Spanish blue cheese

And yes, there is a Spanish blue cheese, and it;s pretty damn good. As good as a good roquefort, and comparable taste and texture wise. So, no rubbish, like Danish Blue.

And wrapped in maple leaves, for the Canadian audience.

A drowned ZoombaTracker™

All very well, this irrigation business, and jolly for Zoomba that she likes it a lot here, chasing rabbits, but not so great she returned all wet, with a malfunctioning ZoombaTracker™.

She rummages around the irrigation channels, and sticks her nose into the conduits, thus putting the ZoombaTracker™ in water. It is dry here. Very very dry, so this is something I had not taken into account.

Now and then the tracker gave a sign of life, but more often it did not. Lucky my soldering iron and spare parts had just arrived with the car, so I had a spare ZoombaTracker™ and some Arduino Trinkets.

The SIM still worked, so did the LoNet GSM/GPS, but not the lipo-battery. Even after days of drying it cannot be re-charged. That is eleven euros down the irrigation channels. (Update! The battery is fine again.)

With the spare battery still malfunctions. Grmbl. (And worse.) Then the remaining part to swap is the Arduino. Screw-glue-desolder-solder-curse-grmll-sweat. But, it's working.

And it fits the little plastic Oropax box a lot better, with shorter wires, shorter battery wires, and the clever use of Tesa black tape.

My paint!

Yes, this car has very wide doors. And if you don't pay enough attention you will bump the door into something, and loose a chip of paint. That severely dampened the joy of having the preciousss back.

I still have a can of the original paint, but not here. Luckily the nice folks at Talleres y Gruas Azor were kind enough to mix some paint to colour, and dab the spot. Free. Alright, for a cup of coffee. I gave them a few.

The Comfy Chairs

We cannot do without comfy chairs.

(And the soft cushions.)

So today was spent screwing, mostly.

Irrigation / Irritation

What is that sound? Water?! There is water running through the old irrigation channels! We had not expected that. So they are still in use.

We now understand the lighter stripes on the fields too. They are tiny "dykes" of clay that are used to stop the water running further.

Apparently they switch on the water every few months to water the orange groves.

Zoomba runs free a few times a day with her ZoombaTracker. She also runs through the water channels, because het lower half was wet, and so was the ZoombaTracker. That cost a lipo-battery and an Arduino, a lot of cursing and bug finding. Lucky the GSM/GPS module still works, that is the most difficult part, and I only have two. (That was the "irritation" bit. More for the sake of the fun alliteration than for your information.)

Fly curtain

The house had a nice fly screen of metal chains. After the transfer of the house it had vanished, however. "Everything minus a number of things" apparently was no guarantee for the staying behind of the fly screen.

Last year there were few flies. Now there are a few, so better get a fly screen. No tacky coloured plastic strips please, we want nice metal chains.

← You can buy bags with 100 meter aluminium chains here, and special rails.

And lo.

The chains that were here till last year were heavier, but aluminium is good enough.

Prickles

I don't know what plant this is, but sandalias and dog paws are serverely troubled by these devil's claws. Bloody things!

BUT! MUHAHHAH!

And lo, the torched earth.

There now appears to be a "total fire ban", no burning off of rubbish, and even a barbecue is not allowed.

Sorry!

Electrickery

The house is way better dry than last time, so the solar ventilator has done it's job, unless the weather has been a lot drier the past few months. Still, half the kitchen and the hallway have no power. The RCD still switches off when the group is switched on. So, we again need the extension cord for the freezer and fridge.

Luckily there's a business card of an electrician in the switchboard. He's doing a job nearby, and can come and see us this afternoon already.

It was not easy. After half a day searching and a lot of head-scratching a piece of cable in the wall, of about a meter, is not good. There is a resistance of ca. 200kΩ between the two leads.

Cable in the wall? Yes, a cable in the wall. A hick cable was put in a slit in the wall, and then plastered over. The preferred way is to put a pvc conduit in the wal, and then pull leads through. Here they didn't do that.

One wall-socket remains a mystery, the red and black leads were not found anywhere else. Possibly there is a "joint box" that is now hidden behind a wall or behind plaster. The previous owner does not yet respond to inquiries. Right.

Solution for the kitchen is a new cable behind the wall of the hallway, throught the wall into the cupboard in the corner, through the work surface inside the cupboard, to a new socket inside a cupboard for fridge and freezer.

Now all that remains to do, next week, is a changeover switch setup for the lights in the hallway.

Shade

The average air temperature here varies between 25° to 30°, with blue skies, cool breezes, Campari, etc. Also at night. Nevertheless the sun is rather fierce and hot when your directly exposed, and not in the shade. It is much better in the shade.

There are various options. You can stay inside, the house is nice and cool, and has shade, but that is not our preference. You can build a pergola, out of stone, wood, pipes, or a combination of materials. Or, you can install a shadesail, as we know them from Australia. There are triangles, squares, rectangles, made of an elastic but strong material, so you can give them an interesting shape when tensioned with cables..

The real ones are available here, end they are not expensive. Montage though, is.

Or you can opt for a pergola. Freestanding, attached to your house, wood, stone, pipes...

Or the "mi casa system", that a nice restaurant here has.

After asking some quotes we know now that shade is expensive. We have at least 8x8 meter to shadow, so we chose ready made shadesail fro the Lope. For less than 100 euro there is a 5x5 meters sail made of strong materials, and decent attachments. We'll manage this season, and then decide if we want/agree to/can afford something else.

Next to the house shade is desired too. We use factor 50 sun cream, but cars don't like that.

Unwelcome visitors

Many people here have an Indalo man figure on their house. Usually made of some iron wires bent and welded together.

← Look! Here it is still on our house!

Ours is now gone. Only a faint rusty trail remains. Where did he go?

And who broke the lock of the gate to the workshop, bent the gate in the process, but decided to not break the door of the workshop itself? (Which would have been dead easy because the wood there is quite gone.)

So, we need to take anti-burglary measures. (With as much electricity as we like.)

Next!

So, we're back online, and back into existence.

Back in NL there is ADHD, ADSL, and lots of wires to get data in and out of your house. Even radio and television en Eric Corton and Sven Kockelmann enter your home via cable. All of that is absent here. Here the future has begun, and everything is wireless, via Next, and at the same cost!

They screw a smal box onto your casa, here pictured against a nice blue sky backdrop, 26°, sunshine and a mild breeze. The box looks towards the antennae on the encircling hills:

(see the blue sky, 26°, and the mild breeze?)

Well, it's not entirely wireless. A cable runs from the antenna-box to another box, which has a cable to a wifi-router. And the power has a cable as well.

Next also has telephone and television, but we will have to wait a bit, as watching tv takes up bandwidth. Too many tv watchers and the internetters start to complain, and the tv watchers as well, as short freezes will happen.

In the mean time nothing here will freeze, and we won't complain, with mild breezes and 26°.

(Did we mention the nice weather yet?)

PS: well actually, we have do frozen water, that we put into Campari in little cubes, together with oranges and lemons from our own trees, or our neighbours'.

PPS: should you choose Next because of this blog then let them know, so we can have a month free internet!

PPPS: nice weather here!

Sandalias!

New sandalias!

En route...

 En route!

Pack!

Last time we had this on the car is quite a long time ago. About 11 years, when we last moved house. This time it's about moving house and country. But, only for three months to start with.

I did not know we had that much essentials that we cannot do without for three months, but we do. Well, actually we planned a mini removal of a part of our household, like half of our books, summer clothes, garden furniture, tools, but decided against that in the end. Instead we'll bring the car, and pack that with the most essential essentials. And we still have more of those than we thought.

Tools, because we need to do.. things. Computers, to try out the internets.

I see someone has sneaked in an extra pair of sneakers.

Oh well.

ZoombaTracker™ IoT

This is the fruit of last month's work: the ZoombaTracker™, GrannyFinder™, CarTracer™, etc.

Remember Zoomba? Of course you do. Well, she runs off, which is worrying for city dwellers. The ZoombaTracker™ is a wearable IoT "Internet of Things" thingie consisting of a GSM+GPS module, the smallest Arduino I could find, a LiPo battery and two antennae in a little (match)box, that will be attached to Zoomba's collar.

GPS trackers for pets are readily available, but they usually come with a subscription service that costs a lot of money, and I don't like that. The ZoombaTracker™ is different. It can be controlled by sending it a simple SMS, and it will return the GPS location of the device as an answer. So, at the cost of one SMS you will know where Zoomba, granny or your car are.

The device is designed to be sleeping mostly, to save the battery. Current testing show the device will work up to 50 hours on a charged 550mAh LiPo battery, which is not too bad. The tracker is active 08:00 till midnight, so 16 hours a day. It should work two days on a charge. Perhaps removing the 3 LEDs will further decrease power consumption.

The ZoombaTracker™ will send an SMS when the battery is low, to remind you to charge or change the battery.

Here is an example: some commands, an SMS with a link to Google Maps, and the result.


(Gw=send GPS location as soon as fix is obtained, Mg=send in Google Maps format, Gf=force send GPS location NOW, G0=GPS off)

The complete device. It will be attached to a dog collar next, and tested in the wild.