missed the worst of it by some way. Looking forward later this month to meeting friends from Spain who are over in the UK right now and generally getting the house ready for our return to the sun in April. All my kit is working in Spain so we’re able to keep an eye on the place which is also regularly visited. Maureen has had flu over the last week and so we’ve not been anywhere other than visits to friends.  I’m taking the opportunity to learn – in particular to get stuck into the technology surrounding the “Raspberry Pi” and more advanced computers such as the Radxa Rock Pro – but that is all detailed on the blog.

Looking back over these posts and realising what a wonderful time we had this summer gone. Back in Blighty there is absolutely nothing positive I can say, the country’s leader is an apologist waste of space deluded in thinking that Europe actually gives a shit what he has to say, the opposition leader is a losing, bag-biting communist, the weather in the North is atrocious with people losing their homes due to floods and businesses being finished off due to losing their livelihood, something we COULD have prepared for but didn’t…  and all I can think of is “yes and what contribution to sorting this is coming from the many, many countries we help (India for example) or those who’s refugees we’re taking in… zilch – absolutely zilch.

We should immediately cut off ALL foreign aid, cut off ALL charitable work overseas and start looking after the innocent victims of climate change AT HOME. But we’re not and insurance companies as always are biding their time at home in comfort as others suffer – and that is annoying the hell out of me. At least when I’m in Spain I don’t understand a word of the news on TV and I can just live in la la land and pretend all is ok (while conveniently enjoying the sunshine). THe only good thing I can think of is that this week we’re apparently going to move up to 80Mbit broadband.

We’ve made lots of friends in Spain and some of them we visit when we’re back in Blighty which I’m really looking forward to. We’ve had some great experiences and I can’t wait to get back there in April and start all over again (well, perhaps not the fights with the shipping companies but all the rest of it). I keep tabs on the weather over there thanks to some technology I’ve left in place and I’ll grant you – in Galera it’s not a lot warmer than it is here – but it is also a lot less wet.

Some good news, my waterproof Pebble watch which famously failed miserably as Maureen and I were enjoying swimming in salt-water along the southern coast of Spain was, as you might have read, replaced by the company. Well, time rolls on and I noticed the new one has a slight fault – only tiny – there’s a little air bubble in one corner – as if the laminated glass/plastic finish was separating – nothing to write home about but I wrote off to Pebble and lo – a replacement watch is once again on the way.  Ok, they didn’t get it right, the technology didn’t work as advertised but you just CAN’T fault the customer service – in a week or so I should be starting again from scratch with a hopefully improved Pebble. These guys are great.

Meanwhile the work I did in Spain on my summer “sabbatical” had proven worthwhile – I developed some home control software and hardware and tested it in just about the worst electrical environment you can imagine – Spanish rural electricity and line-of-sight WIFI which while nice, fails at the mere hint of a storm – and by the end of it, my ever evolving kit and software survived and recovered (thanks to a lot of help from a growing online community of people determined to help). I’ve brought that knowledge home and my current work is controlling the heating here in freezing cold England and soon will control just about everything else electrical and up to now it is proving to be bullet-proof.

Maureen is getting into the local gym which is conveniently in line of sight of our house, we still have SO much work to do, compounded by a chimney leak which we hope to get fixed this week and heating issues unrelated to my kit but related to so-called electricians and other workmen who could not give a shit. We’re discovering ALL sorts of issues with the house and slowly solving them one by one. Meanwhile I’ve had great success with the technology blog at http://tech.scargill.net and on a regular basis I’m getting sample technology from companies in the hope of a decent review (which I don’t do – I review as I see something – not as the companies would necessarily like me to see their kit). The other day I had 1,700 genuine visitors that one day and I’m rapidly heading toward 3,000 followers on my Facebook tech page – a goal I thought was impossible a mere year ago.  I want to dramatically increase all of that in the coming months.

Meanwhile we’re about to consider letting the cats do outside before they drive themselves, and us, around the bend with their “extra beans” caused no doubt by confinement.

And with that I’m giving up for the night – have a nice weekend.

The summer is well and truly over here in Galera with temperatures plummeting to maybe 8c at night and rarely getting over 20c or so during the day. Still a million times better than back in the UK but I’m sitting here with the heating on in my office.

I’ve been looking back over the summer – which started with my trip to Boston in July – a great adventure marred only slightly by incompetent Iberia Airlines who managed to misplace my baggage, finding it only at the very end of my trip. That started a communications saga via their Facebook page – and only now in November have they finally agreed to cough up for the clothes I had to buy. I’ve not yet figured out a way to punish them for the state of my feet (I took light sandals on the plane and so after walking several miles to restaurants etc. my feet suffered somewhat. They couldn’t have given two hoots of course.

Other than that the summer went very well, it’s amazing how many places, friends we’ve visited and the good times we’ve had. With temperatures as high as 40c and a comfortable 25c in the evening, reasonable general prices and dirt cheap fuel, there is absolutely no comparing life here and in the Northeast of England. Sure, it has it’s downsides, I’ve fought with couriers who should not be delivering crisps never mind packages and as in previous years I’ve struggled to get parts I would easily find in the UK.

But this year more than others we’ve found ways around issues and discovered that materials are indeed widely available here as in Britain – you just have to look harder. Outside of the towns there are a myriad of industrial buildings that look like you really should not be there. In fact many of them are open to the public and are jam-packed with goodies – who knew !!

Meanwhile my home control projects are starting to come together thanks to taking the summer out and away from the FSB – something I’ve never done. Before the FSB it was business keeping me occupied all the time and so I’ve never really stopped and spent the time needed to really get as heavily into interesting projects as I’d like. As they say – there IS more to life.

I’ve finally started to make a break with Skype – I’ve had a Skype telephone number for many years – indeed since Skype first introduced “Skype In” – I started with a London number and migrated (when they screwed things up) to a Newcastle number. Last week they made a major gaff, sending out an email to their subscribers to announce an unfeasible price hike. By the time they announced they’d gotten it wrong, many of us had already told them to shove it. I’ve been researching other operators and those offering standard SIP IP phone lines. I’ve chosen one and now have both English and Spanish incoming numbers – both for less than I was paying Skype for one. I spent the afternoon making sure everyone knows the new numbers.

And there it is – my new modem has just arrived, we’ll be spending a little time in the winter in the UK with a break in the USA in the middle of it…  and when we return, the cottage in the UK will once again be holiday rented – I want to ensure that guests have a totally isolated WIFI setup while leaving me with full access to everything – the new TP-Link router should do that job for me.

As the weather cools off I’m missing the sun already as are my solar panels which now struggle to handle the (bright) outside lighting for more than a couple of hours or so. When we come back I’m bringing batteries as the electricity here is prone to un-announced failure.

I think I should probably have been born in a hot country… Time yet however, according to the ever-inaccurate forecasts we could be looking at clear skies and 23c toward the weekend. Fingers crossed.

This weekend we took a trip to the coast with our neighbours and friends.  –

It’s been a funny old week, not a lot happening outside but in here I’ve been having one HELL of a time with the WIFI – some kind of interference I think which I’d put down to a faulty router but as we’ve had a day with almost no issues having made minor changes, it’s looking more like some other issue (for once, not Spanish power). So I’ve spent far too long tackling that. As we left Galera  all seemed well and I would be able to keep an eye on everything on the phone – which was re-assuring.

Cartagena is down near the coast and temperatures were up to 23c and sunny for at least some of the time though us second day has marred somewhat with cloud (still warm). The summer is over here in Galera, it was down to 9c in the early hours of the mornings late last week and for the first time this year we put the fire on – though only just and we’re still wandering around in light shirts.

My phone repair has held out – got a new skin and glass cover for the old Samsung S4 so it has a new lease of life. The Chinese Zopo which until this week had refused to connect to the networks, after I’d tried the SIM in the Samsung, suddenly sprung back to life – so it looks like it was the SIM not the phone – just as well as Banggood in China were quite useless – a phone merely months old and they wanted to send it back to the manufacturer. Bloody peasants.

Got the solar panel mounted properly at an angle – essential now that the sun is much lower in the sky (amazing how quickly that happens) but even then there’s a considerable drop of power – I’m monitoring battery voltage so my system can cut off the lights at night a little earlier to compensate.

So, off we went to Cartagena, first thing Friday morning, armed with cameras – within hours I lost access to the systems back home – and that control never came back. It turned out a fuse has gone in the main fusebox – to this day I don’t know what caused it – but the learning item here – with several hours of no power, the battery backup I use to power my home control kit – a standard off the shelf “uninterruptable supply”, gave up – and that’s fair enough  – but then never came back up when the power was restored – how stupid is that! So THAT’s going in the bin!

Anyway so for our first day we visited various places around the seafront – lovely.

Day 2 not so sunny – it was lovely and warm but the clouds ruined most opportunities for photography.

There were some pretty amazing ships in dock during the day and during our cruise of the coastline we still manages to get some half-decent pics.

So was Cartagena worth it? Most definitely yes and worth another trip sometime, lots to see, lots to do. Perhaps another day would have been good.

Today (Sunday will be a quiet day, I’ve some re-wiring to do.

This week we took a short break down the coast, specifically to Almunecar (where we stayed) and to the caves in Nerja, Balcon De Europa and more – indeed we also visited various places along the coast including Salobrena and other, smaller towns and of course the trip would not be complete without a shopping excursion in Granada on the way back. (click on the map or any photo for a larger version).

The A92 is not at it’s best right now, there are a few patches detracting from a great journey but it’s no worse than the M6 and the view is a lot nicer. The motorway does however have it’s share of speed cameras and the sat-nav is virtually useless thanks to some over-enthusiastic reporting of camera locations.

The whole trip is nice – the But first, Almunecar – very nice – touristy – yes and certainly not somewhere I’d want to visit in July or August but now most of the tourists have cleared off for the summer – we’d definitely take another look.

So our first stop (after the obligatory lunch on the beach) was Hotel Casablanca on the sea front at the junction of Paseo De Las Flores and Paseo De La Caletilla in Almunecar – opposite the Penones de San Cristobal (see statue below, near the entrance). The hotel was inexpensive – and not the best pillows in the world but pleasant, well maintained, wifi, clean, cheap – excellent value for money.

When we arrived they clearly had figured they would convince us to take a balcony room and almost double their income – they didn’t seen to know what to do when we said no thanks – but I think we paid something like 40 Euros or so (remember this is off-season) for the room, it had air-conditioning and was clean with an excellent bathroom!

Others we know like this hotel so it looks like one to remember overall.

The location of the hotel could not be better – straight out of the door you are at the beach, it is walking distance along Paseo De La Caletilla to the old town (superb little backstreets, chocker full of bars, restaurants and shops – including some great stores full of wonderful stained glass lamps – can’t really explain why that’s interesting without showing you them and I didn’t take photos – flat phone battery).

We went for a walk and stumbled across a fantastic park which Google doesn’t even mention but here’s a link – it is free to wander around, with fantastic statues and various ruins (Majuelo Botanical Gardens – mainly a fish salting factory that dates to Phoenician times – fascinating) and so much more (the ruins are fairly obvious in the link above)– I didn’t take a note of it’s name but what an experience. Next to the park itself is a kind of mini-zoo – Park Botanico – we took that in as well.

After an evening in Almunecar, we set off down to Nerja to visit the caves and were not disappointed – some students I think discovered them late last century – just by accident – and they are MASSIVE – we took the un-guided tour and I really do recommend the place.

All done at the caves we headed off to Nerja to the Balcon De Europa – all I can say is check out the salobrenaphotos on Flickr – and take a visit – wonderful.

From Nerja we headed off via Maro, La Herradura to Salobrena – can’t say I felt any urgent desire to visit the latter again… and then up to Granada for some supplies and wood for my next project. Overall would we take this trip again – you bet. First opportunity – I reckon as the weather cools off it is probably viable for perhaps another month before the winter air starts to get in the way – September seems a really good time for this – not too many tourists, still plenty of sunshine.

Nerja is situated on the Costa Del Sol in the province of Malaga. It is about 50km east of Malaga and a nice run down from Granada.

Somewhat over 2.5 hours  in all from our place in Galera, we decided on the trip after advice from friends.  We started with the idea of going to nearby Motril until someone said “why would you want to go THERE” and advise us to check out nearby towns – so the final destination was somewhat random – but what a good deal.

I certainly would not call the place deserted – as parking was a bit of an issue, but you could just tell we’re not kind of off-season as the many restaurants were certainly FAR from full.

The place is wonderful, a TAD “British” for me.. I didn’t really come to Spain to be in a hot Britain, not by a long chalk and that’s kind of what happens when Brits go overseas in mass – British food, British music etc. – so for example the hotel specialised in the “full British Breakfast” (though I’m not sure who told them we like re-constituted bacon) but also had some continental food. However despite that, there is plenty for everyone in Nerja including, I’m told, a fabulous cave system – that will have to wait for our next trip – which will be soon.

The journey from Granada to Nerja is in itself worthy of note as the modern, well-maintained motorway cuts it’s way through mountains and across modern, well designed bridges. That experience alone is quite nice – though I didn’t manage to take pictures being the designated driver. The photo above was our first sight of the town and as it happens our hotel was on the corner. Not far off the sea front but sadly VERY high up so there was no way we were walking up and down  THAT hill. The hotel had a decent pool and our first order of duty was to soak in it for an hour before getting back into the car and heading down to the coast.

Wonderful – the usual highly coloured stored selling Chinese plastic junk but enough variety to keep people happy – and along the waterfront a very large variety of restaurants to suit most tasted. We found a quiet little Italian and ate altogether far too much garlic, after which we  ended up at an ice-cream vendor with more choice of flavours than I EVER recall seeing before – excellent and nothing we saw along the sea front was too expensive.

After dinner we walked around the beach for a while before heading off back to our hotel. The next morning we went off in the car to have a look around town and it was then we realised that this is going to take a more leisurely trip – maybe a couple of days as the place is BIG. We also found the Nerja Cave area but again – to enjoy properly it needs more time – so we headed off out of town on our way back to Granada but taking an ever so slightly different route, following the sea for a while and I’m so glad we did  – the pictures should speak for themselves.

Firstly a few more (you can click on the links to expand) of Nerja itself – or rather the seafront…

And now some photos as we LEFT Nerja.

Hope you like the pictures – more when we return later this year. As always, more pics (and higher quality) on our Flickr area – just search for “scargill spain” and you won’t be far off.