Translation (by Google Trains Late):

Consumer Affairs opens proceedings against a platform for failing to remove listings for tourist rentals in occupied Palestine
The ministry has identified advertisements for accommodations located in over 200 postal codes corresponding to Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.

This morning, watching the TV news, I was presented with the above article and it made me shudder. The Catalan Consumer Society is going after AirBnB for advertising “holiday homes” by Israelis in Occupied Palestinian postcodes (zip codes).

Now, seemingly this has been going on since 2018 and a quick search shows the current state of play in the following AI summary. I was unaware of these shenanigans, so just in case you might be too, here is the current situation. (Palestine in the search is spelt incorrectly on purpose)

And it gets worse. Here’s the top search results from my phone.

Now, I don’t care how you dress this up, try to justify it, make it sound like a little mistake; this is sick.

Sick.

And before you go “but, but but…”, yes these adverts weren’t placed by Palestinians.

Sick.

What sort of mentality thinks, “ooh there’s a ‘freshly abandoned’ house, I’ll have that and make a shekel or 2 on AirBnB with it.”

Sick.

Or what sort of mentality thinks, “ooh there’s a ‘freshly abandoned’ bit of land, I’ll have that, build a house and make a shekel or 2 on AirBnB with it.”

Sick.

And AirBnB, who’ve known about this since 2018, just go “whatever, gimme de cash.”

Sick.

Now before any “apologist” tries to justify this as “historic” or “they weren’t using the building or land anyway” or whatever, let me point out, in my book at any rate, there is no justification at all that would satiate my anger at the decision by one party to take another party’s property and use it as a resource.

I don’t care that “all profits go someplace ‘good’”. The acts of sequestration and use are beyond the pail.

And this is now October 2026 and it is still going on, which means that AirBnB doesn’t give a shit.

At least booking.com, TripAdvisor and Expedia (who were also had up for this) seem to have gotten the message that these adverts “might be bad for business” and has stopped them. Well, type in “Israel” to a search on booking.com and it gets a bit “woolly” but it’s not “in yer face” like AirBnB. TripAdvisor and Expedia playing it safe just cover hotels. As an aside I love this filter on Expedia…

So the next time, you’re sitting in your downtown US apartment, on your iPhone, looking for a pet friendly rental on AirBnB in sunny “Israel”, just think how these bastards are allowing adverts for rentals that are (in basic terms) stolen properties.

Sick.

PS: There are other articles here on Medium about this starting in 2016. This is the best one…

Airbnb - End Illegal Rentals in the West Bank

I couldn’t sleep, so I got up.

You’re lucky that I was just lying on my bed and not in it, otherwise I’d be typing this “balls out,” rather than wearing a hoody, “sweatpants” (why does that word sound so gruesome) and a pissed off attitude.

Listicles are everywhere on Medium. They are a curse, a disease, the actual literary clap and each day more and more get plonked on here as “articles.”

It’s like Medium has turned into DMAX.

I’m guessing it works like this... some lazy type gets his/her ass out of bed, makes a coffee, turns on their Apple iPOS and types “give me a list of ten items about X” into CrapGPT.

CrapGPT presents 10 things about X, so ol’ lazy bones, goes off to Unsplash, or YouTube or someplace else and grabs 10 pics or vids, edits the GPT shit, mungs the lot together, bungs it here and awaits the gentle sound of coinage trickling into their piggy bank.

And my eyeballs get infested with massed 10 Top whatevers when I open Medium.

Sweet Jesus.

And it’s like playing whack-a-mole trying to get rid of them.

No matter how hard you bash “show me less like this,” more and more seep through the filters, like they’re some sort of wordy damp.

OK, they must work (aka pay), but what started off as a giggle has now become an epidemic; a scribefest as everyone has piled in.

Don’t get me wrong. I laugh at the personal ones; the ones that someone has put some thought into, but Jesus H Fucking Christ, the “Top 10 TV programmes you’ve never heard of” ones are just formulaic diarrhea.

And American.

The “authors” would be better off setting up an account on OnlyFans where people could pay to watch them taking a shit. Maybe they could call themselves “flatulencers” or similar. I dunno, but as long as they are off here.

And whilst I’m banging away at a keyboard like a deranged monkey, I may as well get the beef out that I have with the “new discovery” mob that hangs about these environs.

This mob is the same as the “Top 10” mob.

Nearly every “new discovery” on here was actually discovered about 5 years ago and all a “new discoverer” has done is ask CrapGPT and its ilk to summarise the “new discovery”, grab some pics and vids off Unsplash and YouTube, edit the wordy dross, mung the lot together, bung it here and await the gentle trickle of coinage into their piggy banks.

And my eyeballs get infested with massed “new discoveries” when I open Medium.

Sweet Jesus 2.0.

And again, it’s like playing whack-a-mole trying to get rid of them.

What happened to honest toil or original thought? Imagination seems to have been replaced by accountancy, thought with a time card, style with a florid, polyester shirt.

Cory D-row invented the “enshittification” word, but this is more like the “McDonaldification” of writing. In effect, industrialised scribbling which is tasteless, doesn’t fill you up, not cheap anymore and makes you feel like you’ve bitten into that bloody gherkin that everyone has wanted rid of for at least the last 70 years.

I’m not after “I wandered lonely as a cloud” level stuff. I just want to read stuff that someone has personally thought about, rather than them banging a prompt into a web page and churning out another LLM rehash that Altman et al hope will save their financial asses.

Please stop.

Buy me a token (just joking)

Overview:

This is part 4 of my HaLow vs 2.4Ghz WiFi slap down in the woods experiment and after a year (and 2600 euros) of cobbling together a “solution” for the HaLow and 2.4Ghz devices I bought, well this morning I gave up on HaLow.

Links to all the previous scribblings about this experiment are here.

Conclusion:

There is no use case that I can think of for deploying HaLow anywhere outwith America or Australia, as the devices for those locations ONLY will not have been crippled by bureaucracy. Seriously, bureaucracy is the bad actor here, because the products used were made by serious companies with proper reputations. The Anjielo products used for the initial and successful tests were probably “full fat” HaLow whereas the stuff that’s legal for sale in the EU has been emasculated by massed paper shovellers.

2.4Ghz WiFi is better. LoRa or LoRaWAN is better. Even Bluetooth is probably better. In fact, a couple of tin cans and some string is probably better than EU-specified and hobbled HaLow.

If all you want to do is send, say a WhatsApp text message saying “test”, from the middle of nowhere, then by all means (try to) use EU HaLow. If you want to send a piccy to the internet, then 2.4Ghz WiFi is really your only option.

The Goal:

The goal of this experiment was to create a self-powered, self-repairing infrastructure on the worst reception terrain imaginable that would allow users to create soil, land and forest management solutions for general land and agriculture health, forest fire warning systems and animal tracking in an environment that has no electricity, little mobile signal, steep terrain, no roads, no nothing. Satellite imagery (which I’ve tried) is only useful if you’ve got a supercomputer and a “model” to work out (guess) the blanks between each satellite sample, and there is no “on the ground” local sampling available that doesn’t involve a person driving to the site.

Test Site:

The test site was the epitome of evil. Steeply sloped pine forest with rocky ridges starting at 439m above sea level and rising to 570m in just 400m. The overall area was 17Ha (40 acres) with 2 tiny areas that could receive a mobile signal. Starlink was tried as a back haul but was of no use due to its power requirements. Drones and balloons are banned in protected natural areas like the test site, and there is no line of sight at all at tree level.

2.4Ghz WiFi in the latter half of 2026:

The kicker is this. 2.4Ghz in a dense forest will only give you maybe 40m radius of reception. You need to find some mobile reception, and your solution needs to be south-facing, as you’ll need to use solar panels. The long and the short of it is that in late 2026, 4G 2.4GHz solar powered router/extenders and solar-powered extenders cost around 60EUR each, delivered within the EU from China, and you can daisy-chain them together. The top speed is 300Mbps and they are deterministic in that they either work or they don’t. I’ve had mine up for about a year now, and they work a treat. Bit of a failure last December after 4 days of rain when they ran out of power, but they self-recovered, and apart from that, they are reliable and do not need looking after at all.

All singing and dancing solar-powered UHD cameras will cost you around 30EUR each from Amazon, and again they are as tough as boots.

The only limitation is the quantity of devices running through the router, but I reckon a router and 5 extenders, in 2 sets will cover the 17Ha and still give you space for cameras and ESP32 sensors.

A SIM card is 8EUR + 5.90EUR pcm for 20Gb of data.

Total cost say 740EUR inc taxes and delivery, plus some screws to get you going and zero hassle apart from a bit of tree climbing.

EU HaLow WiFi in the latter half of 2026:

On the plus side, HaLow throws its signal a fair distance through dense forest, and you get 2.4Ghz WiFi hotspots around each HaLow node. However, there is “connected” that is usable and “connected” that is a joke.

What is the point of being able to transmit, say 120m through deep, thick forest if all you can send is a text or a little packet of data? You could use LoRa or LoRaWAN to send the same data over a greater distance for a lot less cash.

And whilst I’m mentioning cash… ALFA R(EU) units are 115EUR each, but then you have to add 12v 15W solar power supplies with suitably large, built in 20Ah batteries, which I eventually found in China for another 68EUR (delivered) each. BTW, I spent months trying to find a power pack solution, and none of them worked, hence, I’m up to my ass in power packs, UPSs, power diverters, 5v to 12v converters, 12v to 5v buck converters and solar panels.

Then you’ll need fire extinguishers at 2EUR each (from China again and just in case) and a waterproof box at 17EUR (from Amazon) because current HaLow devices are not designed for outdoor use, so you are looking at 202EUR per unit minimum. AsiaRF devices are way, way more expensive once you have taken delivery and taxes into the price. Oh and you’ll need a 2.4Ghz solar router too as a backhaul.

And you’ll need 2 nodes, obviously.

That’s 472EUR minimum for a 120m transmission of a text, whereas 4 x 2.4Ghz units will set you back approx. 250EUR and you can send UHD video if you wanted to.

And don’t get me started on config time. You could probably set up a daisy chain of 4 x 2.4Ghz units at about 2 minutes a unit, including testing.

HaLow took me days to set up due to some unknown tech reason, which was fixed by NOT CHANGING the SSIDs or default passwords and drove me nuts trying to test it. Oh, and if your device goes titsup in the wilds, say due to power failure, you have to walk the thing back to someplace closer to the AP node to pick up “connected” again otherwise you’re in “connected no internet access” hell.

Oh, oh, oh… when you are setting up an ALFA STA and the IP address changes as part of the set-up, and you’ve no idea what it is, you go to Status > Interfaces on the AP version of the set-up, and you’ll find it there. Maybe ALFA could include that little nugget of info in their instructions. The AsiaRF kit only makes the IP change after you’ve inserted the value you want into the form, so there’s no guessing.

Back to testing, I did manage to pick up a web page from theregister.com using HaLow, but I was only about 15m further away than the router’s 2.4GHz signal, so that’s pretty crap.

Anyway, here are some data, just to show the stupidity of EU HaLow. Each test was simply sending a WhatsApp text with “test”. Tests in italics and bold mean those tests didn’t even manage to send the text message. In no test did WhatsApp manage to send a photo of the area. The tests below were all taken on the right-hand side of the AP, as that terrain was the toughest.

Test 1: http://maps.google.com/?q=41.04907,0.79006

Test 2: http://maps.google.com/?q=41.04860,0.79027

Test 3: http://maps.google.com/?q=41.04822,0.79114

Test 4: http://maps.google.com/?q=41.04787,0.79100

Test 5: http://maps.google.com/?q=41.04775,0.78994

Test 6: http://maps.google.com/?q=41.04782,0.78937

Test 7: http://maps.google.com/?q=41.04780,0.78897

Yeah, sorry for the HTTP use, but my GPS app produces the links. Google will resolve the addresses, though.

In a Nutshell (and I’m not going to be polite here)

EU HaLow has been castrated by coffee-swilling, croissant-munching, office-dwelling losers in Brussels who would rather pay ETSI to do their thinking for them and has therefore been rendered useless. The ETSI “recommendations” were made in 2016, which is almost the late Jurassic in tech terms, and I do have to wonder if ETSI makes use of brown envelopes in their offices.

Cough.

HaLow, Good Bye was originally published in Radio Hackers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Yup, Google has gone a Big Mac short of a Happy Meal too

I read today that Google has renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America for American users, left Lake Ontario alone for Canadian users and the rest of us mutts on the planet get Lake Ontario (Lake America) shoved in our faces.

Now according to the limp wristed weasels at Google, this is because they are only following “orders” and said this to USA Today…

“Since we update Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources … people using Maps in the U.S. will see ‘Lake America,’ those in Canada will continue to see ‘Lake Ontario,’ and those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names,” Google posted on its news blog. “These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country, and are starting to roll out now.”

Source

The translation of which is…

“Since we update Google Maps to reflect whatever name changes in official government sources that his His Donald wants… people using Maps in the U.S. will see ‘Lake America,’ those in Canada will continue to see ‘Lake Ontario,’ and those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names,” Google posted on its news blog. “These updates follow our long-standing policy of kowtowing to anything He wants and are starting to roll out now.”

So…. as I’m now pissed off at having a Trump tantrum shoved in my face, may I suggest to various governments on the planet, and Canada I’m looking at you, that you change the name officially too, thus making Google add your 2 cents onto their maps.

Off the top of my head I can think of…

Lake Epstein Files

Lake DoOneYaOrangeTwat

Lake West Strait of Hormuz

Lake Donald “Lame” Duck

Oh and that brings me to his nut job’s latest AI sketchings.

Yeah, this.

All I can say is that the bloke’s gone quackers.

I wonder what fun they’re having in Bejing over this?

What is it with women? All day they bang on about healthy diets and then stab themelves full of chemicals.

My girlfriend has an on/off relationship with food. She switches the cooker on, cooks stuff, then stuffs the stuff down her throat and then complains that she is “getting fat” and that stuff must come off in the form of a diet.

Me, I don’t understand any of it because I can eat anything I want and it makes no difference to my body’s weight. The only thing I do understand is that when she goes on a diet I starve, because kitchen access is controlled to curb her noshing desires and food is usually to be found in the kitchen… which is now under lock and key with guard towers and Alsatians and non-edible razor wire.

To be absolutely clear here, we are talking about a woman who went on a sponsored diet for charity and ended up having to pay said charity herself, because she put on weight.

It’s that bad.

Anyhoo, the first I knew about her new “stab yourself with chemicals” diet was a plaintive WhatsApp call from the front line in the war against gristle aka her mate’s (Jan 1’s (the friends of my girlfriend all come in packs with the same name, e.g. massed Jans and massed Karens (no not Karen Karens))) bathroom and things weren’t going well. Well, they were actually going too well, from both ends, and the bathroom was beginning to resemble the Battle of The Somme on a rainy day.

She didn’t know if she’d make tomorrow’s flight because… INCOMING!

You get the idea.

I was very understanding and replied “whatever.”

The next day, there was a lull in the fighting, the sun had come out and she drove to the airport, got through security and was at the gate when I got another plaintive WhatsApp call to “get Gaviscon out of the chemist!”

She was lucky that I knew what Gaviscon was, however I was ahead of the game here, because I’d seen the ads on TV.

Looked at the time, it was 19:43, thought “shit” (no pun) and ran up to the chemist. It was still open, so I asked for and bought Gaviscon. I tell you, the price of that stuff nearly gave me heartburn. Then rushed back to the house and sent a “got Gaviscon” WhatsApp.

“What flavour?”

“It comes in flavours? How the fuck am I supposed to know it comes in flavours?” Etc.

I looked and there was nothing about flavours on the box, or the sachets, so I typed back that I couldn’t see a flavour, but I am but a man and might have missed it on the packaging.

“Maybe Spanish Gaviscon doesn’t have flavours?”

Spoiler alert: It does now. You can get “Fruits of the Forest” flavour. I’ve just seen the new TV ad.

“Maybe.”

I put 3 sachets in my bum bag (fanny pack in American) to take to the airport with me.

“Can you bring some to the airport?”

“Yes.”

I did my “retarded monkey” waddle across the floor for fun and then drove to the airport.

Immediately I caught sight of her, the Gaviscon and a bottle of water were lobbed at her. Seemingly you don’t need water, but again, I am but a man and am unaware of current fashions in medicinal applications.

I’m amazed there isn’t a warning on those sachets that reads “DO NOT DROP DOWN THROAT” because there were warnings about everything else.

We drove home (nervously).

Upon arrival, the Germans opened a new barrage (she’s German) and there were all sorts of bangs, splats and screams coming out of the toilet. The battle lasted for days.

Meanwhile, I’m on Amazon searching for “HazMat” and “Suit.”

Anyhoo, it transpired that her mate D***** had stabbed herself with this “anti-eating” stuff and it had all gone wonderfully well and my girlfriend, who may as well have “FOMO” as her middle name, had anted up 310 quid to some supermarket chain to get her hands on this wondrous new method of eating and not getting fat.

I didn’t even know you had to stab yourself. That’s how much I knew what was happening and considering that my girlfriend was only supposed to be in Spain for the eclipse, you’d have thought she could have held off for a few days before embarking on this “death diet”.

Hell no, she had adopted the “more is better” or “I made a mistake” method of dieting (depending on how she was explaining the current state of affairs) and had unleashed biological warfare on assorted innocent bathrooms.

Nurse Neil Enters the C̶h̶a̶t̶ Shit

So, after we’d driven into the middle of nowhere and walked (very gingerly) up a hill and saw the eclipse, we came back.

Taking no chances, eclipse glasses and massed toilet rolls were carried.

Next day I put on my “caring face” and ministered to her needs, which comprised cups of tea which went undrunk and boiled potatoes with half a chicken stock cube in hot water as gravy. That’s all she wanted and to be honest even boiling potatoes is at the high end of my cooking abilities.

Meanwhile she was practicing for the Olympics’ 10m bathroom dash every 10 minutes.

“Maybe I’ve got what Simon had?”

Her brother had died of cancer in February and the worst symptoms were constant diarrhea and throwing anything he had eaten back up because the cancer had wrapped itself around the bit that joined his stomach to his intestines and he basically starved to death.

“Yeah that had crossed my mind too.”

So I did a quick Google and nope, she had taken too much Mounjaro.

“I need some “NameOfSomething-itine” from the chemist”

I did another Google.

“I’m not letting you add more chemicals to your body, given that this mess is being caused by that last lot of chemicals you stuffed into your body and besides Google specifically mentions that you do not take “NameOfSomething-itine” when you have diarrhea and are throwing up.”

She went in the huff.

It was pointed out that I am not a medical practitioner whereas seemingly large supermarket chains’ customer service departments are. Then there is the holy temple of “Boot’s the Chemist” if you are a woman and are really up shit creek without Imodium. See, I’m learning the lingo. I’ve stuck an apostrophe in “Boot’s” because the founder was some bloke whose surname was “Boot” whereas now the company is now just called “Boots”, probably because no one in marketing knew what an apostrophe was or meant.

God, this is beginning to feel like the last bit of Apocalypse Now where it all goes a bit psycho.

Long story short: Duly lobbed back onto a plane, she made it to her sister-in-law who is a nurse, and a born again christian and therefore nuts and 2 days later God had fixed my girlfriend and she had turned into a born again christian and had all sorts of stories to tell me, so I could be converted into a born again nut job.

I put the mockers on that pronto.

She went in the huff again.

Anyway, I told her to get rid of the rest of that Mounjaro stuff and just be herself. She complained that it would be a waste of money to bin the stuff and I strongly “disagreed”, so she ended up giving it/ flogging it to some other sucker/friend.

Then she saw a proper doctor to make sure everything was tickety-boo.

After the growing, the fermenting, the waiting, we get to this bit.

Previous article

is here…

The Grape

The grape used was Solanes Terrace B (registered DO Priorat, poligon 8, parcel 145, CJ238) Carinyena (Catala spelling) variety, planted 1985. Spraying was carried out against Mildew and Cendrosa 6 times using organically certified products (records kept). Pruning happened in January. The ground was ploughed twice in March, vines thinned in April. Weeds were removed by hand brushcutter in August around 2 weeks prior to the harvest. Harvesting was by hand.

No other works were carried out to the vineyard.

Filtering

Course filtering was carried out when the wine was added to the 25L demijohns after a 4 day ferment on the 10th September 2025. The reasons I chose demijohns were that A) I didn’t know what I was doing, so if one screwed up, I hadn’t wasted the entire terrace’s production and B) they were made of glass as I didn’t want anything that would alter the taste of what came out of the ground.

Reason B was also why I used a grape crusher that didn’t remove stems.

The demijohns sat in the barn over the winter and were moved to the basement in March as the temperatures rose. The basement is a constant 18c and dark.

They were not touched until July 2026 when the contents were gravity filtered via a strainer. Each demijohn had its remaining debris removed, was washed, dried and the contents replaced.

No chemicals or other additives were added to the wine at any time.

Bottling

14 x 24 bottles were bought along with 500 corks, sanitising salt, funnels, cotton filters and measures. All works were carried out by hand (in rubber gloves!!). The corks were applied with a manual cork closer.

The method was to gravity feed the wine from each demijohn through the cotton filter and into the measuring jugs. Each jug was poured into a bottle (at a 60 degrees angle, jug offset to avoid bubbling) and the cork inserted.

In the end 292 bottles were filled and closed.

The bottles were capped with a bottle sealing wax.

Labeling is for another year.

Additions to the base product

Apart from the chemical spray in the field against mildew and cendrosa and the sanitising salt for the bottles, nothing else was added to the wine and filtering was carried out gently and by gravity.

Lessons learned

Use a gravity feed tube that’s armoured as the weight of the wine kept crushing the one I had. Buy a higher table. The logistics are horrendous even for 336 bottles and these works should be considered a 2 man job. Never use DHL for anything ever again as it is really shit.

For the 2026 campaign

The main difference from the previous campaign is that field spraying is now carried out by hand. Kills your back but my tractor broke down 2 weeks before spraying was due to start and took 3 months to fix, so I had no choice. You do use a lot less chemicals for no real difference in production. So hand spraying from now on. Bought 25 x 20L more demijohns for the upcoming harvest. Overall I’m aiming for 800 bottles (350 carinyena and 450 garnatxe). Again DHL is shit. The fermentation period will be reduced until the must goes blood red which was after 2 days last year.

For the 2027 campaign

Field and cellar cameras and ground sensors so that consumers can view works and see data during the wine growing, making and bottling year via the internet. Labelling, building permit and assorted licenses so I can sell the stuff.

The Taste

Oops…late addendum as I forgot the important bit in all this. The taste was fruity, “feminine” and made you feel “clean” inside, if that makes any sense but it was too dry. Also, I was expecting something with a lot more bottom end “grunt” which was completely missing. I guess the direction I’ll take, is to take the “feminine” nature of what the terrace provides forward and make the wine less dry on the tongue. I think the clue is when the must colour changes as it looked gorgeous when it happened.

God, this is like shooting fish in a barrel. I don’t really have to write anything or bore you with a long story of how I’ve been wronged. I just have to show you the above screen dump from Trustpilot.

1.1 out of 6783 reviews and 6782 of them are 1.0

A year ago DHL.es was great. I ordered 1 x 500L pot from France and 10 x 25L bottles from Germany and they turned up on time and on their pallets and with zero issues.

Oh gawd, this year I ordered 2 x 500L pots from France and 25 x 20L bottles from Germany and it has been an unmitigated f*****g disaster.

The pots spent just over a week hanging around at the depot 30kms away (at least I had a tracking number), then appeared without warning at the delivery address after I barked at DHL “customer service” whose idea of “customer service” was to palm me off with “contact the seller” who was some bloke using the Leroy Merlin souk. However, at least me shouting at said bloke and Leroy Merlin seems to have lit a fire up their asses because the depot finally recognised that they had the goods.

Oh, the bit on the 23rd about the goods needing “special measures” is priceless. The goods were 2 plastic pots, one inside the other on a pallet and DHL didn’t seem to have a forklift, so they took the pallet off. Seriously, the weight sans pallet was something like 8kgs.

However, the prize for mostest shiteness has got to be the Whatsapp call I got from Josep the driver (who is actually a good guy) on the 7th August to inform me they were going to deliver my 25 bottles.

He delivered 7… with a promise of the rest on Monday 10th or Thursday the 13th.

It is now the 14th and I’m still short of 18 bottles and according to the German company, DHL has spoken to me and I’ve agreed to a delivery next week.

My arse I have. First I’ve heard of it.

Anyhoo, I am somewhat heartened by the fact that DHL is “corporately” shite and it isn’t personal to me.

So, what could have possibly happened to turn DHL from a beacon for delivery hope into the most useless pile of delivery shite in a year?

Well, there is this fuckwit…

And any money he’s implemented “AI.”

The house next door to me is up for sale. Some of it (all of it, I’ve no idea) was built in 1365, the same year the front wall of the Tower of London was built, so Americans put down that “London Bridge For Sale” brochure and get yourself some genuine Spanish treasure!

As it was used as a garrison building in the Spanish Civil War, it has graffiti of tanks and soldiers on the top floor walls. The middle bit is all elegance with big rooms, gilding, a library, zebra skins on the floor and chandeliers and all that Trump type stuff. The ground floor is where they kept horses and probably the staff in the old days.

There’s a massive round, stone edged hole half way up the stairs to the first floor that my torch couldn’t see the bottom of, so it might be a well or where they used to throw witches or about to be made redundant staff.

We are talking medieval here.

And it’s a big assed building.

Wikipedia

MonumentalNet

So if you fancy playing big dog, this “pile” is right up your alley… and it’s cheap, really cheap. You could probably pick it up for 200k€.

Eva (a neighbour) is selling it here

I thought fancy offices on the first floor (although my 20 year old niece immediately reserved the back end of that floor as her “apartment” and my girlfriend then reserved a vast acreage of open space (where they probably dried crops in days of yore) on the second floor as some mad internal garden come lounge) and I thought a server room on the ground floor/basement wine cellar for low latency access to the AI Gigafactory they’re knocking up a few miles down the road. And remember, we’re up to our asses in fibre in these parts, so it might be a “goer” financially.

However, after having read the “normatives,” (specifically the laws pertaining to stately homes) even if you tried giving it to me for nothing, I would still run. Not because there’s much wrong with the building because there’s not much wrong with it, but because of where it is. You see it’s a Spanish Stately Home and that means BIG TROUBLE. Why does “trouble” look weird when you type it in uppercase?

Anyway and obviously, the main point of having a stately pile is that you are the big dog, but… what’s the point of being a big dog if the other end of your leash is held by a bunch of rabid civil servants in Madrid?

Let me explain…

You must have heard of the term “over engineered” at some point in your life. Well all Spanish laws are “over engineered” and the laws regarding big old buildings are humongous, with a big dob of Fascism thrown in for good measure, as well as being “over engineered.”

What you are doing when you fork out a couple of hundred Ks for the privilege of owning “history” is setting your ass up for a deep, hard and never ending fucking.

There’s probably a Dept of Antiquities and Ass Fucking in Madrid, set up in 1600 and something (by Royal Decree) that specialises in administrative shafting, that has a reference giant brass dildo in a glass case, detailed notes on stroke length, the number of thrusts per minute, force to be applied and sends emails on velum carried by minstrels.

I know from personal experience that there’s a subdivision based in the Tarragona branch of Social Security that my sorry ass never wants to get near again. Ouch!

Anyway, the 2 takeaways I got from the hours spent reviewing massed paperwork were…

1. You as the owner, have to let the hoi-polloi have free visitor access to said building a minimum of 4 days a month for 4 hours a day.
2. Do anything unauthorised to “the precious” (like painting the walls) and the fines start at 600,000 euros and end at 10,000,000 euros.

Now, as regards item one, that’s no real biggy. Rope off certain areas to control the mob and make your cash on refreshments after dragging said mob through the labyrinthine wastes of this POS. The problem is that another bunch of paper shovellers will immediately parachute in (well they’ll advise you that they’ll parachute in sometime in the next 5 years) and demand disabled access, disabled toilets, disabled fire escapes, hydration breaks (thanks Infantino) and everything brought up to current building regulations.

Meanwhile, the velum toting vassals of Madrid, will be unlatching the latch on the giant brass dildo case and ordering (at your expense obviously) a giant vat of Vaseline (so the giant brass dildo doesn’t get worn out whilst drilling) and grinning in an insane manner.

Which leads us to item 2.

Knowledge break o’ the day: I’ve just been out for a cigarette and the matches I used, “Tres Estrelles” were actually made in Sweden. So if anyone ever asks you to name a Swedish export you can say “safety matches” (and bloody dangerous they are too). End of knowledge break.

Brought to you by Pres Infant and Infantino Hydration Advertising LLC

Now, I’ve done a lot of construction work, mostly in Central London and the main pain in the ass is the “conservation officer” which, in most of my cases turned out to be some bird from California who was hell bent on returning London to Dickensian times but with toilets. The absolute worst one was the pack of archaeologists that lumber about building sites looking for pottery’n’stuff, but they can be dealt with by telling the workmen that if they find anything that looks ancient to bury it pronto and keep their mouths shut, otherwise the building programme gets toasted.

However, these 2 bunches of miscreants have nothing on antiquities civil servants from Madrid. Imagine a bunch who do pretty much sod all all day, get free state money to keep breathing and then them finding out that some twat has just bought a monument and they control the rules.

KERCHING!

My first back of a fag packet budget for making this heap of shit wind and water tight and habitable came out between 1.5 and 2 million euros.

Read the rules and chuck in a bunch of civil servants with an insatiable desire to perfect something forever and you’re looking at the thick end of 5 million euros and no end in sight because they’ll always find something new so they can stay in their jobs.

And that’s before you’ve got architects, engineers, quantity surveyors, history and culture officers, specialist contractors and assorted peripheral lay-about civil servants involved.

And be subject to inspections per denuncia by any passing towrag who didn’t like you and mandatory inspections every 10 years.

It would bankrupt Elon Musk.

So if you think you are “special” come and have a go and buy it. I’ll be waiting for the day that you give up and I’ll take it off your hands as a sunk cost project.

Gracias.

Yes, I too am horrified by the lack of an apostrophe. Mind you the spelling is bad enough.

I’ve no idea if these ramblings will ever see the light of day because the gods at Medium (sometime in the afternoon (CET) of the 24th July 2026) put me on the naughty step. No idea why, but there we are…

…guilty until Medium says otherwise.

Given that I’m absolutely baffled as to what I have done to merit exile, I can only presume the reason is one of the following….

The incompetent (and probably incontinent) code monkeys that Medium uses have stuffed the site again and everyone has been suspended because someone got their 0 and 1 the wrong way round or mixed 2 boolean columns up or the ETL went gaga. Given that the home page after login currently looks like the below, I’d say that’s a fair possibility.

Mind you, maybe it’s a new minimalist UX design style. Who knows?

Or it could be one of the monkeys is still pissed at me and booleaned my ass after I called out the last time they stuffed the site.

All I know is I’ve still get this in the kisser after I login…

So as it tells me to learn more about my current state of purgatory, I thought I’d have a look to see where I’ve been bad.

Seemingly Spam is the biggie which is why I thought of Monty Python and then thought of the prisoner in Life of Brian.

So let me think if I’ve been Spamming…

• Posting content primarily to drive traffic to, or increase the search rankings of, an external site, product, or service;

Well sometimes I use Google to spell check stuff. Maybe that’s it.

• Affiliate marketing in the guise of reviews of products or services, product testing (does it work?), etc., whether generated via AI or manually written;

I’ve written a couple of reviews (ages ago), but I always make it clear that I’d paid for the stuff with my own cash and have no connection with anyone, so it can’t be that.

• Using deception to generate revenue or traffic

What like… read on to see a picture of my giant, hard cock? Nope.

• Abusing our Medium Partner Program

Never touched her.

• Advertising or participating in bounty campaigns, pump and dumps, reviewing for reward, or other forms of brigading or inauthentic activity.

I bought a Bounty bar at the petrol station last week. Medium surveillance must be really good. It was tasty though.

• Advertising or promoting airdrops or related activities unless you are an authorized representative of the project. You must have an email address on the domain of that project.

No idea what any of the above even means.

Accounts and posts violating this policy will be considered spam under Medium’s rules, and will be suspended without notice.

Yup, “suspended without notice”. That’s me, I’m guilty.

Then the list witters on about cryptocurrency and web 3 stuff which mean nothing to me. Then it bangs on about the DSA in the EU, but I’d seemingly be notified about that before I’m up for castration.

Then it tells me that all suspension reviews are by humans, so judging by the hedonistic lifestyles of the Medium rich and shameless, that’ll be sometime in 2035 then.

And another thing…the public flogging with no trial, aka this…

I got nuked late on a Friday afternoon (CET) and obviously no one at Medium works the weekend, so I’ve been humiliated publicly, internet wide, all weekend. I’m now a “con man” in the eyes of the internet. If my mum saw the above, she’d have kittens. A simple “content not available” would be better than using the words “investigation” and “violation” because those two words make me sound like a kiddie fiddler.

And still I have no idea what I’ve done.

In the meantime… bye or not.

PS…. I’m back! I was incorrectly “filtered” seemingly.

Yup, it’s summer in the EU….

Now I don’t want to make light of this issue, but I’m a little bit pissed off with the constant “titillation” of the “Forest Fire” subject by the media.

Every year, the same old crap gets trotted out again and again by this mob as the reasons for forest fires…

Global warming.

Bad forest management.

Take-away: Keep ’em cameras rolling and make it all about “me.” Adriana (top left) is an expert at all that with her scare the wimin and children and keep them ad payments coming in strategy.

Anyhoo, we could argue the toss regarding global warming until the cows come home and still resolve nothing, but bad forest management gets right on my tits. So…

Some actual facts…

It is summer and forests get dry as a bone.

People are “encouraged” to visit “nature.”

95% of forest fires are caused by people.

70% of people live in cities.

Example: For today, the 26th July 2026 we have this situation…

The black bits mean no public access, the roads are closed by the police and monitored by about everyone in authority. The dark red bits are Pla Alfa 4 (fucking dangerous) however there is always, always “The Special One” who thinks that the rules don’t apply to him/her and will merrily pull his/her “green” EV over and (example) have a barbecue with his/her family and then chuck said barbacue into the bushes because it is now too smelly to put back in his/her clean car.

And KA-BOOM!

That’s the typical level of tosser that inhabits cities and visits the countryside theme park.

Some more actual facts…

In 1992 the EU created the Xarxa Natura 2000 network to protect biodiversity.

If you have land in a Xarxa Natura 2000 zone you are entitled to annual “compensation” for the imposition and increased regulation.

If you don’t collect the annual “compensation” within 2 years, the government of the country you are in can have your money.

The money covers land maintenance, loss of crops due to protected animal predation and many other facets of forest management.

No one collects the “compensation.”

The reason no one collects it is that the process is designed to be so expensive and complicated that no one can afford the time and especially the money because the cost of creating the paperwork to get the “compensation” always exceeds the “compensation” that you are entitled to.

Example: Someone I know actually did it and she couldn’t afford to implement the final solution after getting all the paperwork together in order to receive the “compensation.”

So QED right there.

As far as I can work it out, the word “compensation” must mean something different in EUville.

Anyway, the land is then abandoned and whatever government hoovers up the free money.

Take-away: EU bureaucracy doesn’t care. Funds are available and funds go out. Governments have a vested interest in keeping the cash.

Forests get fucked.

Just sayin’

Now before I continue…

let me give you my “subjective impression” of how the EU operates. The EU is a quasi military bureaucracy (obviously with holistic and green badges on their sleeves). What that means is that it is a top down driven organisation where some big cheese spouts forth on a subject and the massed minions of the EU hit the typewriters to make real what the spout was about.

These missives, then get passed down the chain of command to individual countries and instead of a country taking the best bits out of an individual missive and dumping the rest, they give it to their massed civil servants who “go for it” and produce something wholly incomprehensible.

This mess is then passed further down that chain of command and so on and so forth.

By the time it hits the bloke at the bottom of the pile (aka me, you, anyone normal), everyone above has lobbed their arse covering bit into it and I’m/ you/we are stymied.

So what’s a bloke, who’s up to his ass in trees, to do?

Spoiler alert: When there is a forest fire in close proximity, the best solution is to check that the wind direction is blowing the fire away from you, open a bottle of whisky (or whiskey) and get pissed whilst watching the show.

Or prior to the close proximity forest fire piss up, you could try the following…

1. Maintaining your bit of the forest by hand.

This requires the following bits of equipment…

Brushcutters x2 (examples: a Stihl 400 series with an after market twisted nylon Hurricane head and a Stihl 500 series with a shredder head)

Chainsaws x3 (examples: an Echo 490 with 18" bar + a Stihl 150 + a Makita 5m polesaw)

A Yamaha Grizzly ATV (660cc or bigger with 4x4 and diff lock) and trailer to carry the above + petrol, tools, PPE etc.

Big Boy bollocks, because if the equipment doesn’t get you, nature will have a go.

And obviously, due to assorted missives, you’re not allowed to do anything with bigger machinery. Civil servants like you to sweat.

Long story short: This is an annual job.

2) Maintaining your bit of the forest by animal.

This requires the following animals…

Donkeys, goats or sheep.

However, once again, massed civil servants have “flooded the zone” here because unless you are a registered “autonomo” and have signed up to be milked monthly by the civil servants at Social Security (that SS is no lie) and have completed your DUN animal entries correctly (you can tell when you haven’t completed that correctly because you get fined) and have signed up to be raped repeatedly and “up to the hilt” by a vet; you are limited to 10 goats/sheep or 3 donkeys for “personal use.” TBH I don’t fancy the “personal use” bit of a donkey.

Oh, and let’s not forget, housing and water for the poor bebies, which will involve you prostrating yourself in front of the council planning gods (for years) for a building permit (which you can’t get because you’re in a Xarxa Natura 2000 zone) and hand to hand combat with the local branch of the Spanish State Water Hoarders Association (also for years) for a water use permit.

Then hunters from the city will show up in the autumn and shoot the animals because city hunters are desperate to shoot anything that moves in a forest to show to their mummy wives how manly they are. Meanwhile the mummy wives are probably fucking window cleaners whilst little “Rambo” is playing big “Rambo” in the woods, whilst wearing his newly washed hunting pajamas that stink of fabric conditioner, therefore alerting any wildlife about that there is a twat in the forest.

Long story short: avoid animals.

3) 3 Moroccan blokes with Stihl 550s (and other attempts)

I’ve never personally tried this, but I’ve seen it in action. These guys are awesome and super tough. I’ve seen them work 12 hours a day during Ramadan. I couldn’t do that (by miles). Totally amazing, however that’s not good enough for civil servants, so they replaced the super tough Moroccans with city born, Gen Z yoof and that went as well as can be expected.

Undeterred, the civil servants bought a fuck off “robot” that cost a shite site more than 3 Moroccans with Stihls, but it was paid for with EU Next Generation cash so that was OK. The “robot” needed a trailer and a 4x4 to pull the trailer (and tools and insurance and so on), so by the time it actually got on site, the civil servants had spent about 150K euros + vat on it.

It fell over on a slope. It broke hitting rocks. It was never seen again.

Then they got GEPIF out. Can’t remember what GEPIF stands for, but it’s a Bombers’ bunch. It probably starts with “Gestio” and ends in “Incendi Forestal” but as to the bit in the middle, I have to idea and I can’t be arsed Googling it. They had the latest Stihl 560s and new 4x4 Toyota trucks and obviously they had slurped even more EU Next Generation money, but these guys were OKish. Then they gave up and never came back and never actually finished the job. I presume something got dirty.

No idea what happened to the Moroccans, but hopefully, they’ve found a niche where someone actually appreciates them.

Long story short: I’m still surrounded by jungle.

Ploughing

Now, please, please, please armchair experts on ploughing (or plowing in American) and the “internet noted” bad effects it has on nature; just shut up as you don’t know what you are talking about. I have a big empty space in the middle of my forest and I plough it. This creates a fire gap which allows assorted fire fighting ‘planes to target bombing runs and practice targeting bombing runs and allows a nice helicopter to land and save my sorry ass should I get trapped in a fire.

The gap is there to also save any wildlife that can’t readily escape a forest fire because they can hide in an area that isn’t going to reach 1100c, which is roughly the temp in a pine forest fire. We’re talking snakes, amphibians, smaller mammals and the like that just don’t have the legs to outrun burning and exploding trees. Exploding is what pine trees do in a forest fire. The noise alone of a pine tree going up in flames is enough to make you piss yourself.

Long story short: I plough, I brushcut, I don’t apply for “compensation” or any other help off city types and any tosser from the city, which is where civil servants live, is a fire hazard.

But wait Neil. Work smarter, not harder…

Apart from hand cleaning the forest what else could I be doing to reduce the risk of forest fires on my patch?

Well, it turns out not a lot unless I want to drive myself totally barking mad, so here’s a list of tries and fails (mostly due to even more bureaucracy).

Drones

Well, you can buy a drone off Amazon, but that’s pretty much all you can do with it. Actually use the thing for anything and a vast web of paperwork descends on you. Some bits like registering that you have a drone are easy (if the website would actually work), but finding someplace to fly it is a bit more tricky as the “can’t use your shit here matey boy” list is humongous.

And anytime you actually want to use the thing, you have to physically go to some office 30kms away and physically give those wallahs the date, time, duration and location of use. And guess where you are not allowed to use a drone, yup Xarxa Natura 2000 land.

Oh and if it’s got a camera (which most have) you have to be a “data controller” for GDPR purposes.

Long story short: no one wants you flying anything, so they make it nigh on impossible to do it legally and the fine if you do it illegally is 225,000 euros.

LoRa/ LoRaWAN

Well I tried this a couple of years ago. LoRa was too toy town, so I went LoRaWAN. Sensors in the forest, gateway backhauled by Starlink, LoRaWAN chucking data at my big assed back end servers someplace off the west coast USA.

Long story short: The gateway casing couldn’t survive the UV radiation, the data rate was too low, the cost of sensors was silly high and Starlink chewed too much power, so that all went south. Oh and no one could get their head around the concept of a “public gateway” so rejected the idea that they spend a few hundred euros on kit that anyone could use.

Satellites

These are a waste of time as the sample distances are too far apart and has no bearing on your actual patch. Data extraction methods for a non scientist are from somewhere in the mid 1990s and if you want to fill in the blanks between sample points, well then you need a super computer and a “model.” If you’re a published scientist you obviously get the new shiny API and although ESA says all its data are available free to anyone, there is a hell of a difference between REST API calls for scientists and FTP for the hoi polloi.

Long story short: Only for the scientific “in crowd” and not for the great unwashed.

WiFi HaLow

This is where I’m currently at and it has been a nightmare.

The EU restrictions on HaLow are as bad as their restrictions on drones. No video/audio allowed, limited duty cycles, hobbled channels etc but I can get a signal 400m from an AP in deep forest whereas with 2.4Ghz you’re down to around 50m max. Each HaLow node also has 2.4Ghz WiFi built in, so I can dock any 2.4Ghz gizmo into it and create data gardens.

Powering HaLow is another story and my latest attempt has just gone titsup as my 15w panels with integrated lithium batteries from China have gotten lost between Barcelona customs and my house. I’ve got normal AGM batteries as a back up plan (get them fast as the price has doubled due to Donald playing in the Straight of Hormuz. Thanks Donald) but they weigh 13kgs each and are a PITA to carry through a forest.

Getting a signal out is another problem. Starlink is just too big and power heavy, but I’ve now found 2 x 2sqm patches on my land with a mobile signal and with a little help from China and Amazon have solar powered 4G backhaul doo-dahs which weren’t available in LoRaWAN times (2022 — 2023).

The back end was built for LoRaWAN and the API endpoints just need some tweaks as LoRaWAN JSON files are massive whereas my ESP32 JSON files aren’t. The back end also sends out WhatsApp and Telegram notifications.

Solar powered cameras with AI are cheap.

ESP32 boards are cheap and easy to power.

My next goals are to forest (client) side a possible fire alert using AI, sensors and cameras, send an “eek” message with GPS coords back to the back end and then send a notification out to the bombers/ADF and anyone else interested.

Obviously, all of this is now on hold due to some idle delivery driver who can’t be arsed delivering something that I’ve been waiting 3 months for.

Seemingly, the UPS truck broke down in Germany.

Stuff just turned up via a liveried UPS van with a bloke in UPS uniform. Usually around these parts, you get some POS white van being driven by a drunk bloke, delivering your stuff.

Such is life.

PS… I’ve been quiet because my account got suspended on the 24th but now I’m back. I was filtered by mistake.