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Posted by Nad on 16 April 2018 at 17:49
Server move to Netherlands complete[edit]
This post has the following tags: Server
Over the weekend we've moved the server from Codero in the US to the Dutch hosting company Abelohost. Apart from a few small email glitches, the move went very smoothly. The US has been stamping out liberties like there's no tomorrow, and Internet privacy is one of the worst hit areas with abominations like the CLOUD act being signed in. This along with the fact that Codero have never responded to requests I've been making to them for over three years to accept crypto-currencies as a payment option has finally prompted OD to leave and head for greener pastures. We chose the Netherlands as our new digital home because Dutch law takes privacy much more seriously than most other countries in the world, especially the US where the very concept of privacy has been rendered virtually non-existent now. Abelohost use the 100% Dutch Serverius data-center and they accept over fifty different Crypto currenies for payment :-) We're now running Debian 9, Nginx 1.10, PHP 7 and NodeJS 8.11. All the wikis are running MediaWiki 1.30 which is the first time ever that everything's completely up to date!

Mum & Dad's last week in Brazil[edit]

Posted by Nad on 10 April 2018 at 15:38

After spending a few days in Caxias, we spent the last week of the holiday at our land again, there was a bit of rain, but the view from the guest house is nice especially when there's some mist rolling in over the hill :-)

We went for a walk to the other waterfall when the weather cleared up a little bit. We drove most of the way, but stopped the car at the top of the hill at the start of the infamous Vaca Velha trail. I realised later that actually we could have driven all the way to the river as the road only gets really bad a few hundred meters past the other side.

On the way back to the car, we noticed some fallen Pinhão so we collected some to cook for dinner, but then completely forget we had them and had omelette for dinner instead!

The next day we went back to Caxias where Beth dropped the three of us off at the bus station, and then went to take the car in for some repairs while we set off for Porto Alegre. We spent a couple more days there so that we could go to the public market, and Mum & Dad could get some good photos of some of the historic buildings and go to the museum. And then it was time for them to head back to the airport so they could get their flight to Chile via São Paulo and then a few days after that back to Nova Zelândia.

I got the bus back to Caxias and then we went to Canela in the newly fixed car and spent a few days there for Beth to do her drama course. This time we stayed in the building right across the road from the cathedral which looked right down on the apartment we all stayed in a couple of weeks earlier :-)

Mum & Dad spending time at the land[edit]

Posted by Nad on 30 March 2018 at 22:24

The holiday hasn't quite gone to plan, first Dad and Beth and now me, have come down with various sicknesses and we've had to cut out all the hot places (which is pretty much everywhere!) and cut the duration down to just one month. We were unable to book anywhere comfortable to stay in Florianópolis due to it being right on Easter, and so we've spent the whole time staying at our land and at a hotel in Caxias!

We have two waterfalls that are a short walk from our land, and we went to the first one last week:

And the rest of the time has been spent reading or doing odd jobs such as chopping and collecting firewood for the winter and putting glass in the guest house windows - while being careful not to disturb the uninvited guests squatting above!

Mum & Dad's 2018 holiday in Brazil begins![edit]

Posted by Nad on 11 March 2018 at 14:23

Mum & Dad arrived in Brazil the day before yesterday! I forgot to take the camera when we left the land and I've also been changing over to a new Purism laptop that they brought over from New Zealand with them, so the blog has started a couple of days late sorry!

They flew from Auckland to Santiago (Chile), spent a day there, and then flew another six hours across the continent to São Paulo, and then took another couple of hours on a connecting flight to Porto Alegre. Meanwhile, Beth and I drove from the land to Canela where we unpacked all our luggage into the apartment we've rented for the week, and then I caught the bus to Porto Alegre about three hours away to meet Mum & Dad at the airport. Their plane arrived right on time and we were on our way to a hotel about half an hour after I got to the airport. The next morning we had breakfast at about 9:30 and then got a taxi to the bus station to get a bus back to Canela. We all arrived in the apartment at about midday :-)

We've just been relaxing and going out to nice places for lunch and dinner, but one thing Mum and Dad did do here in Canela was visit the Caracol Falls and go on the gondola which gets some very nice views of the falls.

After that we went to lunch at a nice buffet called Paradouro Rural which is a few km out of Canela to the north, they have good traditional Gaucho food as well as a good vegetarian selection for Beth and I, some nice speciality beers and some free Cachaça ;-) They also have tables overlooking a really nice view of the valley, those eucalyptus in the background are around eighty meters tall! It's amazing that it's only 40km from our land, but yet there's tropical fruit there that's really thriving like papaya and banana.

Unfortunately, on what was to be our last day here in the apartment in Canela, it was pouring with rain all night with thunder as well. We thought this probably wouldn't be a very good situation to go to the land in, so we've extended our booking until Monday, and then we'll go straight to Caxias from there. We can do a day trip to the land if the weather picks up, and stay there for longer after Caxias. So meanwhile we've set our selves up for some rainy days in the apartment :-)

Posted by Nad on 6 March 2018 at 00:28
New house design for 2018[edit]
This post has the following tags: Our sixth year on the land
Oops! I should have posted this a month ago! The bad feng shui in our house has been driving Beth crazy¹²³⁴⁵ so after getting some emergency interior design advice from our friend Irena, we bought some new furniture in Canela and made some long overdue changes!