Bedrock

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.

Today is turning out to be a good day.

I’ve been having troubles with the broadband here for a couple of weeks – losing connections all over the place. Meanwhile,  my Zopo phone stopped taking and making calls  – and to crown it off, my old S4 ended up back in my lap as that had a SIM issue.

The Broadband: 2 weeks ago my various Internet-connected IOT gadgets started acting up – and we started losing connections on the WIFI. Was it my gadgets? Was it the service provider? Was it the modem. Not a clue and several tests took me no further. Eventually 3 or 4 days ago I reduced the router to factory settings (not a pleasant task as I have dozens of modifications).  I After I gutted the router – all seemed well for a couple of days – and then Maureen pointed out that she could not get her TV on the Now-TV box.

I realised I’d not put the DNS solution back into the router that we use to get British TV in. I put it back in – and – the problem came back.  I tried using DNS on just one outlet and got no-where. I contacted our service provider and got no-where though he did offer a few tips. Then I realised there’s a tick box to force the router to use the chosen DNS. Why would I need that? Oh, well I ticked it anyway. I don’t know why that would affect reliability – but everything is working perfectly and the TV is better than it has ever been – my devices are all talking reliably.

The Phones: Then there was the problem with the phones – my ZOPO top end smartphone stopped talking to the phone networks a couple of weeks ago and Banggood (who I bought it from) proved to be utterly useless – no technical support – just send it back to the factory (only a few months old – maybe 3 months) – only take a few weeks they said. Meanwhile I had a fellow over here griping – I’d sold him my old S4 and he said it intermittently would not work. It was working fine before I shipped it to Spain.  Well, I needed a phone and it was fine when it left me so we took the S4 back – I thought it would do while the Zopo went back to China.

But sure enough – “SIM missing” messages would appear intermittently – then it would work, then it would not. I trawled the XDA forums – hundreds upon hundreds of items about S4 and SIM issues  people putting foam on the SIM connector – some said it worked – some said not – they had all sorts of fixes and by the look of it none of them worked – someone even said that Samsung would fix the phone for £150 – I know what my response to that would have been.

Well I wasn’t buying any of this and so I went on Ebay and for 4 quid got a complete replacement panel with both sockets… orderd it 2 days ago in the UK, turned up here this morning – can’t be bad. I fitted it – took about 2 minutes and – nothing- NO MORE missing SIM but just like the Zopo – no connection.  I was beginning to smell a rat by now.

I went to manual settings in the S4 following a tip from the THREE operator last week – he told me to select an operator manually – and forced a connection to Orange… I did that last week and the S4 worked for about 5 minutes. But now… with a fixed SIM socket – it KEPT on working.  Amazing – S4 back in action.

I put the SIM back in the Zopo and BLOW ME – the Zopo started working – clearly something I’d done in the S4 had left a change in the SIM.

So in 24 hours I’ve got my WIFI network back, in working order, both phones back up and running and meanwhile all the world I’d done on my IOT devices, thinking they were faulty not the network and so they are now pretty much bullet proof…. meanwhile to take my mind off things I’ve been working on a new all-singing Thermostat and as of last night that is working so well I’m going to fit them to both houses.

Add to that – my new 50 degree wooden frame for the solar panels is up – and I’m getting around 10% minimum more juice out of them – more than I was getting when the sun was higher! 11am and the battery is charging at 14.2 volts already.

The Post: So all in all, a good start to the day and it’s warm and sunny  to boot! All that is left to sort out is the mail.  I have the usual “UPS – your address is wrong” nonsense but after applying pressure all around they have PROMISED FAITHFULLY to deliver today – a free sample worth maybe a fiver.  The POST OFFICE issue is another one altogether. A company in the USA with a new computer product offered to send me one for review FOC.  I accepted and told them NO WAY to use UPS – so they used the ordinary post system – and that’s fine – but then I got a letter from the Spanish post – I had to fill something in. I didn’t understand it so went to the local post office – no, you need to go to Huescar they said. Huescar post office looked at it in dismay – you need to fill it in online they said.

So armed with a translator off I went. They want FOUR documents from me – the first is my ID (like my passport but Spanish) – done, dusted. The second was a “proof of delivery” a little difficult as I’ve not received the goods – the third was proof of purchase – difficult for a freebie and the forth-  proof of payment – even more difficult for a freebie.  And all of that would be fine if I was shipping gold or nuclear weapons but it makes you wonder why such a fuss for a simple piece of electronics hardware the likes of which ships by the million all over the world on a daily basis!

Still with the start I’ve had up to now, I’m optimistic!

It’s been a great summer here in Galera, the weather, by and large has been stunning, with temperatures up to 40c in the afternoon and really pleasant evening temperatures, ideal for BBQs. The last couple of weeks have been good – but it’s not summer – still wearing t-shirts but no-one is in a rush to go off to the lake for a swim. Yesterday it rained which was a bit of a novelty but by the look of the forecast we’re going to see sunny conditions, the odd cloud and maybe 21-22c in the afternoons for the next few days at least. Ideal for getting on with projects.

I’m currently working on a number of projects – one of which is my lighting – we’ve simplified the external lighting basically down to one colour – green. The lighting is predominantly LED-based and so I decided to go for 12v – this has the advantage that I can run the lot of a battery. I have a couple of small solar panels here, each able to give out 40w on a good day and they’re currently mounted flat on the pergola.

Well, that was fine until maybe a couple of weeks ago, every day they’d fully charge my 12v deep-discharge battery (basically an average size car battery that doesn’t mind getting heavily discharged) and so the lights would come on at dusk and go off at midnight. That, some Pergola lighting and a WIFI controller of my own design would take the battery down just below 12v in time to be fully recharged the following morning. You can see the last few days in the graph above (the system reads the battery voltage every 15 minutes). from the peak, the voltage drops with the lighting on until midnight where the lights go off, at which point the battery instantly recovers a little – but then continues to drain overnight as the controller itself takes some power – then come dawn it starts to go up again – etc. There’s a general downward slope, halted only by reducing the amount of time the lights are on but we’re only just into October here so it’s going to get worse – I’m hoping by angling the panels I can get that power back up.

Not so now, over the past weeks the hours of sunlight have dropped and this week I had to dramatically alter the timing, keeping the main lights off for an hour after dusk. I’ve been sitting here this morning looking at optimum angles for panels and of course my current flat setup is useless in winter. It turns out the optimum winter angle here is around 50 degrees – and thinking about it, the flat panel would be pretty useless if it snowed – so I need to make a little A-frame to hold the panels, easy to do when you have a B&Q around the corner, here we have a “Carpinteria” – and yesterday I tried the one in our village and the next – both closed all day!! I can see a trip to the big town coming on. It really just isn’t as simple as in the UK – on the other hand it’s probably pouring down back home by now. It’s 8am, the sun is thinking about coming up, a little damp outside but there’s not a cloud in the sky so it might well be a nice day.

All of this just just a project of course – I could just as easily power everything by the mains – but it’s a fun project and lots of knowledge is coming our of it. Between that and years of playing with garden lights I’ve a fair idea of what you can and can’t get out of solar panels.

Meanwhile, Maureen is taking an interest in local Pilates lessons and glasswork and I’m learning all about the operating system Linux – the hard way – by experimenting. Yup, it’s going to be a nice sunny day today.

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.