Bedrock

Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

Yet another lovely day, temperatures in the upper thirties at peak.  Yesterday we had our treat for the week – CHUROs at the Huescar market…. then a cracking night last night with some Brits down at the local pubs, today we went to the Orce pool – mid-afternoon – almost deserted – lovely, followed by a spot of shopping tonight for supplies in Huescar (wherein I discovered free WIFI in the square which is nice – better than Scarborough’s supposed WIFI on the beach which turned out to be not yet commissioned) and a quiet night in Orce for a pizza in the square there.

Back in the cave now, I’m writing the blog, Maureen’s sitting outside on the patio, pitch black apart from our coloured solar lights, talking to her sister in the USA on video Skype on her iPad. I put some acid down on the weeds today, we’ve a few more bathroom repairs to do and looking forward to more sun at the weekend.

Orce market is on Sunday night – WELL worth the trip if you’re nearby – I’ll drop some pics in here after the event.

Currently suffering with wasps outside – Maureen’s convinced they’re hiding in the hot tub so I’ll be taking panels off –looking for a smoke-bomb solution to get rid of them – ideas welcome.

Got streaming video from our PC at home working – but the broadband is not QUITE up to it, Habland (who are most helpful and speak English – forget about Iberbanda) have promised options from September on for varying the data rate – clearly they can handle up to 4 meg either way, it’s down to getting the funding model right I suppose – but for me, slower broadband when we’re NOT here – at lower cost – and faster when we ARE here at higher cost would fit the bill nicely.

Still no sign of my new cameras from China – which is a bit of a worry as they need forwarding from the UK to here! Existing cameras work a treat but I’m hoping to add audio to them before we leave later in the summer.

Pete Scargill

Lovely. Full moon, it’s 9pm and around 13.5c outside which isn’t stunning but it’s not freezing either… got a nice fire inside (22c) and the worst broadband connection possible! I screwed up TomTom on the iPhone and the only way to reload it is via the PC – which says it’ll be done in another 10 hours!!!!

As you can see on the right, I’ve now got 2 sets of the colour-changer solar lights – what a bargain (B&Q) and they work as well. Everything you see there is solar – sky was pitch black but the picture was a 6-second exposure. Tomorrow Tony the builder turns up to fix the gateposts and I’ll put a final coat of paint to cover up my wires.  I spent the afternoon working on the WIFI – I promised neighbours I’d try to come up with an arrangement that lets them use the connection when I’m not here for a contribution to my monthly bill (which I pay whether I’m here or not) and I’ve now got an extended external aerial and teatime I tested it – it pretty much covers the entire area, outdoors at least, I doubt it’ll penetrate cave walls. That meant fitting a second router internally but I had one lying around and now that’s all fitted up properly and tested.

I notice this fellow (left) appeared in the grassy area just in front of our place – he tethered – I’m guessing the farmer put him there to eat the growth – thankfully he’s not quite close enough to smell!

In the process of doing my wiring I ended up face to face with the horror you see below and right – something of an irradiated cricket – except I’ve never seen a cricket even REMOTELY that size, this fellow was near enough 6 inches long! I say was because he’s now languishing behind the woodpile with a mouthful of wasp killer. Hopefully he’ll have told his pals to keep away before going to meet his maker. Nearly gave me a heart-attack!

So not a bad day’s work altogether, finished off with a nice chat with my pal Jonathan and Maureen – though in both cases the quality was crap thanks to the TomTom download. I need to get shopping tomorrow and finish the vacuuming so I’m ready to to my rounds on Saturday which include a trip around Puebla De Don Fadrique for Kodak moments, shopping along the coast and finally a trip to the airport to pick up Maureen – that sure was a quick week… but then I learned how to do some serious programming in PHP (a language for the non-technical reader) and I’m feeling quite de-stressed which has to be a good thing. Hopefully Maureen  and I can find a suitable gate and post-lights next week and that’ll look really nice.

Yesterday was the big day for videoconferencing… I ran an IT meeting from here in the cave… 9 people in 6 locations in 3 countries – or rather attempted it.  After the biggest downpour of rain here in Galera I’ve seen in summertime… yesterday morning I  got up to find that one of my ADVENT over-the-mains Internet units had blown itself to pieces (less than 2 years old). Fortunately I started with a pack of 3 so I had a spare… which promptly refused to connect reliably. 

So armed with a less than ideal signal and Skype BETA (handles multiple video locations), GotoMeeting and my various documents ready to go for a meeting that started at 10am UK time, we started on time – to echos… no matter what we did, we got feedback and echoing.. we scrapped Skype and used Gotomeeting on it’s own with mics on mute until requested.. and so it was we managed several hours of meeting in 3 countries. I’ve a suspicion the problems were down to one site not set up properly but hey… still something new we’d not done before!

The weather picked up and so I decided the answer to the WIFI issue was to re-site the one router so it is line of site for upstairs AND downstairs – a mere matter of 8 metres of network cable and a small cupboard to mount the lot at the bottom of the stairs. 5pm, off we went to Huescar – and returned empty-handed. The electrical shop was closed and not one of the furniture shops we looked at had such a thing as a small cabinet. If we’d had a B&Q I’d have wrapped things up in one store.

So, as is often the case, it’s a trip to Granada (namely Carrefour and Brico-Depot) to sort out the bits we need. I’m hoping the weather is going to be nice for the drive and perhaps we’ll take in a bus tour.

If you’ve an iPhone incidentally you can now read these blogs in a special theme for the iPhone – just punch in the normal web address and you’ll get a special version of the blog.

Well, that was an interesting overnight experience. I got up in the middle of the night with an urge to do some forum testing (amazing the things you think of on holiday – I’ve been putting together a vBulletin forum for the FSB and it’s been giving me installation issues) and…. no broadband.

Regular readers will know I had a problem last week and it turned out it was the connector to the Iberbanda dish… well I checked the connector – seemed fine.. and this morning I went up the road to a neighbour who also has the same setup – he’s had no problems… so back to the cave. As the alternative was to ring up Iberbanda who are not the best English speaking company in the world, I poked a hole in the insect mesh and shoved my last decent network cable through in a last-ditch effort – on the hope that a replacement cable might do the job.

I didn’t really expect much but SURE ENOUGH, not only do they use crappy cement over here, they use crappy cables as well! The broadband is working better than ever, I’ve scrapped the original cable and put in a bright new orange one!

Some kind of holiday celebration today so the shops are all closed tonight.  Sun is back out and I’ve no need to contact the office until teatime here so a little sun, I think!

Well, not a life as such but a few days cut off from the world… may as well have cut my right arm off…

3 days ago, the Iberbanda broadband went off… not for the first time, it went off months ago and it turned out that some local turds had disconnected the plug… quickly fixed..

This time, no such luck, the broadband just stopped. I checked to ensure all the connectors were in, cycled the power etc… nothing, dead. Over here in Spain in the mountains I have a wireless broadband system. An Aerial points from our cave down to the village centre and that’s where we get the broadband from.

Now this might be of interest to those of you in a similar situation using Iberbanda… basically as far as foreigners are concerned they’re worse than useless. Without a phone, you can’t ring them. There does not appear to be an email address you can use… so the only way is to ring up on your mobile… they don’t speak English but will have someone who speaks English ring you back…. but – and this is second hand from various sources – they will NOT ring you back on a UK mobile…  They have a British speaking off-shoot of the company but unless you signed up with them in the first place – they won’t touch you!!

I got a couple of local Brits to help me and very welcome too – but the information needed is ridiculous – they need your national insurance number, the number of the phone you have with them (which being broadband based doesn’t work when the broadband is off) and the CUETA number off the invoice…

After over 2 days of struggling with this and getting no-where, I finally got desperate and starting taking connectors out and actually LOOKING at them – and that’s when I discovered a problem… the RJ45 connector going into the dish itself was black – like carbon black – I have NO idea why as the socket looked ok.  I got out the wire brush – and the WD-40 – and gave it a good old clean – plugged it back in and hey presto – broadband. Back in action.

All of this does however beg the question – how on earth are you supposed to get a fast response when you need it?? Between that and needing passports at some garage our near the town of Vera when taking payment, either the Spanish REALLY don’t trust us Brits – or they don’t trust people in general – at this point I don’t know which it is.