One of the things I've noticed since I gave up the booze (in May 2024) is that I'm an exceptionally judgemental person. I don't know where I get it from as my parents were really easy-going, tolerant folk. Not me. Hardly an hour goes by where I don't find something to moan and groan about. I thought perhaps I was just experiencing the common cognitive bias which psychologists call the 'fundamental attribution error'. That's the one where, for example, while driving you think that everyone going slower than you is an idiot, yet everyone going faster than you is a lunatic. It's a fallacy because we make assumptions about the other drivers without considering the reasons they might be proceeding at a different speed - a wedding cake on the back seat or ferrying a heart-attack victim on the way to hospital, etc. However, I don't think that applies in my case. I think the world really is a crazy place full of crazy people doing really dumb things!

So here are just a few of my pet peeves - the things that are currently making the veins in my temple throb. See if any of them chime with you.

1. Foreshadowing pre-roll on YouTube videos.

We used to see "COMING UP..." a lot at the start of American TV shows, but in the last couple of years it has been creeping into low budget videos on YouTube and social media. I even saw it on a two-minute YouTube short. I watched an interview recently which was about an hour long, and about every ten minutes I heard the punch line of gags that I'd already heard in the pre-roll. I normally skip these things if the author has been thoughtful enough to include a bookmark to where the content really starts. If not, I sometimes get impatient and randomly skip forward so I'm probably missing some of the action but it's worth it not to have my brain cells assaulted by repeated information. In one five minute video I saw so much pre-roll I swear it took up half the video. Does anybody 'like' having to endure pre-roll? I have a sneaking suspicion it's really only there because some media studies teacher came up with the idea because their course was a bit thin on content, then every student takes it as gospel rather than questioning its actual value. Its real value to me is that I have unsubscribed from channels that are big on pre-roll. Stop this nonsense now!

2. Intentionally wobbly camera work.

This has been around for a long time, and there is a time and a place for it, but in 2025 folk are still doing it for no good reason. I was watching an episode of a show called The Mentalist, which admittedly is ten years old, but the camera was wobbling so much it made me feel seasick. There is a case for doing this in action scenes but the fly-on-the-wall documentary style is long gone. Get over it. The technique is also extremely bad for streaming since the constantly moving background is much harder for the algorithm to compress the video stream, so if you see this malarkey on Netflix, someone needs to get a sternly worded memo.

3. My Android Phone's Interface.

Christ on a bike, I could write a book about what's wrong with the mobile phone market, but I'll confine myself for the purposes of this blog to the recent 'One UI' update on my Samsung A25. For some reason, they moved the audio player controls to the bottom, so now it is next to impossible to hold the phone steady while reaching down to change tracks with my thumb. To change tracks safely without dropping the thing I need to engage my other hand. One-handed people must be up in arm about this. I wrote to Android to complain but of course nothing will happen. Our feelings as customers have very little importance in the grand scheme of things compared to the whims of some self-satisfied graphic artist and the corporate bod who commissioned him to make the interface look snazzy!

4. Cuisine

The very word cuisine itches my scrote, being French (pretentious moi?) yet originally coming from the vulgar Latin word for kitchen. Cuisine is used when a TV show or a Sunday magazine supplement is going to wax lyrical about regional food that is a fancy dress version of what folk really eat there. I was triggered while watching episode six of Searching for Spain with Eva Longoria. I generally feel obliged to watch shows like this about Spain since I live here. This series is OK but tends to skip around the regions focusing on their unique 'cuisine' - gnashes teeth. In the episode in question, the house special was four slivers of fried fish served on a log, "inspired by my grandma's recipe". What happened to plates? Was nanna a lumberjack? Why the compulsion to serve tiny portions of food on roofing slates or Citroen hubcaps? For the love of Grok, give me some decent grub on a dinner plate!

5. Facebook's disappearing posts

Social media suffers from so many ills, I almost feel bad for singling out Facebook, but this one yanks my chain on a daily basis. Often I'll want to add my 10 cents to a post by making a witty, well-observed comment. However, so as not to appear a complete knob, I normally want to fact-check what I'm going to say and open a second browser tab to make my enquiries. Then, certain of my facts, I return to Facebook to fashion my killer invective, only to find the original post has gone. Facebook refreshed the page and the post has disappeared, never to be seen again. Sometimes I've spent half an hour researching, planning my comment, only to be unable to write it! No wonder people are giving up on social media!

6. Open soda bottles

This hints that I might have OCD issues, but on occasion I'll be watching a film or TV show and a character will pour some cola from a big two-litre bottle and not put the top back on. That's it for me. I've lost all interest in character and plot. The only thing that matters in my life at that point is that I'm watching a fizzy drink go flat before my eyes. Art imitates life - do people do this? Do they not know every second counts with fizz? There should be a law against things in media that are this triggering. I lose sleep thinking about it!

7. Modern day slavery

I've covered this in previous blogs, but the gist is, businesses keep getting us to work for them for free while they enjoy the profits. That's why I don't wear merch - why should I turn myself into an advertising hoarding? I've mentioned in previous blogs how online banking and sorting recycling are sneaky ways in which we're made to work for free, so other people can make a buck. I only recently realised that supermarkets are another example of this. In the 1965 thriller The Ipcress File, Michael Caine and Guy Doleman are pushing trollys down the aisle in the supermarket and Doleman's character says something like "I can't abide these new American shopping methods". He's a man after my own heart. We think nothing of it today, but before supermarkets existed, one would have gone to the butcher's or the grocer's and they would have served the goods to you, instead of you being the 'picker' pushing the trolley around. Elon Musk recently tweeted we're all going to be living lives of leisure while our personalised robots do all this sort of thing for us. He also wants to sell us a bridge.

8. Bullying

I got a distaste for bullying at school. Though I wasn't a huge victim of it (apart from always being chosen as the goalkeeper) I saw how it affected other kids and it stayed with me. Even today I really hate to see it, and unfortunately there's a lot of it about in 2025, much of it emanating from that guy in the White House. 

Trump's threat to sue the BBC is only the latest in a succession of heavy-handed attacks he's made on media outlets and universities for the crime of disagreeing with him. What really grinds my gears is that with all his swagger and overbearing bluster, he clearly thinks bullying is "projecting strength". While I'm no expert on strong men, I strongly suspect they don't have to keep telling you how strong they are. I'm pretty sure previous presidents used their position to apply leverage, but did so without the self-fêting fanfare that would have made them look like a dick.

9. Streaming

I know I'm on solid ground here, as social media has been full of posts recently where folk have been cancelling Spotify, Netflix and my personal pet hate, Amazon Prime. It was on Prime Video that I was watching The Mentalist mentioned above. As I worked my way through each series (which is a great show BTW), I swear to Grok that the number and frequency of adverts sneakily increased. Maybe it's because I'm British and grew up with uninterrupted viewing on the Beeb, but I find this sort of caper very distasteful, especially since I'd forked out my hard-earned cash for an annual subscription. Why in the name of Lord Reith, do they think it's OK to charge a subscription fee and show advertisements at the same time? So I'm done with Prime - still have several months left but I won't be watching any more videos on there thank you very much. 

10. Privacy

Last on the list (I kept it to 10 - it could have been a lot longer) is privacy, and I felt compelled to add this in reaction to the proposed UK digital ID card. I've read a lot of reaction to this on social media and a common misunderstanding is that folk ignore the digital bit altogether. They say things like, "other countries have ID cards and they're OK" or "I have a driving license and a passport, what difference does an ID card make".

Well, quite a lot actually. Your passport doesn't send an update at three in the morning telling half the government, three contractors and a bloke in IT called Kevin that you went to Wetherspoons twice this week and bought some cold & flu tablets and a pregnancy testing kit. In fact, few countries do have truly digital biometric identification, and the consequences of having one are potentially very serious. 

We're stumbling into an Orwellian future that makes the movie Enemy of The State look like a cosy Sunday evening drama where the worst thing that happens is someone loses a dog. At least in the movie you could disappear by throwing away your beeper. With the proposed digital ID, we move another step closer to Big Brother knowing everything about you. Now I don't have any brothers, never mind a big one, but I reckon there are some things it's best that your brother doesn't know. 

I'll leave it at ten moans for now. How do these grab you? Is it just me, or do you have a similar list of gripes? I'm already getting ideas for a part two of this blog!

 

I bought a new piece of kit this week, that really made me reflect on how far things have come. Long story short, I blogged about prepping for Armageddon earlier in the year, and one thing I realised needed a major overhaul was my 'home network' - the ever-growing collection of tablets, phones desktops and the ways they connect to the Internet. I've been looking for ways to make the whole thing more robust yet less power hungry.

When 'El apagón' - the big blackout happened here in Spain earlier in the year, I found out a lot about what would happen during an extended period without electricity. During those 17 hours, one of the things I noticed was that my local ISP failed before the Internet on my mobile phone. Not 100% sure why that is but my guess is the local ISP has less emergency power backup. So in the following months I mulled this over in my mind, and the more I thought about it, the more I came to see that I had underestimated my local Internet connection as a single point of failure. I live in quite an isolated little village in the 'Sierra de Cádiz'. I've long suspected much of the Internet coming into and out of the town comes through line-of-sight microwaves as the connectivity often gets worse in adverse weather, particularly storms and low lying cloud. The town's electricity supply is on a knife-edge at the best of times - I personally use two uninterruptible power supplies to keep the network up as I'm used to the electric tripping out mid-poker game. The chances of losing Internet due to an electricity outage is therefore always on the cards. Then there is flooding, terrorism, meteorites - OK and straw-clutching with that one, but you get my point, it became apparent that having a backup to connect my local network to the Internet made a lot of sense.

So I began to research solutions. I could have figured out away to make my smartphone a hotspot, but the phone assumes a higher level of importance during an emergency so I didn't want it occupied on network duty. After lots of research with my friends, Claude, Grok, and ChatGTP I arrived on a solution which was to buy a second Wifi router with a 'fallback' option. It works like this. My ISP router connects to the second router, so all my network traffic passes through it. I use the new router for both Wifi and wired connections. Should the ISP connection go offline, the new router makes a 4G connection through the phone network. Within 60 seconds, I'm back online. It's like magic. I had to get a new SIM card for the router, but I shopped around and found a pre-paid card with no contract. All I have to do is put 10 euros on it every six months to keep it 'alive'. During normal operation the SIM is inactive and only makes a connection during an emergency.

After I set this up, feeling very smug and pleased with myself, I noticed on the box that the router is capable of 300Mbps - over 4G? I thought this was a mistake, but apparently due to a thing called 'carrier aggregation', under ideal conditions the thing can weave together different mobile bands making 'one big one' (given there aren't too many other folk online). This is what triggered my reflection on my path as a user of the Internet in Spain.

Back in the late 1990's when I first considered moving to Europe, Spain was one of a number of countries I was considering. Internet connectivity was a key factor, since I would be working remotely for my company in England. During my research I stumbled across an article that wrote in glowing terms about the broadband rollout in the Iberian peninsula, and how the country was 'forging ahead' as a European leader in high speed Internet connectivity. This must have been a puff-piece for Movistar or something because when I finally arrived, the truth was rather different.

The house I bought in Murcia was less than three kilometers from town. The house had mains electricity and potable water, so getting an Internet connection would be just a question of running a phone line, no? Oh how wrong I was! I made overtures to the phone company who said they would be quite happy to help if I paid several thousand pounds to install telegraph poles! There was another problem in the form of a big hill at the back of my house that made line-of-sight connectivity impossible. I was so screwed. Caveat emptor. (Some years later, I met a smarter guy than me, who had his lawyer insert a clause in the compra-venta - the presales contract that determines the conditions of sale - that broadband internet connection would be available in the property before the sale would go ahead)

I was anxious to get connected because of work, so I had a word with the owner of a local Internet cafe and negotiated a preferential rate, given that I was spending five mornings a week in there with my laptop! There was a lady who did shifts looking after the place who was a chain-smoker. I used to go home reeking of tobacco smoke and coughing like a laboratory beagle, so I was keen to find a practical alternative.

There was a Vodafone shop in the town and, although mobile phones at the time were more geared towards calls, they were offering a new card with a data tariff. It was expensive so I'd have to ration my connectivity - a bit like the early days of Compuserve where we would use an off-line-reader program to login, download a bunch of messages and log off again to minimise connection fees! So I signed up for one of these cards and a condition was I had to have an ordinary phone SIM as well. This is where something happened to my disadvantage. The lady gave me the SIM card for my phone and said the data card would arrive in the following week. While muddling through with my schoolboy Spanish, I got the impression that I could use the SIM card she gave me to connect to the Internet until the proper data card arrived. So that weekend, I made a few sojourns in to Hotmail and Google, nothing too lengthy, then swapped over to the data card in the following week. At the end of the month I got a bill for 400 euros! I remonstrated with the girl in the shop arguing that she told me I could use the other card, but she just said 'you did - it worked'. I spent hours complaining writing to regional and national offices, sending faxes at their request etc, but never did manage to get a refund.

After about a year of struggling with the SIM solution - it did work when I had the right card, a Spanish neighbour helped me wade through the bureaucratic minefield of Telefonica's Sales Order Process to get a 'fixed line' telephone. Due to the poles issue, this was provided over radio, which capped the Internet connection to a ridiculously low speed, but at least I was on all the time without the same level of metering that I suffered with the SIM card. That did me for another year or two, until an enterprising couple of English chaps in the village put their heads together and, realise there were a lot of folk in the 'campo' like me with a need for broadband, started a wireless network company.

I'm a software guy rather than a hardware guy, so a lot of what they did remains a mystery, but it seems they figured out how to bundle together a bunch of consumer internet connections from the local cable company, then bounce these around the village and then on into the houses in the country side. If like me, line of sight was unavailable, they would angle dishes on other client sites to share the signal around. However they managed it, the system worked great and at last, after about four years I finally had a fast Internet connection in Spain.

When I moved to another little village in Andalucia, most folk were using a similar wireless systems because it was cheap - subsidised either by the townhall or the regional government or both. It was pretty terrible with speeds slowing to a crawl at that time of day when the kids came home from school. The support closed on Friday afternoon and if the line went down, which was often, there was nobody to help get it back until Monday morning. In time however a couple of new entrants to the market emerged offering fibre to the home. Considering we are fairly remote I'm very impressed by this.  A friend in Portland, Oregon with a holiday home here was telling me the Internet we get here is faster and cheaper than he has back home. I pay 20 euros per month and on a good day my fibre will test at 600Mbps. My ISP has a higher tariff - for a fiver a month extra I can get double that!

All of which makes me think, why on earth isn't everybody grabbing a digital nomad visa and coming to Spain to work. I often see posts on social media, especially TikTok from Americans who have moved, or are thinking of moving to Barcelona and are moaning about the price of property there. Well here's the thing, there are plenty of other places, many of which have amazing property deals. Whole villages are for sale for peanuts in some regions due to the phenomenon of rural depopulation, yet now, with Starlink in the mix providing broadband coverage through the whole of the country, there isn't a place where you can go in Spain where you would have to endure the same painful journey I did to get a good online connection.

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