IT Archives - Adrian's Blog

More PHP Updates

Nov 5, 2024 | IT, Server, Software | 0 comments

It feels like quite a long time since I blogged about PHP, and that’s because it is! Over 5 years, to be precise. Unsurprisingly, none of the supported versions of PHP I was running back then (7.2 and 7.3) are supported today. How about we start with a similar timeline from the PHP website:

As you can see, only 7.3 is still visible on their support roadmap, and support for that ended back in 2021! 7.4 is pretty much the minimum most web-based applications will work with now, but support for this ended just a year later, at the end of 2022.

Fortunately, most of my online services are running supported versions, but some are proving more problematic to update than others, and I’m not entirely sure how to upgrade them all.

The process for updating my TrueNAS/FreeBSD jails is still pretty much as described in the blog from five years ago. The PHP modules change occasionally, with some dropped as they’ve been included in the core and some new ones added, but they’re mostly pretty straightforward. Here’s a quick table of my services using PHP:

LimeSurvey	7.4.32
MediaWiki	8.2.24
Nextcloud	8.3.12
Pi-hole	8.1.2
WordPress (live)	8.3.12
WordPress (test)	7.3.12

APE Services PHP Versions

LimeSurvey is running in a FreeBSD jail, which I’ve updated to 13.4. This will undoubtedly cause me problems, as 7.4 is no longer supported, so a pkg update && pkg upgrade will break things by removing PHP. I have updated the database to 10.6, and LimeSurvey is running the latest version. Still, when I update PHP to anything other than 7.4, I get the error reported here on the LimeSurvey forum. When I get some free time, I’ll play around a bit more, but this one might need to be rebuilt, perhaps starting to move away from jails to docker containers.

I rebuilt MediaWiki as much as a test as anything when I had some database upgrade issues. This is running a supported version and could be upgraded further if required. The suggested version was 8.2, so that’s where I went.

I upgraded NextCloud to the latest version, and that seems to be running fine, although I have noticed a few issues in the TrueNAS console where PHP is exiting in this jail, so I will need to keep an eye on things:

Nov  4 13:21:48 freenas0 kernel: pid 29684 (php-fpm), jid 36, uid 80: exited on signal 10

Pi-hole is running in its own VM, following the instructions on the website and using the simple curl build script. Other than updating things when I noticed a new version, I’ve not tried to do anything with PHP. It’s still receiving security updates until the end of 2025, so I have about 12 months before I need to do anything.

My live WordPress jail, where this blog is hosted, runs 8.2 and could be updated to 8.3. I’m not really sure why I haven’t done that, so I will before the end of the year. UPDATE 10-Nov-24: It is now running 8.3.12!

My test WordPress jail is running in a VM as a docker container, and other than updating WordPress, I’ve not touched the docker container. This is still running 7.3, and I really need to consider updating this, but I’m unsure where to begin. I will need to understand Docker a little more than I currently do if I’m considering migrating from TrueNAS Core to Scale at some point in the future, so this might be a good place to start. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if I completely broke this and needed to create a new test environment.

Anyway, this is starting to sound like one of my annual ‘state of the server’ blogs, and given we’re not too far from the end of the year, I might be doing one of those again, very soon (sorry, Chris)

TrueNAS 13.3

Oct 27, 2024 | IT, Server, TrueNAS | 0 comments

Well, it’s been a busy month!

TrueNAS and FreeNAS (as it was named before that) have been one of, if not the, most blogged-about subjects in the last 250 blogs (yes, I made it to 250 and didn’t even notice) over the past 8 years (or at least it will be in November 2024).

I’ve just upgraded from TrueNAS 13.1-U6 to 13.3, which could be the last major release of TrueNAS Core, the FreeBSD-based version that was FreeNAS 9.2.8 when I started using it in 2013.

Upgrading TrueNAS is usually pretty uneventful, even though it causes me no end of worry for weeks before and sometimes weeks afterwards. This is one of these updates that I might still be fighting with in months to come!

I’ve already blogged about some of iXsystems focus changes here, with TrueNAS Scale based on Linux being the future direction of travel. What this means for TrueNAS Core is still a little unclear, but hopefully, there are still a few years before that becomes a major issue for me.

After updating TrueNAS (which is built on FreeBSD 13.3 rather than 13.1), the process of upgrading the jails begins. This updates them to the base version of FreeBSD. I successfully upgraded one jail from 13.1 to 13.3 and then updated and upgraded the packages (#pkg update & pkg upgrade), but it was only my Airsonic jail, which isn’t really used in anger anymore. I wouldn’t be upset if it broke and I had to destroy it.

Lots of my jails are web-based applications running on a FEMP stack, or FreeBSD (as the operating system), Nginx (a web server pronounced Engine-X), MySQL (a database server, in my case Mariadb), and PHP (a programming language to process dynamic PHP content). I’ve kept the jails running by upgrading the operating system between versions of TrueNAS using commands like #iocage upgrade -r 13.3-RELEASE <jailname> and then within the running jail #pkg update && pkg upgrade. I needed to update PHP separately, which I blogged about here, but the one thing I neglected was the MySQL element. My Nextcloud, WordPress, and LimeSurvey jails are all running Mariadb103, which, along with Mariadb104, are no longer supported. The latest version of MariaDB is 10.11, so I’m pretty far behind.

I asked for some help from the TrueNAS forum, and as ever, I wasn’t let down with some excellent advice. It turns out I can update the jail base to FreeBSD 13.4 on TrueNAS 13.3, so I’ll be doing that and then trying to update Mariadb103 to Mariadb105 as a first step. I’ve struggled with this in the past and simply rolled back and found a way to update without touching the database. In hindsight, that wasn’t a great idea, but at least now I have a problem that needs to be solved, and once I’ve solved it for one, it should be easy enough to apply to the others.

It turned out to be a little more problematic than I thought, although that’s more down to my lack of System Administration skills than the technology. The first rule of updating databases is to ensure the old database has been shut down correctly and not aborted by trying to jump a step ahead and simply install the new one! I’m sure this will be in System Administration 101, which I think I also skipped.

I also learned about something called tmux, which lets you keep a session running on TrueNAS even when your SSH session is lost. How have I made it 10 years without knowing this? To be fair, they have only just removed the built-in shell console, which I tended to use more than the SSH method.

Anyway, I’m going to list some commands I’ve used to upgrade, which is more for me than anyone reading this:

#tmux new -t iocage (starts a tmux session called iocage)

#tmux a (restart the previous tmux session – I’m guessing you have could several running, although I’ve only tried with one)

#iocage fetch -r 13.4-RELEASE (downloads the release)

#iocage upgrade -r 13.4-RELEASE <jailname> (update the jail to the specified release – note, there are various ‘y’ prompts to confirm the process here, which is where tmux comes in handy. There is also a step which appears to stop with a : prompt, and this is skipped by entering q several times)

#iocage restart <jailname> (restart jail after upgrading)

#iocage console <jailname> (console session into jail)

#pkg info (lists all installed packages and versions)

#service mysql-server stop (clean stop of database server)

#pkg install mariadb105-server (this will remove the old database server and then install the new one – 10.5 – along with any dependencies)

#service mysql-server start (this should start the new database server; check with #service mysql-server status)

#mysql_upgrade -u root -p (to upgrade the databases)

#pkg update && pkg upgrade (this will upgrade all of the other packages in the jail)

I’m not going to pretend I understand exactly what changed between mariadb103 and 105, but the main issue I encountered was the UNIX socket connection, which changed from /tmp/mysql.sock to /var/run/mysql/MySQL.sock. These changes were in the /usr/local/etc/mysql folder and ./conf.d folder.

So, while the database started and the upgrades worked, none of my web applications would start, as the configuration to the database was wrong. So far I’ve fixed Nextcloud (/usr/local/www/nextcloud/config/config.php where you set ‘dbhost’ => ‘127.0.0.1’,) and WordPress (/usr/local/www/wordpress/wp-config.php where you set define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘127.0.0.1’);)

This got everything back up and running but after a reasonably stressful afternoon and several snapshot rollbacks where I’d broken things and had no idea what to do. Thank goodness for TrueNAS snapshots and the incredibly helpful people who use their forum. It’s still one of the best online communities I’ve come across, even though I visit less frequently since the forum platform changed. I need to try and fix that!

iPhone History

Oct 11, 2024 | IT | 0 comments

When writing my last blog on the Kindle Scribe, I linked back to an Old iPhone blog, which I thought might be interesting to revisit some five years later! I think my daughter has interrupted the natural order of upgrades, although other factors may be at play, too.

Let’s start with a lovely picture gallery!

In the previous blog, I’d just upgraded to the iPhone X, with my partner using the iPhone 7 and my daughter using the iPhone 6 (the middle row). My grandma was using the iPhone 5, but sadly passed away in 2021 at the grand old age of 89. That’s probably the main thing I’ll take away from this blog: regular blogging acts like a time machine and takes you back to places you’d started to forget about. It’s also a helpful reminder of some of the things you did, which this site now takes me back to 2016!

Anyway, I reminisce! Back to the iPhones. Since the previous blog, we’ve all had a few new phones starting in 2020 with the 12 and 12 Pro. My X was only two years old for me at that point but was three years old from release. The 7 my partner used is even older, so we all got an upgrade, including my daughter, although she was using an iPad at home now. The iPhone 7 sat as a spare for some time (before being sold on eBay in 2021, when I sold both the 6 and 7 for £76 – can’t remember individual prices).

The 12 Pro was a great phone, but the following year, I upgraded again to the iPhone 13 mini. I’d found the 12 Pro quite heavy and liked the idea of a smaller phone. It was also the first time I’d ever bought an iPhone where I just went for the lowest storage configuration as I was starting to use iCloud more and more and had signed up for an Apple One account, giving me lots of iCloud storage and access to all the Apple services, importantly Apple Music so I didn’t need to carry a big music library with me. So we all upgraded again, with my partner getting the 12 Pro and my daughter the X, which she did use a little more as you could send emojis!

I loved the iPhone 13 mini and might still be using it if my daughter did not want to start using a phone as an actual mobile phone when she started high school! This is where the cycle was broken!!! I bought an iPhone 15 Pro on the day it was launched from the Apple Shop in Glasgow, and the iPhone 13 mini was handed down to my daughter, with my partner sticking with her 12 Pro and 12 months later, after the iPhone 16 launch that’s still what we’re all using.

It’s certainly true that every year, Apple make a slightly better iPhone that offers slightly better functionality than the previous generation, but that doesn’t mean that the latest will always be considered the greatest. I’m sure some would argue for the 1st generation, and while I didn’t own one, it was a flawed device. Limited storage and missing some fundamental stuff like copy and paste kept me using a Nokia Communicator until the 3rd generation. Even then, it didn’t feel too far ahead of the limited competition. I think that changed with the 4th generation, and the design of that still carries through into today’s devices. I certainly have a soft spot for the 4th generation, and it would be in my top 3. The 5th generation felt like a step back in some ways, although looking back, it was probably better than I gave it credit at the time. I loved my 7th generation Jet Black iPhone and used it for almost 3 years. It was perhaps the longest of any iPhone. I also liked the iPhone X (10) and think that would also be in my top 3, introducing the button-less form factor and FaceID. It was also the first which cost over £1000! I loved the mini form factor, although I think the 15 Pro combines the best of the 4 and the 10 and might be my favourite of all time, disproving the statement I started this paragraph with!

To finish up, the only device I still have in the house (well, garage, actually) from the original Old iPhone blog where all this started is the iPhone 4. It’s a bit of a classic, and I still have it in the original box, although I suspect they made too many for it to be worth anything in the future. It’s part of the IT history cave, along with some 1980s Sinclair computers, but that is probably another blog altogether; I should have blogged about that when Sir Clive sadly passed away. As I’m sure you’ve worked out by now, I’m a bit of an Apple fanboi (although I work in IT, so I have devices running Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and ChromeOS in the house!) As well as the family of iPhones, we all have other Apple devices, which is probably another blog. In fact, I blogged about some of them here, here and here (although my daughter is now using an M1 iPad Pro from 2021, and the iPad I blogged about here is used to Facetime, another grandparent, this time my Dad or my daughter Grandad).

Kindle Scribe

Oct 10, 2024 | IT, Leisure, Reading | 0 comments

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I’ve been an Amazon kindle fan for quite a while now and have just upgraded a kindle Voyager to a kindle Scribe. I thought it might be interesting to test out the note taking abilities of the Scribe by writing this blog on the kindle scribe itself, and testing how it converts my terrible handwriting to text and PDF! This blog might look a bit different as I’m not quite sure how to demonstrate that yet…
Lets start with a kindle history lesson. I wasn’t really an early adopter with this, as the first kindle was launched in 2007 and the first one I aned was a kindle keyboard which wasn’t released until 2010. That was a 3rd generation device, which is similar to my adoption of the iPhone which stall at the 30S model!

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like the iPhone, he had a ite a few bundle’s since that first 3rd gen kindle keyboard, and the old ones other get handed down to family members, i. e. an excuse to upgrade!
The bundle keybard was upgraded to a land Touch in 2012 and that will a handle Voyage in 2015, the 7th Gen.
I’ve actually been using that voyage for quite some time, as that’s what my new handle Scribe has replaced. Its replaced the bundle Paper white 3rd italian or 10th gon device my partner was using( I think the Voyage is better even though it was slightly ever) and we have a Paper while 5K generation that my daughter uses with a handle Unlimited subscription.
So why did I buy the Scribe? Good question!

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I quite liked the idea when it first came out in 2022, Lt it was quite expensive and I caldit justly spending almost £400 on a handle. for context, the lenddle voyage had been the most expensive one at abut £160( the Paper whites were ball and £80 and the keyboard perhaps £ too at the time). The scribe was an offer for £279, but I discard Amazon do a trade in offer where they give you a small gift card in exchange for an old device AND 20% off a new one. With ball applied to the already discounted price, I pided up a 320 Scribe with Premium Pen for £213.99! A bargain i’m sure you’ll agree? But hats sill more than any of the other handles. What makes the Scribe so special? More great auctions!
The clue is in the name. The Scribe is the first binder hat allows you to write or scribe on the

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device, so comes with a pen and is almost twice as big as the Voyage or Paper white.
Ya can mask up PDF files and some e Pub bodes, but the main reason I bought it was to make notes in meetings and then convert them to text or searchable PDF tiles. Now if you made it this for you will have seen how bad my handwriting is! I’ve had other devices that promised to do this, and never rally waled that well. Possibly dan to my illegible unting, but also down to the technology working too well. I’ll let you decide how well this works. I still don’t know as I need to send this to my Mac and see how its done. I’ll finish up oer Here once I’ve assessed the results…

So, how did it do? Let me try to explain what I’ve done. On the Kindle Scribe, you can choose to share a notebook and then have options to Convert it to text and quickly send it to an e-mail address. That’s what I did, which sends an e-mail with two links. One downloads a text file, which is the unadulterated text blocks at the beginning of this blog. The second link downloads a searchable PDF file, which is shown above. I also added the picture gallery with the 5 Kindle devices I’ve owned to break things up, and a hyperlink to an iPhone blog!

I know my handwriting is terrible, and I’ve even used the fountain pen option on the Scribe, which makes it look a little better. You can select Felt tips and pencils with various degrees of thickness and pressure sensitivity, but so far, I quite like the fountain pen effect. There are options for highlighting (which you can do using the premium pen user configurable button) and deleting (the premium pen also has an eraser on the end). You can also lasso blocks, move things around, or copy and paste between notebooks.

But what about the conversion to text? Well, you can see for yourself it’s far from perfect, but it wouldn’t take too much effort to correct and spell check, as it’s broadly captured what I tried to write. The search facility in the PDF file is also remarkably good. I think it’s done a better job than the Livescribe 3 Smartpen I bought back in 2013. That was quite a fat ballpoint pen that wrote onto specific notebooks with small dots tracking the writing. The pen transferred these to an App, which allowed you to convert them to text, although I never really got on with it, and the conversion to text wasn’t anywhere near as good. If I did this professionally, I’m sure I’d be recreating the text again using the Livescribe pen for a side-by-side comparison, but I’m not!

The other thing I’ve not mentioned is the Kindle bit of the Scribe! It has a much bigger 10″ screen, so reading eBooks is much nicer than any of the previous Kindle devices. It is still missing the page-turn buttons the original Keyboard device had, which Voyage tried to replace with haptic ones, but so far, I’ve not missed them too much as there’s less page-turning, and tapping the side of the bigger screen feels quite responsive.

So, would I recommend a Kindle Scribe? For £213.99, absolutely. It’s probably worth that as an upgrade over a standard Kindle device, but adding the note-taking functionality makes it a no-brainer! I would be more difficult at the RRP, so you’d probably need to consider the competition. They are generally more expensive but better as a note taker or Reader, but from all the reviews I’ve seen, the Kindle probably does the best job of both, and when it’s almost half the RRP, it is excellent value for money.

ps: I corrected the text I typed below the PDF file. I hope you noticed the difference 😉

I Loved FreeNAS

Sep 1, 2024 | FreeNAS, IT, TrueNAS | 0 comments

This blog is a bit of a con, as I drafted it to post on the iXsystems forum in the hope that I might get some ideas about what to do with my TrueNAS server. I’ve posted it below, but I still haven’t added it to the forum!

I loved FreeNAS, and since first installing it over ten years ago, I have learned so much about hosting and maintaining my own micro data centre, much of it from the old forums.

The death of the old forum and the focus on TrueNAS Scale have been quite disheartening, and I don’t know where I go from here. Obviously, everything is still working, so I don’t have to make any immediate decisions, but I feel I should at least be thinking about what the future holds and how I might get there.

I was hoping that if I described how I was currently using TrueNAS Core, I might gain some of the forum’s incredible wisdom to help reinvigorate my love for all things Free to TrueNAS.

For background, I started this journey running an HP N40L Microserver and about 8TB of RAW storage. That was upgraded to an NL54 and 16TB, and then I built my own server in a Fractal Define R5 case with an Intel Xeon E3 and Supermicro motherboard, ECC RAM and 36TB storage. See, I was paying attention! This was upgraded about 4 years ago using the same case, an updated Xeon and Supermicro motherboard, 64GB ECC RAM and 64TB storage, with some SSDs for jails and VMs. I still have the old one and replicate to it monthly (it used to run 24×7 until the cost of electricity went through the roof), so I have something I could play around with using Scale.

Obviously, my main use is storage. I have two pools. This main pool is 8x8TB RAIDZ2 WD HDD which is currently running about 75% (I know, too high really but I was considering upgrading the 8TB drives to 16TB over a few months). The second pool is 2x1TB Mirror Crucial SSD which is currently running about 65%. The main pool is predominantly long-term storage, and the second pool is for the jails and VMs and associated databases.

I know Scale will do all the storage stuff, so that’s not my worry. I’m worried about the jails and virtual machine I have running lots of externally facing services accessed through NGINX Proxy Manager, now running on a separate Raspberry Pi (it was running in a jail for a few years)

I have six jails of varying degrees of importance. My Nextcloud jail is probably the most important and is used by family and a small charity I was a Trustee for. The files and database are in separate datasets, and I know this could be run on Scale, but moving it and breaking it scares me! I also have an emby jail used by around 15 family members and friends. It has the emby_server folder mounted to a separate dataset, so again moving should be possible. I’m assuming it is possible to mount datasets into containers or VMs similarly to jails, but not whether the structure of these will be the same cross-platform? I also have a WordPress jail, which used to run my company website, but it’s now just my personal blog. It’s a similar set-up with a dataset stored outside the jail. I have three other jails running OpenVPN (so I can connect back to my network remotely), Limesurvey (running small surveys, which could be lost) and Airsonic (an old music streaming service, which has pretty much been replaced by emby).

I then have some VMs. The first one I created, running Ubuntu 20.4, was to play around with Docker. I’m still no expert, but I have become quite dependent on this VM as it is running Bitwarden, Teslamate, Calibre-web and a test instance of WordPress (for playing with new plugins and themes). It does have some mount points to a Docker dataset with more permanent storage, but it’s not as consistent as I’d like. It became a little unwieldy at one point, as I was also trying to run other things, so eventually, some of these got moved to their own VMs. I have an Ubuntu VM just running ONLYOFFICE Document Server, which is linked to the Nextcloud service for an Office 365-type experience. I have another Ubuntu VM running Pi-Hole and another running Mattermost, although this is still pretty much a playground and not used in anger, so I wouldn’t be too upset to lose it. The last one is a ubuntu 22.4 VM running CrashPlan, which backs up any irreplaceable data in the cloud.

Having learnt to set all this up and maintain it for the last 7-8 years gives me hope to learn the necessary skills to do it all over again. My only worry is this time I have data I don’t want to lose, and services I’d be devastated to have to start again from scratch, which I didn’t have when I started my FreeNAS > TrueNAS journey. I know ownCloud was rebuilt a few times, as was emby, before iocage allowed jails to be upgraded after the version of FreeBSD was!

EPIC Roadtrip

Jul 3, 2024 | Holiday, IT, Photographs, Tesla, Toys | 0 comments

Before we begin

Right, this is going to be a long one, so buckle in for the ride! I’m going to try to blog over the next couple of weeks while we travel from Scotland to Austria, stopping at some interesting places along the way.

Before we begin, a few updates related to previous posts are probably worth mentioning. We now own Lexee! What do I hear most of you say? Lexee is the name of our Tesla Model 3 Long Range, which we leased from Lex Autolease in 2021. The lease expired last month, and we could buy her, which we did. She will be transporting us from Scotland down to London for a day at Wimbledon to watch some tennis and then down to Dover before catching the ferry across to Calais. From there we plan to travel through France, Belgium and Germany to Austria, specifically Salzberg to explore some of the places where The Sound of Music was filmed, before heading back through Switzerland (possibly), Luxumberg and France, to catch the ferry back to Dover and then drive home to Scotland. If that sounds like a long way, it is! About a 2000 mile round trip, so a good test of the car and passengers.

They will be me, my partner of 22 years and our 11 (soon to be 12) year-old daughter. No dog for this trip, who will be enjoying her holiday staying with family at Culzean Castle. So that’s about it. We’ll be leaving for London on the 5th of July, and I’ll blog where I can along the way, hopefully with some interesting stories, pictures, and videos from my new drone. Wish us luck and enjoy the adventure…

In Bruges

So, we’ve already made it to Belgium, and this is the first time I’ve found some time to provide an update on our adventure. Perhaps the blog won’t be as EPIC as the road trip!

The drive down south was fairly uneventful, although I think I’m getting too old to drive between the Scottish and English capitals! We stopped at Tebay Services on the M6 for lunch and electricity before continuing south. Lexee suggested another stop at Keele Services, but by the time we got there, nobody needed to stop, so we thought we’d crack on. P came up with the great idea of stopping in Stratford-upon-Avon to visit the birthplace of Shakespeare and found a charger at the Morrisons for Lexee. We grabbed some supplies and plugged in the car before wandering into Stratford, where we took a few photos and headed back as the heavens opened. Not the first time we’d get wet on this holiday 🌧️

The Premier Inn at Wimbledon was fine, and we found an on-street charger to plug in Lexee. It wasn’t clear if it was for residents only, but we thought we were okay while the car was charging, and I slowed things down to make it longer than required. At 5:20 the next morning, I got up and walked to the All England Lawn Tennis Association, aka Wimbledon, to join The Queue. I probably need to write a separate blog about the whole experience, but needless to say, it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I’d hoped to get a ground ticket before 11 am and then head back to the hotel to check out with P & K before finding somewhere to park and enjoy the tennis. I was still in a very long queue by 11:20 when P & K found me to switch places so I could check out and sort the car before joining them back at the tennis. It had been a long 5 hours and I was almost ready to go back and watch films in Lexee, but they managed to get a ticket fairly shortly after I’d left (about another 90 minutes). By then, I’d checked out of the hotel, packed Lexee, who hadn’t gotten a parking ticket and found somewhere to park for the rest of the day. I returned to Wimbledon and enjoyed some tennis and football before driving down to Dover for a night in the Travelodge before our early morning ferry to Calais.

We stopped in Dunkirk en route to Bruges, checking into the Radisson Blu just after 3 pm. We were all pretty exhausted and needed a rest before exploring. Still, the hotel was a big improvement from the previous one and was cheaper to boot, so we called reception and extended our stay for an extra night, giving us a full day to explore Brussels before heading to Brussels. We headed in for some dinner and caught the end of Belgium’s largest flea market before enjoying some food and drinks at Heavenly Pizza after a short walk around the tall spires in Bruges. The next day, we returned for a waffle breakfast before a short boat trip along the canals. We headed back to the hotel for lunch and to recharge our batteries (Lexee had been topped up again the day before in the car park under the hotel!) before a final walk into Bruges for dinner at the Frites Bar.

We’d struggled to find a reasonably priced hotel in Brussels for the following day, so we booked something a little outside. We plan to visit the Atomium on our way in and then drive into the centre for a few hours. I’ve registered Lexee so she can drive in the ULEZ, and we’ll head out to the hotel after a brief visit. There are no plans beyond that, but I will provide another update. This blog might look messy as I’ve typed this on my phone using the Jetpack App! It wouldn’t let me edit the Divi blog I’d started the blog with, so I copied and pasted that into here. I’ll sort it out when I have more time to fire up the laptop. I’m sure I’ll have some spelling to fix and can add links and pictures, too!

Charging across Europe

I’m still on the Jetpack App, so excuse the spelling mistakes 😂 We’ve now reached Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Germany 🇩🇪 having passed very briefly through the Netherlands 🇳🇱 stopping for some lunch in Maastricht. Tomorrow, we are planning to make it to Salzburg in Austria 🇦🇹 where we will be staying for 3 nights. It will give us a chance to relax a little from the EPIC road trip.

Not having a plan does offer lots of flexibility. Still, you also tend to spend a fair amount of downtime planning the next day or two, including driving, accommodation and fuelling the body. Luckily, we haven’t had to give too much thought to charging Lexee, which I was referring to in my ‘Charging across Europe’ heading!

I was a little worried about how things might work across Europe, having not tried it before and knowing that the UK isn’t as easy to navigate as North America, which we’d done on a road trip around New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Toronto, Montreal and Boston last year. I needn’t have been as we’ve been fortunate enough to find destination chargers at most of the places we’ve stopped for the night, and there’s been plenty of Tesla Superchargers and other destination charges en route. We’ve not needed to go out of our way once, and the only real challenge has been the multitude of new Apps I’ve needed to install, accounts to create and payments to make. Some of them have been toward the prices I’d normally drive away from in the UK, but the approach has been to charge to full when we can overnight and start each day at 💯%

The Tesla chargers have all been super fast (some pushing the 250kWh max), the cheapest (around €0.33 or £0.28) and easiest to use (connect and you’re off). The destination chargers have been a bit more complicated, more often than not requiring an app to be downloaded and an account created to use. Some just require payment on a webpage, and some use Apple Pay, which is probably the easiest. There was only one that wouldn’t work with either method (after frustratingly downloading the app and creating an account), but the hotel had an RFID card that could be used instead. That was also the most expensive, almost competing with gasoline ⛽️, at €0.71! I’m sure we’d have found a Tesla charger, but the convenience of starting the day with a full tank’ was worth the extra cost and was probably only about £7-8 in the context of a £?000 trip!

I’ll try to pull together some more detailed stats once we’ve made it back home. I have a Teslamate account connected to Lexee, which tracks her every move, and a Grafana Docker container where I can access lots of wonderful information about trips, charging, costs, efficiency, etc. When I eventually get some time with a laptop rather than a mobile phone, I’ll add some screenshots with some details.

Anyway, that will do for now. We’re about to go and eat at a traditional German restaurant, which I’m not sure my Daughter will approve. Still, we had takeaway pizza last night while watching the Netherlands v England EURO2024 semi-final, as my partner wasn’t feeling too good. It’s great to see lots of the world on a road trip, but it does take it out of you! A new country for all of us tomorrow, though, and a few days in the same place, so we should get some time to relax a little….

Drone home…

I’m writing this from the Hotel Castel Jeanson in France on my laptop after trying to tidy up the previous blocks! I’m not sure how well I’ve done. Since the last update, we’ve visited a few castles in Germany and many sights from the Sound of Music in and around Salzburg. I’m going to post some pictures to a gallery below and some drone footage I’ve taken in a few places, which I’ve uploaded to YouTube.

I was quite surprised at how many places specifically ban the use of drones, outside of the usual restrictions for using drone assist. I can understand why, but we’ve visited some spectacular places which can’t be fully appreciated from the ground. Anyway, I might provide a more detailed update should I find time before we arrive home, but for now, it was a quick update to fix things and add some pictures and video!

There’s no place like home.

We made it home last night after 2890 miles through 6 countries using almost 900kWh of electricity. Lexee did us proud and never missed a beat. We all need another holiday and have agreed to leave the next road tips for at least 2-3 years! It was a great adventure, but at times, it didn’t feel like much of a holiday moving between so many hotels. I was going to try to wrap this blog up with a detailed analysis of our EV charging, but I think I’ll save that for another blog. My Teslamate service has all of the data, with the Trip summary shown below. I need an updated credit card statement to double-check the conversions from € to £, so watch out for that in the coming months. I might also provide a bit more detail about the places we stayed, but for now, our EPIC trip has ended!