Dartmoor

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I've been to Dartmoor quite a few times since I came to the UK. Because of that it feels like the 'standard' or 'annual' destination for me in this country. This spring was the second time we went there to wild camp, and it was definitely a memorable experience.

This time our trip would take us to Fur Tor, apparently one of the most remote places in Dartmoor, far, far away from civilization. Or, about 15 miles, as it would turn out. We never did get that far, though. Because as beautiful as Dartmoor is, once you're in the no-mans-land, it does get incredibly monotonous. And why bother walking 10 miles more if the scenery's not going to change?

Well, that was part of the reason we didn't make it to Fur Tor. The other part is that we simply ran out of time. Given that we needed to set up the tent and prepare for dinner before dark we decided to change direction about half of the way in. Progress was slow on our way to Fur Tor because the land was very boggy. Not enough to pose a danger, but enough to get your feet wet after a misstep, and certainly enough to make you want to pay attention to every single step you take. Not a relaxed walk for sure.

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While the walk would have been tolerable, setting up the tent on bog land certainly wouldn't, and neither would it be good if we could not find a stream to camp nearby (although not a disaster since we had brought plenty of water. Sadly the stream that we were supposed to cross on the way to Fur Tor turned out to be not there, and with the OS map reporting nothing but bog land on the path ahead we decided to change direction. I say 'path', but there really isn't any. You can walk wherever you like, in any direction. No paths. No humans. No nothing. We went East instead in search of another stream and less bog.

Luckily we found a usable stream and some bits of land that were not boggy. Unfortunately none of the bits were entirely flat, so we ended up having to set up our tent on a slope. Setting up the tent only took a few minutes and we had a lovely evening meal and watched the sun set. During the night I left a bit of tent flap open so I could look at the stars. It was an amazing sight.

I kept waking up during the night and sliding down my sleeping mat, which was rather slippery on the angle the tent was set up on, but it could not be helped. I remember waking up a few times in the morning, seeing some light of dawn seep through the tent flap, but the sun never quite seemed to come out, so I went back to sleep again. Until finally I got up and stuck my head out, and realized that we would not be seeing the sun at all that day.

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The mist was so intense and so humid that the tent was full of moisture droplets, and just walking outside for a few minutes would cause lots of tiny droplets to appear on your clothes on the side that the wind was coming from. We ended up having to pack everything up while it was still wet, and went on our way back to civilization, via a different route than the one we came in on. Although visibility was utterly poor we had plenty of maps, compasses and GPS devices to guide our return. The way back took us past a military practice area where a bunch of old rifle shells were littered on the ground. At least the soil was less boggy than the route of the day before, and we managed to make good progress on the way back. Our plans to have an elaborate lunch under a beautiful blue sky were put on hold though, because it did not clear up at all in Dartmoor that day.

There's something intensely satisfying about not seeing any other people for a whole day, and also from not having to follow any paths, because there weren't any. It's probably the closest to true, age-old nature that I've ever been. It's a really good experience, and I will do it again.

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Posted in Travel , UK | Tagged

Yup, still searching

We haven't found a house yet, but we are learning many things as we view more properties. Here's some thoughts I had on the topic while searching for a new home.

  • We're getting better and better at narrowing down properties that are worth viewing.
  • As a result, filtering properties is absolutely not an issue after you've started looking. There's only 1 or 2 new properties every day that match our criteria.
  • There's no point for me to improve on Gumbug. I could make it better, but manually looking at 2 properties per day, even if they're mismatched, is not a time sink.
We'll get there. It's just a matter of time.

Posted in Daily Life , UK

Gumbug: A better way to browse real estate

Last summer I really wanted to find a decent rental apartment around London. Every day I scoured Gumtree, Rightmove and the likes in search of something affordable. In the end I decided to wait until I was able to buy an apartment instead, but I spent several weeks searching and getting annoyed at real estate sites nonetheless. I decided I could save myself a lot of time and effort by automating some of the steps of my search process. My search process went roughly like this:

  •  Go to Gumtree, search by location and price
  • Mentally filter out all the ads that I'd already rejected, usually because they were old or just looked crappy
  • Check the new ads, decide which ones I might be interested in based on my more subjective criteria (not ground floor, too far from public transport, high-crime area etc.)
  • Repeat the above process for a different set of locations
  • Repeat the above process for all locations on a different website (Rightmove, Zoopla etc.)
Thus Gumbug was born. Initally it was meant to search both Gumtree and Rightmove for rental apartments, but I've adapted it to only do Rightmove's To Buy section, for now. I've found a lot of duplication between sites that are listing property to sell, whereas for rental apartments there was often a whole category of quirky private listings that would only appear on Gumtree. The need to scrape multiple sites seems a lot less when only considering things to buy.

You can find Gumbug on github: https://github.com/rv/gumbug. I'm also running a semi-public version of it on Heroku, although it won't be very fast if a lot of people end up using it. You can have a play with it here: http://floating-forest-4090.herokuapp.com/, or to see some example search results, have a look at this link: http://floating-forest-4090.herokuapp.com/s/gzr1vwthsd. Since it might not handle the load, I'll describe how it works.

For each search you can add multiple sources, which are all consolidated into one page. I tried to avoid pagination of things as much as possible because I just want to see everything on one big page that I can scroll through at my leisure. If a listing appears on more than one source url it'll only appear once in the results. If the listing is already in the system its details won't be re-fetched every search, to save time. Adding urls as input might be a bit 'techy' but it saves a lot of coding time and allows me to specify a whole bunch of hard filters right at the source, since the url can already contain filters for price range, number of bedrooms etc.

Keywords Keywords

You can add a list of keywords to ignore and a list of keywords that are required. Eg. you can ignore 'ground floor, retirement' and you can require 'leasehold'. For the ignored keywords, if a listing contains at least one of the keywords, it'll be marked as ignored and moved to the bottom. For the required keywords, if an add doesn't contain at least one of the required keywords, it will also be marked as ignored and moved to the bottom.

Filter by distance to public transport Filter by distance to public transport

The public transport filter lets you select the stations you wish to be near to (or far away from). The list of stations is prepopulated from the zoned stations around London, but it'll automatically update after every search. If you add at least one station filter, all the listings will have to match at least one of your station filters, or else they will be ignored. Eg. if you add two filters: between 0.0-0.5 miles from Chesham station and between 0.2-1.0 miles from Amersham station, a listing must be either close to Chesham or close to Amersham (but not necessarily both) to match.

The distance filter is pretty stupid because distances are simply scraped from Rightmove, which (as far as I can tell) only shows straight-line distance. You might have to make a massive detour to get to the station, but Rightmove will still happily report that the listing is right next to the station.

Once the search is complete you get to see all the results on one page: all their images, important information and a map. No useless clicking through tiny thumbnails here. The key feature in the search results page is this: you can manually mark listings as either favorited or ignored, and any future searches you do from that particular search result page will preserve your favorites and ignored listings. So let's say you haven't searched anything for a week or so, all you have to do is press the search button to perform the exact same search again to get the new listings. Gumbug will pre-filter the new listings according to your criteria and will automatically move the ones you've already ignored manually down to the bottom.

So, why am I showing the ignored listings at all, if I'm clearly not interested in them? The reason for this is that humans (especially real-estate agents) make mistakes. They will mislabel things, forget to mention a keyword that every other ad that you're interested in has, or they'll add something stupid like "not ground floor" which throws off the keyword filters.

A second reason to display ignored listings is because you might be sharing the link to the search results with more than one person, and the other person might want to un-ignore a listing. Gumbug isn't exactly built on security: any person that you share the search results url with can favorite and ignore listings. This is great for me because I want to share search results with my girlfriend so she can go through them as well, but when sharing in public it's better to spawn a new search with a new url.

Lastly, there's the map. One of the things I've consistently found myself doing when checking listings, is to cross-reference the area with the deprivation map, which gives a rough indication of how much crime/poverty/incidents/bad things there are in an area. You can also click the name of each public transport station to display walking directions, so you know if that 0.6 miles is actually 0.6 miles (hint: it usually isn't).

Deprivation and Directions Deprivation and Directions

Gumbug will continue to be a work-in-progress, but it's reached a point where I'm quite able to use it to make my own life easier. Maybe it can help someone else too. Here's some of its issues:

  • When you flag something as ignored and then go to the next page, the ignored listing will pop up again because it's been moved to the back of the sort order.
  • No street view support yet
  • Some map issues when viewing on mobile
  • No floor plans yet
Feel free to give it a try on Heroku. If for some reason your search doesn't seem to be working then that might be because the worker process is not running. Since Heroku's not cheap I'm running the worker process on my local machine. Heroku's database is very tiny so it might fill up very quickly. If there's enough demand I could consider setting up a more proper version of it, so consider this an attempt to gauge the public interest. Let me know what you think :)

Posted in Tech , UK

Thoughts on buying a house in Greater London

North-West Greater London properties

  • Watch out for BISF houses, they're worth less.
  • Shared ownership is a lie. It only complicates things.
  • A reasonable house will set you back at least 300k, a good house 400k.
  • A reasonable apartment will set you back at least 250k, a good apartment 300k.
  • Watford station will close down soon, don't buy around there.
  • Check the deprivation index before you view.
  • Bloody hell, Chesham, that is one massive hill you got there. Check altitudes and routes to nearest public transport on Google Earth or street view.
  • Anything close to public transport may not have good parking spots, so check for residents parking. You'll still piss off people who are driving over to visit, though.
Estate agents
  • I have called at least 6 different ones so far and have been unable to arrange a single viewing in the past two weeks. Either the place is already gone or they don't call you back.
  • There are no deals to be found from oversight; you won't find a place that's cheaper than market price. Everything is appropriately priced. If something's cheaper than you'd expect, there's something wrong with it: close to a railway line, very old building, massive hill in the way to the nearest tube station etc.
  • The only 'deal' you might be able to take advantage of is getting there first. Monitor the real estate sites for new ads, but also go to estate agents in person and get them to notify you. Oftentimes they'll recommend you crap that you don't want but you can do the filtering. What's important is that you know about properties before they are advertised on the internet.
  • Do not trust them.
Mortgage
  • Holy shit.
  • There is a fuckton of things to research about mortgages. The more you know, the better.
  • Do the calculations yourself. It's the only way to be aware of what's going to happen to your money in the long term.
  • Check for yourself what's the difference between variable rate and fixed rate for various years.
  • Do the math yourself to see what a huge difference it makes if you can pay off more in the first few years.
  • Make sure that compound interest will not hurt you more than you can take.
  • Take into account that interest rates will rise, and assume a worst-case scenario.
  • Compared to renting and saving, getting a mortgage seems to almost always make more financial sense.
  • Getting a massive loan to get a really nice place is fucking stupid, don't do it. Get a more reasonable place first and then upgrade later. It'll be way cheaper. But don't trust me, do the math yourself.
  • Mortgage advisors (and  some estate agents) are very eager for you to leave everything to them, no questions asked. Do not trust them. Ask questions. There are many lenders out there, you can always choose another.
  • I still cannot find any concrete info about when it is okay to renegotiate your mortgage.
WIP.

Posted in Daily Life , UK

GT86: first impressions

(written on 2014/07/19) So, I bought a car! And not just any car. I thought about saving money and going for an economic model, or an old second hand one, but I couldn't help myself. I went to a used car lot to have a look at a BMW 1 Coupe, but as soon as the diesel engine started and the smell of it reached my nose I realized I did not want a diesel. With that incident my resolve to get an impractical fun level reached the threshold, and I bought a second hand GT86. Woohoo!

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The meh:

  • Fuel consumption is not exactly great, but on the bright side, it doesn't seem to consume that much more fuel if you drive it like you stole it, so no need to hold back :)
  • After a week of driving I've gotten used to the power and the sound rather quickly. It's all very civilized. That's probably a good thing considering it's my first rear-wheel-drive car.
The awesome:
  • Dashboard is excellent. Very focused, a joy to use.
  • Lovely short gears. Wow. Such shifting.
  • Handling is ridiculously sharp and does nothing unexpected whatsoever. It feels perfect.
  • Suspension is firm but not too firm. Excellent feel for the road.
  • Very good steering wheel and feedback.
I've taken it out almost every day this week, to get a feel for the car and to get to know the roads in my area better. Going northwest of Watford there's a lot of nice B-roads, where this car seems to feel the most at home. Although you can tell that there's a lot more potential and power in there that would not be legal to unleash on public roads. Most importantly, the car feels comfortable and confident during longer drives. It's a great place to be in, and that's what I wanted. More, much more, to come :D


Update, a few weeks later. I'm doing pretty much exactly 35mpg, which is the manufacturer-reported mpg. My driving style is a mix of extremely conservative while in city traffic and mildly enthusiastic when getting onto a nice road. I guess everything is as expected. There have been no odd surprises, no unexpected behavior, no strange quirks. The car is as predictable and tame as you'd expect it to be during normal road usage. I can only imagine what it'll be like on a track, and perhaps I'll have a chance to take it out on a track day this year. I did have a chance to see a near-identical GT86 perform a parade lap on a track. Oddly enough it was the quietest car there. Literally every other car was louder than the GT86! I couldn't believe it really. It's such a tame car when not pushed to its limits. That's my pervading image of it as I'm driving it. It doesn't have as strong a presence (personality?) as an RX7 or even a Subaru Impreza would have. All other sportscars seem to be more.. unique than the GT86. Or perhaps I'm just thinking that because I own one now. Still, this is my first (real) sports car. Our personality will grow as we grow.


Update, another few weeks later. The car is fun! I'm becoming more confident in driving my new friend, but I have a lot to learn. I'm really enjoying it though, and I feel excited every time I take it out. My attitude while driving is still mostly 'get good fuel economy', although sometimes I have moments of "drive it like you stole it". The car accommodates either. I've been reading about it online to see if it has any quirks, and the only thing I could find was the so-called torque gap in the mid revs, which I do find I actually notice, since the high revs tend to be a bit off-limits on most public roads, so the mid revs are where you want it to start pulling to get up to speed with things. An ECU + exhaust kit apparently fixes this quite nicely, but I'm not quite ready to think about that just yet.

Side note: I also got my first damage.. Just after I parked the car at a supermarket, a middle-aged lady decided to reverse-park into it as I was just walking away from the car. As soon as I heard the scraping I turned around and saw the woman performing the worst ever reverse-park that I ever saw in my life. Fortunately it was only bodywork damage, but it will need to get fixed. What a fucking hassle..


Update, today. The power and rear-wheel-drive-y-ness does let itself known when you're parking on slopes, especially combined with grass or gravel. It's entirely possible to either spin the wheels too much or do something naughty to your clutch if you're not careful. Makes for good training though.

People have been reporting that the GT86 has a torque dip right in the mid range of the revs where it's slow to pick up compared to the rest of the rev range. I've actually noticed this a lot myself lately, because I'm usually too much of a pussy to use the higher revs on public roads, so the highest I go tends to be the mid range. Mild annoyance, easily dealt with by changing driving style a bit, getting an aftermarket ecu and optional exhaust fix, or just putting up with it.

Posted in Cars , Daily Life , UK | Tagged

Finally got hit by a car

It had to happen after years and years of cycling: I finally got hit by a car. I went out for a cycle today to escape the scorching desert that is my room, which just can't get enough ventilation no matter what I do. During the hottest hours I go out to cycle, and so it was today. I headed north to Watford, cycled through town a bit and then got to the other side of Watford, where there's a couple of roundabouts where two fairly big roads meet.

I tend to take roundabouts quite fast because I don't want to spend a long time in places where cars are likely to hit you, but today I was cycling for escapism so I wasn't going too fast. There were hardly any cars on the road, and I saw the silver MPV approaching from miles away. Well, figuratively speaking.

The car was already slowing down so I kept going at a reasonable pace (I was doing about 20kph according to Garmin). Things would have worked out fine if the car had kept slowing down, but the driver must have been sleeping behind the wheel because she only noticed me a second before she hit me. No offense, but that's fucking shit driving. I already saw it coming and tried to evade, but couldn't get out of the way fast enough. I was prepared to fall down on to the asphalt after a hard bump from her car, but I somehow managed to skid-step off the bike as it got cobbled up under her front bumper. I magically escaped without a scratch, thanks to the driver waking up in the last second and actually starting to brake.

My first impulse after realizing that I was somehow still standing in the middle of a roundabout was to make sure that this asshole driver didn't try to escape, so I made sure to block her path as I guided her to the side of the road. That's where I realized that she was just this poor Indian woman who totally had no clue what she was doing and was visibly quite shaken.

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I tried rolling the bike to the side but that didn't work at all, and you can see why in the above photo. I definitely need a new rear wheel. At first I was worried that the frame was bent and the front wheel was damaged, but it looks like it's just the rear wheel that took the hit.

As we got to the side of the road, I noticed that my legs were actually shaking a little, and I couldn't figure out if it was because of the sudden shock of nearly getting hit by a car, of perhaps a muscle spasm or twitch from the awkward way that I dismounted my bicycle. I've never thought of myself as a shock-susceptible person, and the speed at which I was hit was quite low, but I can't completely rule it out I guess.

A witness showed up who was driving behind the Indian woman, but he turned out to be an acquaintance of hers so I'm not sure that'll do me any good if they decide to make trouble. I don't think they will though, they were nice people. And I'm far more likely to make trouble for them if I claim injuries or psychological trauma. There'll be CCTV footage as well if I need it. But we settled on her paying for the bike repairs and that'll be all.

What a strange day. I nearly committed to renting a new apartment yesterday, but ended up calling it off in the morning after having a second look at the place. Then I go cycling and get hit by a car, yet somehow remain unharmed. Two big things could have turned out a lot worse for me today, but I managed to get through it alright. I guess that makes this a good day.

 

Posted in Cycling , UK

Finding an apartment around London

Ever since I started my 'break' period after my cycling trip I've spent 1 to 2 hours almost every day on Rightmove and Gumtree, looking for apartments. Rightmove has a much better offer and more decent-looking apartments, but Gumtree shows private offerings of landlords who want to circumvent agencies, which results in zero fees and a much more casual way of dealing with things. Depending on the landlord this can either be a good thing or a bad thing. In my experience in London, I've been bitten once by a bad estate agent, and been incredibly surprised at the niceness of my current landlord whom I found via Gumtree. Businesses or people, either one can screw you over if you pick a bad one, I guess.

I'm quite systematic about my search. I've got about 4-5 areas that I'd like to live in, and a tight maximum budget. This means my search always ends up pointing me towards apartments that have something wrong with them. Either they're ridiculously tiny, right next to a railway line, too far away from a railway line or in a shitty neighborhood. The Deprivation Map Explorer is an absolute must-have. I keep a spreadsheet of travel times and costs for the stations around which I center my search. Another good criteria that mustn't be left out is how long the walk to the nearest station is.

Recently, since I've been seeing a lot of apartments online, I've gotten a good grasp of what a decent apartment 'should' cost in each area, so I've noted that down in my spreadsheet as well. Whenever an apartment pops up that's way cheaper than the average, I usually know to check for what's wrong. But occasionally, just very occasionally, a jewel pops up: an apartment that's 100 pounds per month or more underpriced. I've seen two of them so far, and in both cases I was too late.

I've been thinking about writing a script that spiders Gumtree every x hours, in certain categories, looking for certain keywords. In fact, I'm very tempted to do this already, but I suspect it'll take a lot of fine-tuning to get usable results out of it. The things that can be wrong with an apartment can't always be easily spotted by a script. Hooking it up to the deprivation map explorer would be a must, and it would have to make heavy use of the Google Maps api to find the nearest station(s) and walking distance to each station. Most of the important criteria can already be filtered out in the url (area, max price, only ads with pictures, no agencies) so the core bit would be the scraping. Notifications can be sent out by email either immediately after the scrape, or consolidated every x hours or days.

I might give this a go if I'm still unsuccessful in finding an apartment next week. After all, there's always that golden rule of scripting: if you have to do it once, do it manually. If you have to do it twice, do it manually. But the third time, write a script.

Posted in Daily Life , Tech , UK

Getting older in Wales

Disclaimer: I've only visited a very tiny area of Wales, just Brecon Beacons national park and the area directly south of there. Based on that, I believe Wales is weird. There appears to be civilization, yet without personality, just dead-end towns that are either chavtown copies of areas around London or dead-end former coal towns where somehow everyone stayed behind yet the 21st century did not quite start yet.

Nature, on the other hand, is beautiful. The landscape is brilliant and some of the roads are excellent to drive. Not all of them though. There's so much space in the UK, yet somehow all the B-roads are shitty narrow paths only fit for one car at a time, so you have to worry at every corner about making an emergency stop. Quite a stressful driving experience. Fortunately there's some wider more open roads as well. And not much traffic.

I won't blame Wales for this, but I hurt my knee again. The last time was three years ago, but I've been worried ever since that it might happen again. I'd already climbed OoYama last year, which hurt my entire body with muscle ache but not my knee in particular, so I half hoped that I would be fine. It started out as a short hike that was advertised as being 'strenuous', which we made fun of as it wasn't that difficult. It wasn't that long either, but I pushed a little too hard and am not used to climbing any more, so ended up hurting my knee in the exact same way as before. Since the hike was short it's nothing too serious, but I did notice the day after that I couldn't really walk down stairs or slopes without hurting. Hopefully it'll pass soon. It's definitely a reminder that I'm getting older and I should respect my body's limits. Ugh.

Posted in Travel , UK

Earplugs

Every morning at 6:30 my housemate wakes up and starts doing the dishes in the kitchen right next to my bedroom. Then around 7:30 the street cleaning truck drives past right underneath my window, which tends to be closed but lately is open because of the heat. Even when closed I can hear the truck clearly though. In the evening there's loud music and the sound of dodgy people loudly swearing on the streets. Yes, England is just wonderful.

But you need earplugs.

Not much to say here. I've tried 3 types. Here's the verdict.

  • Gel earplugs: one-time use only, they feel disgusting and fell out quite easily.
  • Wax earplugs: one-time use only, kinda hard to put in and slightly painful at first, but they really drown out the noise well.
  • Plain old foam earplugs: reusable, washable, decent noise reduction and easy to put in. Recommended.

Posted in Daily Life , UK | Tagged

Public footpath 32a

Public Footpath 32a

The field kept brushing against my legs as I cycled through it. It felt amazing and very nature-y.

(To HDR or not to HDR? I tend to shy away from it and prefer natural colors, but this image felt nicer in HDR. Perhaps I'll blame the camera this time. Here's a comparison.)

 

Posted in Cycling , Photography , UK