The general blog area for the site. Articles which do not fall into a specific category will appear here.
- Written by: Rick Nason
After a long break from the site I decided it is time to make some more progress. We found a property that matches our requirements, mostly!
- Written by: Rick Nason
After much searching we may have located a house that we can afford to buy and which gives us all the things that we would like as a potential final home. We will need to have a staircase installed though!
- Written by: Rick Nason
It's been a while since the last post, a few things have changed.
The new cameras are now working fine, unfortunately the system only allows two to be in use at any time (this wasn't advertised in the software so I'm a bit peeved).
- Written by: Rick Nason
After a hectic trip to England over the Christmas season ... Which consisted of: A flight to Heathrow, two tube journeys and a train ride to Crayford all with 3 huge suitcases and 3 smaller suitcases, a fairly relaxing Christmas with Janet's mum and Christmas dinner at Janet's sister's house. Then a worrying car hire experience
- Written by: Rick Nason
After spending some time looking for a sensible way to make the site multi-lingual I hit upon a semi-automated plugin to help me with the task. After all, now we are in Portugal and would like to stay it seems only polite to try and communicate with our neighbours in the native language. We're making good progress with the spoken language and can order goods in shops and cafés with a little more confidence now. Still a long way to go though. So, now you can switch between English and Portuguese on the web-site.
- Written by: Rick Nason
Having tried a number of photo album plugin modules to display our photos it became apparent that none were really suitable. They all required that every image had to be copied to the web server with images converted to numerous 'thumbnails' so that the system could display them on the browser.
- Written by: Rick Nason
A few weeks ago we took a drive up the mountain. It was a sunny day and pretty warm as usual here in Fundão when we set off. By the time we'd reached the summit things were quite different. No snow of course as the Summer was still with us but much chillier, at least 10 degrees lower. Still, not a problem for a Northerner and even though I took my fleece jacket it wasn't needed.
- Written by: Rick Nason
After a few aborted attempts to re-utilise the Dell server I came to the conclusion that I don't really need a big, beefy server roaring away in the spare bedroom, sucking up lots of energy and producing even more heat. As a stopgap the Raspberry Pi was just about coping with the workload but is a little bit under-powered for my needs and to add enough storage for all my videos and music requires an external disk anyway.
- Written by: Rick Nason
After a fortnight living out of a suitcase in a single hotel room, relying on friends or public 'transport' to get around, and combined with the unpleasant environment of unruly thugs and the saddening number of rough sleepers, I am really happy to be back. Yes, it was great to meet up with old friends.
- Written by: Rick Nason
Sadly, my server has succumbed to the heat here in Portugal. Perhaps hiding it under the bed in the spare room was not such a good idea. Anyway, one of the disk drives has failed and the mirror copy is also suspect so I spent a long time making yet another copy of the critical (irreplaceable) data to a spare disk.
- Written by: Rick Nason
Added photo's from this year's holiday to the photo album app. Janet and I took a two week break in the Algarve near Alvor. The hotel (Pestana at Praia dos Três Irmãos) was rather good, very clean and accommodating.
- Written by: Rick Nason
Ironically, here we are in early June, in central Portugal where the weather is a good few degrees cooler than it is in Oslo or Copenhagen. There is even still evidence of snow on the top of the mountain. It's not cold here but the mostly cloudy sky and regular rain showers is making things looks very familiar. We might as well be back in Macclesfield.
- Written by: Rick Nason
It's been a while since the last post. We've been working most weekends at the apartment of a friend in a village near Alem do Rio in the North towards Porto. The place has been gutted and we have been helping with the re-decoration and building Ikea furniture.
- Written by: Rick Nason
Thank's to another local UK ex-pat who we met at the Portuguese course I finally had some proper work to do earlier this week. Ok, so it was only cutting up some branches for firewood but I got to work outside, do a bit of exercise and get some fresh air.
- Written by: Rick Nason
It's been a while since the last update but things have got a bit more interesting recently. Last weekend I had a pleasant train ride to Vila Nova de Guia, all 5½ hours of it. Janet had been working at their office during the week so we eventually met up and visited a local restaurant for a feed. The hotel is 40 minutes walk, up a steep hill on a clammy Spring evening.