Bedrock

A friend of mine here in Galera just pointed out that I’ve been a bit remiss in updating this site – my Facebook pages and the tech blog are updated a lot – so – time to catch up in here.

Let’s see, since the last post in here – Maureen and had a nice trip to (of all places) Benedorm – a great tribute band at the Palace – then we spent 2 months over Christmas in the UK (mostly in the rain). It was never meant to be that way but between both of us having both eyes fixed (cataract operations) and the inherrent delays, made worse by having the flu meant we spent far more time over there than we planned.

Just before leaving Spain we discovered a great Chinese store near the Thader shopping centre in Murcia – something for absolutely everyone – dwarfs our local Chinese stores..

Here’s a picture taken before heading off to the UK of our then fairly new Bengal cat – then known as Lilly – because neither we nor the vet checked to see if he had bits.

I spent much of the UK Christmas on eBay – including selling my “old” DJI Mini 2 drone and buying the Mini 4 Pro – a major upgrade – I’m so glad I did that.

While in the UK we worked on building our set of Cobra glasses as you see here… I love Cobra..

Of course we also stopped to watch the first Starship Mechazillla landing – a phenomenal, momentous event – sadly things have gone downhill a little since then – possibly because Musk has taken his eye off the ball?

I also bought a new mini-PC for the UK – a marvellous piece of work for the price – maybe £250.. it replaces the old huge tower I’ve had for years over there and is faster, much smaller and generally a good move.

While in the UK we visited the superb Hancock Museum in Newcastle.

Back to Spain in February to discover the village now has 5G mobile signals – and now an updated picture of BILLY as he’s now known as he is starting to settle in nicely..

A trip to Cartagena with friends – the weather was great – more than it has been here in Galera until June…

You can’t see it but there’s a submarine just behind the folks above – and since then we’ve been to Guardamar, Rojales and several other place including a very brief look into Albox wherein we popped into one of the Indian restaurants there – not bad – see photo below…

– and now of course in June we’re enjoying the weather here in Galera. Sadly we recently lost my best cat-friend Simba but other than that all’s well.

Pool time now it’s hot…

Meanwhile, if I ever recommend a mobile phone service provider again, feel free to remind me – they are all an insult to used-car salesmen. For over 2 years now I’ve been using DigiMobil here in Galera, never needing support and hence never realising how shockingly bad they are. Very early in 2025, Galera went 5G and for maybe 3 months we were able to get tremendous, high speed mobile signals (we are line of sight to the mast) – no problems. Then, sometime early May, around the time of the national power outage. possibly before, it all went wrong with frequent dropouts.

Many users would not notice as they use their phones intermittently, travelling around in an area with regular dead spots – or using the 5G in a router (not many) to feed TV watching. What most non-tech-savvy users don’t understand is that given fast data, TV boxes will often buffer for minutes in the absence of a signal as will many Apps like YouTube – but for those of us relying on router-based 4G/5G for real-time communications and data transfer – frequent dropouts are a disaster – and what do Digi do about it? ZILCH. I’ve sent umpteen emails with proof of my claims that the signal is dropping frequently. I’m collecting ping data and have sent it to them. Then they come up with this “we only guarantee the service with phones”… so I went out and bought a phone to use as a router and what difference did it make? Zilch. Next time you hear the word “guarantee”, remember you heard it here first… I see Starlink in my future.

And that’s about it for now, we’re off to Granada soon and Maureen is off to the UK mid-month while I cat-babysit and sunbathe…

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