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By John, on February 27th, 2011
When our house in Xàtiva is finished, Ruth intends to carry on working for a time in Frankfurt. Which means we will be living partly in Germany and partly in Spain for a quite a time to come. Indeed, we expect to keep a foot in Germany for the foreseeable future. What I want to do is to ensure that our data – scanned documents, music, photos, spreadsheets, text documents etc. are equally available and up to date in both locations. Ruth will be using a Mac in Frankfurt, and in the house in Spain we plan to install most of the remaining computer equipment that we have here.
Today all our data resides on a Synology DiskStation DS210+ and can accessed from any of the Macs in the household. We don’t store data on the individual Mac local hard drives.
What I would like to do while we have two households is to be able to replicate data between two data servers – probably installing a DiskStation at each location and synchronising them regularly. Let’s say the main storage location is in Spain. My idea is to access the Frankfurt data server from Spain using WebDAV, mount the Frankfurt server as disk drive on my Mac’s desktop in the house in Spain and use a program such as Synchronize!Pro or Goodsync regularly to keep the contents of both servers identical. I think there is little chance of Ruth and I happening to edit the same file independently of each other between sync’s, so I expect the main sync activity to be adding or deleting files on two data stores.
I decided to set up WebDAV access via the internet for the existing DiskStation we have in Frankfurt and check whether the idea is feasible. To do this, I needed to set up an account with a dynamic DNS (or “DynDNS”) provider so that I can always access our systems in Frankfurt (Our ISP assigns us a dynamic IP address which changes every 24 hours). I needed to set up our FRITZ!Box 7270 to route traffic securely from the DynDNS provider to our DiskStation.
Here’s what I did:
Continue reading WebDAV access to a Synology DiskStation via an AVM FRITZ!Box
By John, on February 16th, 2011
I watched an interesting film on Arte last night, about planned obsolescence. I liked the title in French – Prêt à jeter (ready to throw away), a play on the phrase from the fashion industry, “prêt à porter” (ready to wear). The English title of the film is Pyramids of Waste or alternatively The Light Bulb Conspiracy. (You can read the project proposal for the film here (pdf document) – it’s also interesting.)
The film is an indictment of the modern consumer society which encourages us to throw away goods rather than repairing them, although the world’s resources are limited; largely driven by each manufacturer’s desire to sell more each year.
In particular it highlights planned product obsolescence. Planned obsolescence has been followed as a strategy for getting customers to buy more units of products by manufacturers since the 1920′s.
Some examples from the film:
If you get a chance – watch the film. Here’s a link to the Norwegian version you can watch on Vimeo (main language used is English, but some interviews filmed in Spanish, French and German are subtitled in Norwegian); and here is a link to the Facebook page for the film, where you might find information about where it is being shown in other languages.
You can find other examples where industry has followed its own agenda against the interests of consumers here, by the way.
By John, on February 11th, 2011
Most of the time, I will be visiting our building site on my own, over the next months. Ruth is still working, earning the money to pay for the house! So I will need to call home to discuss any issues that arise. Last time I was in Spain, we tried out the DCalling Service.
This seems to work. Well. I think we’ll be using it a lot in future.
You register with DCalling, which will get you a small credit on your DCalling account (25 cents, if I remember correctly), to allow you to try out the service. If you like it, you can top up your account in units of 20 Euro, which will be enough to keep you going for over 17 hours if you are making international mobile phone calls to land-lines within Europe.
Continue reading DCalling: cheap international mobile phone calls
By John, on February 10th, 2011
 The pool, with the hole for the pump in the background
Antonio sent us an update from his site visit on 8th February- since I was there a week ago, the pool has been excavated, and the concrete base for the house poured. The progress is very easy to follow at the moment! Clicking on the photo will take you to Picasa, where I have added Antonio’s photos.
By John, on February 3rd, 2011
 Concrete has just been poured around the steel column-cores
I was down in Valencia on Tuesday to see Antonio and we went out to the site as he had a regular site meeting scheduled with the subcontractors, builder, site foreman and the technical architect that morning. While we were there, the concrete foundations around the steel cores of the columns which support the roof were poured. The actual workers were completely outnumbered by the number of “bosses” present – I think I counted 3 people actually doing work, the rest were busy photographing details and discussing the progress and the plans for the next week!
By John, on January 30th, 2011
 Seen today, on our afternoon walk
By John, on January 27th, 2011
We had a surprise today – we received some photographs taken on Tuesday this week by Antonio, our architect, showing what has already happened in Xàtiva. I must say it was nice to see not a single sign of snow there; quite a contrast to here, where we have had some light snow again this week. The last lot had only just melted completely.
 Overall view of the building site on 25.01.2011
Click on this image to see the rest of the photos
Things are moving quickly at the moment. In fact we received the first invoice for a stage payment from the building company today too, which Antonio had signed off – that wasn’t actually due until the end of the month!
We have got quite an unconventional contract with the builder and also with the two biggest subcontractors, by the way. The “standard” way to contract building work in Spain is to agree to pay 90 days after receipt of an invoice which has been certified by the architect (that the work is complete); and penalty clauses for late delivery are not common. In our case we have agreed to pay within five days of receipt of the invoice, but on the other hand, we also have a penalty clause – every day after the agreed project end date (in this case, six and half months after the start of construction) costs the builder serious money in penalty payments. The same conditions apply for the subcontractors.
We had a similar contract when we built a house in Munich over 20 years ago, and we moved in over 4 months before any other family on the development (it was a 30-house development). So we are hopeful that the agreed end-date for the project will be met.
I’ll be able to take my own pictures in a few days time – I have a meeting set up with Antonio, which we will start at the building site before we adjoin back to his office in Valencia.
By John, on January 24th, 2011
The construction of our house in Xàtiva started a couple of weeks ago, so we are busy thinking about all the decisions we still need to take, before the builders take them for us by default. The sanitary ware, taps and showers in the bathrooms, the interior doors and their handles, the floor and wall tiles, and so on and so on… I plan to go to Valencia in a few days time and look at some samples with Antonio, the architect. And visit the building site, and convince myself that work really has started.
For light relief, it is good to take a break and also browse Unhappy Hipsters now and then!
By John, on January 17th, 2011
The Camera Culture Group at the MIT Media Lab has come up with a way of marking objects with a 3mm wide bar code that a normal digital SLR camera can read at a distance of over 4 meters (a cell phone camera needs to be closer) :
 Comparision of the new bokode and a conventional barcode
(Image from MIT Camera Culture Club's Paper about bokodes)
The experimenters at MIT call the new bar code a bokode, to distinguish it from its larger counterparts. The bokode uses an effect known as bokeh which is a characteristic of all camera lenses and often causes the highlights of out of focus objects to appear as groups of circles on the photograph.
The advantages of the bokode are its small size, which means that it can offer very inconspicuous identification of objects, and that it can be read from several meters away, thus allowing new applications for bar codes.
One possible use could be to add information to shops and other buildings which could be read and stored by Google Streetview cars, allowing more information to be displayed on on-line maps. The researchers have several other ideas, and are looking for commercial partners to develop the bokode further.
See a video about bokodes here; read more about bokodes here.
(Via Cool Hunting)
By John, on January 6th, 2011
Over the Christmas holidays I have been working with my brother-in-law to update his business website. It had been somewhat neglected over the past couple of years.
Now we have completely redesigned the look (while keeping the corporate image, especially the characteristic “teal” colour that they use), and completely re-written every page. We’ve also added a news section and a lot of new pages about projects they have completed recently.
Below are the before and after images – you can see the screen shot of the old site a little larger, if you click on it.
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The old version
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New version
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