Neil Turner

Going on a P&O ‘mini-cruise’ to Bruges

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P&O Ferry 'Pride of Bruges' docked at Zeebrugge

Last weekend Christine and I went on a ‘mini-cruise’ to Bruges with P&O Ferries. The ‘mini-cruise’ is a package that includes return overnight ferry journeys for two people from Hull to Zeebrugge or Rotterdam, and return coach transfer to Bruges or Amsterdam respectively. This can be taken over two consecutive nights there and back, or over three nights with an overnight stop at your destination.

We did the two night option, which gave us around 8 hours to spend in Bruges. I’ll write more about what we got up to in Bruges later this week but today I’ll focus on the ‘mini-cruise’ experience.

‘Mini-cruise’

I keep using ‘mini-cruise’ in quote marks because this is most definitely not a cruise. You travel on a standard cross-channel ferry – for the Hull-Zeebrugge crossing this is either the Pride of Bruges or Pride of York which are comparatively small ships (around eight decks) but the Hull-Rotterdam ferries are somewhat bigger. The on-board facilities are therefore not like you would expect on a large cruise ship, and are limited to a couple of restaurants and bars, a shop, café and small cinema.

We were on the Pride of Bruges which was introduced into service in 1987 – and it shows. There hasn’t been much done to the ship since then and it retains its 1980s feel in many parts despite some effort in refurbishing it. This includes the cabins.

The cabins sit somewhere between ‘sleeper train’ and ‘budget hotel’. They are en-suite so a shower, basin and toilet are squeezed into a tiny wetroom with each cabin. The beds are bunkbeds, and are rather narrow too – I can’t imagine many children will be conceived out at sea. And you get one unearthed plug socket, about 7 foot off the ground above the mirror, which uses the European standard connector. The walls were also not particularly thick and so the rowdy hen party (bachelorette party for the Americans amongst you) in the next cabin kept Christine awake for most of the night; I slept through it. You have to pay around £10 extra if you want a window in your cabin – we didn’t, so our cabin was in the middle of the boat rather than at the edge. In any case, it’s late October and it gets dark early, so there wouldn’t have been much to see.

Staying connected

There were some signs of modernisation elsewhere on board. Wifi is available, charged at £3 for 90 minutes, which is actually quite reasonable considering you’re out at sea. I didn’t test it so I can’t say how fast or reliable it was, although it seemed to be only available in the public areas and not the cabins. Mobile phone reception seems to also be available at sea, but only for calls and texts, not for data – again, I didn’t test this nor find out how much extra it costs to use. In any case, when leaving Hull I still had phone reception on my own network, 3, for quite some time after departing.

Eating and drinking

Of the two bars, the Sunset Show Bar is the biggest with live entertainment and a casino table, with another smaller and quieter bar next door. The drinks selection is reasonable and not whilst not cheap it wasn’t ridiculously expensive either. The café serves Starbucks coffee, but not the full range – no pumpkin spiced lattes here – and no soya milk. Then there are the two restaurants – The Kitchen and The Brasserie.

The Kitchen is a buffet. We didn’t go there at any point because of the queues – instead we booked into The Brasserie each time, for both evening meals and breakfasts. You do have to book but it’s worth it – it’s a full waiter service restaurant and the food is reasonably good. Not outstanding but I’ve paid far more for worse. The best thing is that it’s also reasonably quiet in there, whereas we could hear the noise from The Kitchen out in the foyer.

When you book your ‘mini-cruise’ tickets online you have the option of pre-paying for your meals – for two people this adds £88 to the cost but at £11 per person per meal it’s not bad overall. It’s enough to cover The Kitchen, and in The Brasserie it will get you £16.50 per person for dinner – anything over that just has to be paid by cash or credit card. We only went over by about £5 between the two of us for our meals – two courses and non-alcoholic drinks. I imagine we would have spent more overall had we paid for each meal individually rather than pre-paying, and because you have to check-in before 5:30pm it’s not really feasible to have a meal before you travel.

If you do the two night ‘mini-cruise’, then, where possible, P&O will try to ensure that you get the same cabin in each direction, so you can leave your luggage there. This isn’t always available, and won’t be an option for the three night option as you’ll go out and come back on two different ferries.

The clientele on board was a mix – some couples like us, presumably on the ‘mini-cruise’ deal, but also a few families, a couple of stag and hen parties, a few school groups and some lorry drivers. Because it’s a ferry you can bring your car, coach or lorry with you, although we went as foot passengers.

Getting there

Speaking of which, if you are travelling by train to Hull, I would strongly advise getting a taxi from the railway station to the ferry terminal. The Zeebrugge ferries leave from Terminal 2 at the ferry port, which is up the arse end of nowhere. According to Google Maps it’s a good 15 minute walk from Terminal 1, used by the Rotterdam ferries, where there is a regular bus service to the railway station. So if you’re going to Rotterdam then consider the bus but a taxi is a must for Zeebrugge. It’ll cost you less than a tenner each way, and on the return there will be a number of taxis waiting at the terminal when you arrive.

The foot passenger terminal at Hull mirrors the ferry in being very 1980s. It’s not like an airport with lounges and shops and so forth – the facilities are pretty basic. Think ‘small regional railway station’ rather than ‘international travel hub’. That being said all of the facilities you’d normally see in an airport are on the ferry anyway. The Zeebrugge terminal was a bit more modern and was full of adverts (in English) selling Hull and East Yorkshire as a tourist destination – I get the impression that Brits going abroad makes up a higher proportion of their customer base than Europeans visiting Britain.

The weather wasn’t too bad for our journey although the sea was rather choppy on the return. When you’re in bed you only notice it a bit though and neither of us got seasick. The ferries lumber across the seas at around 20 miles per hour so they’re reasonably steady, and tend only to be cancelled in the worst of conditions.

In a world where low cost airlines zip you from place to place and international trains carry you under the English Channel at high speeds, it’s perhaps a little odd that we still use these huge ferries to get around. But would you rather spend the whole day travelling, or have the travelling done for you whilst you’re asleep? Sometimes it’s nice to go to sleep in one place and wake up at your destination.

The Brontë Garden at Sowerby Bridge station

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Brontë Garden

Last month a new garden was officially opened at Sowerby Bridge railway station. It’s called the Brontë Garden, and is maintained by volunteers from the Friends of Sowerby Bridge Railway Station. It sits on a small parcel of land next to the car park, opposite platform one.

The name comes from the station’s slightly tenuous link with the Brontë family. The Brontës hail from over the hills in Haworth, in the Worth Valley, but one of the Brontë siblings was employed at Sowerby Bridge station at its time of opening in the 1840s. He was Branwell Brontë, brother of the three famous sisters Emily, Anne and Charlotte. He was later appointed at another station further up the line at Luddendenfoot – this station succumbed to the rationalisation of the railways in the 1960s and no longer exists.

The Brontë Garden at Sowerby Bridge railway station

The garden isn’t particularly big but does house a bench and small gravelled area, along with some planters built using old railway sleepers. There’s also a restored luggage trolley, with opened suitcases serving as planters.

As well as the garden, the Friends of Sowerby Bridge Railway Station look after various other planters on the platforms, many of which are sponsored by local businesses. It’s a relatively young group, having only been formed in November 2010 (co-incidentally about the same time I moved to Sowerby Bridge). Whilst they are a voluntary group, they’ve done quite a bit to make the station look nicer – a hard ask, thanks to its brutal concrete architectural style.

The Ice Bucket Challenge

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One of my lovely friends nominated me for the ice bucket challenge earlier this week. You probably know the score by now, but the idea is to raise awareness of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS – more commonly known as Motor Neurone Disease (MND) in Britain. Throwing a bucket of ice water over yourself is supposed to simulate the effects of the condition, which is terminal and normally kills its sufferers within a few years of diagnosis. There is no cure. One of my colleagues died as a result of MND a couple of years ago.

Whilst the idea is that, after being nominated, you have 24 hours to donate or be drenched in ice cold water, thankfully most of my friends have been doing both. I’ve donated £5 to Motor Neurone Disease Association. I’ve also donated £5 to WaterAid; whilst us westerners can chuck water around as it’s in plentiful supply, there are many in the world who can’t because there isn’t enough to go around. And donations to WaterAid made in the next week or so will be matched by UKAid, so they’re worth double.

Originally I planned to do this outside – however, as we’re four floors up in our flat it would have been a long, cold walk back so I did it in the shower. My wife Christine, whose laughter you can hear in the video, filmed it on my iPhone 5 using the stock camera app. It really was very, very cold – hence why I got the name of the MND Association wrong.

This was the first time I’ve ever edited a video. I used iMovie ’09 as it was already on my Mac, and apart from one tutorial to do the silly bonus replay at the end, all the editing was done just by exploring the app. It’s reasonably intuitive. The music was from Free Music Archive. I edited out the bit about nominations, but those of you who are friends with me on Facebook can see the uncut footage on there.

Brimham Rocks

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Brimham Rocks

Yesterday, we took advantage of the nice weather and went to Brimham Rocks, near Harrogate. The site is owned by the National Trust and features large millstone grit rock formations that visitors are free to climb on. It’s free to visit, but those who are not members of the National Trust have to pay £6 to use the car park.

I’ve been many times over the years. My parents have been National Trust members for as long as I can remember and have taken me there several times, but I also seem to remember going with my primary school class at one point in the 1990s, when marbles were the playground craze of the time. The last time was in 2007, with the university hiking club and as part of an unwieldy-sized group of 19 mixed-ability hikers. This time was with a smaller group of 10 – myself, Christine, and 8 other former members of the hiking club and plus-ones.

Christine isn’t so confident with walking so whilst most of the group did a nine mile walk around the wider Nidderdale area, we just did a stroll around the edge of the site and took photos. Some of the rocks are really impressive, rising up to 30 metres in height, and many have been given names. The Blacksmith looks like an anvil, and the Druid’s Writing Table looks like… well, a table. There’s also The Smartie Tube which has a tunnel that small people can fit through – I’m not sure if Nestlé has authorised the use of its trademark though.

Unfortunately I was an idiot and didn’t check the settings on my camera before taking the photos, so everything was taken at 1600 ISO. Thankfully I shoot in RAW so I was able to improve the photos somewhat, but they do look like they’ve been taken on a much older camera. An inadvertent retro filter, if you will. A small selection of these images are available to view on Flickr.

I doubt this will be the last time we go to Brimham Rocks. It’s a great place to bring kids – provided that you keep them under observation, they will love being able to climb the rocks. I’m sure we’ll be back when we have children of our own. And, if we pick a day like yesterday, we’ll be in plenty of company – by the time we left in the mid-afternoon, both carparks were full.

Shattered

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Elephant

I can very much not recommend working 10 days straight without a break. Especially if one of those days involves 14 hours at work with almost no breaks.

I was doing fine until today when my brain turned to mush at about 3pm. I was asked to calculate some weighted averages and I just couldn’t handle it. Thankfully there were enough mindless things to keep me going until I finished at 5pm.

And it’s only Tuesday – I still have another three days at work until I get a break. Admittedly Friday will only be a half day. And this weekend is a bank holiday so I’ll be off for three days.

What may surprise you is that I haven’t been resorting to coffee and energy drinks to keep going – I’ve had precisely two coffees in the past ten days and no energy drinks – just the odd diet cola or Irn Bru here and there. And plenty of early nights.

On the plus side, I’ve got plenty of work done during a really critical time for us and have accrued plenty of time off in lieu of overtime – around five days’ worth. So I’ll be able to take a well-earned rest when everything calms down.

Goodbye Delicious, hello Pinboard

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Yesterday’s links from Delicious post will be the last one, as from now on I’ll be using rival bookmarking service Pinboard.

I’ve been using Delicious for some time and for a time I was one of its featured users – I managed to amass several thousand followers on there, which is far more than on all of my other social media presences combined. But clearly people are not using Delicious anymore – nowadays, when I save a link, I’m invariably the first person to do so. And usually the only person. It used to be that any link would have had several other people saving it to their bookmarks as well, but not now. And these links are from the likes of BBC News and Lifehacker – not exactly small and niche sites.

Furthermore Delicious changed hands again recently. You may remember Yahoo! bought it years ago, and then more recently it was sold to AVOS Systems, a company owned by the original founders of YouTube. And then in May Delicious was bought again by Science Inc, which co-incidentally was the last thing posted to Delicious’ blog and Twitter account. Either its new owners have something big planned or it’s being neglected like it was in the Yahoo! days.

Meanwhile years ago I signed up for a Pinboard account. Pinboard doesn’t have free accounts; instead, everyone pays a one-time sign-up fee which increases over time. It was $9.40 then, now it’s $10.46. You can also upgrade to enable archiving, where a copy of every page you bookmark is saved, allowing you to search them. This is $25 per year, but your first year is discounted by your sign-up fee, so it would cost me $15.60 in year one.

Pinboard can do a lot more things than Delicious, and has plenty of options to set for your account. This is at the expense of design, however, and explains the main reason why I hadn’t switched sooner. As much as I prefer to pay for services I use regularly, Delicious – especially after its redesign – was a nicer experience. But I’m concerned about Delicious’ long-term future, and so I’ll go with Pinboard.

Switching over to Pinboard from Delicious was simple, as the apps I use the most for saving links – Reeder and Pocket – support both services, as does IFTTT which I use for sharing links to Twitter.

If you read this blog or follow me on Twitter, then the chances are that you won’t notice anything different. My Pinboard profile is public, so if you also use it, you can follow me on there.

Alestorm’s new album

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Over the years I’ve occasionally mentioned the music of the band Alestorm, a Scottish pirate metal band. Imagine heavy metal sea shanties, covering such subjects as piracy, drinking, and the acquisition of wenches. The above music video is a prime example, containing all of the aforementioned things, and it just happens to have come from their latest album. Other songs include ‘Surf Squid Warfare‘ about going into the future to defeat undead squid from space with beer. Yes.

I first came across Alestorm in 2009, when a friend recommended that I check them out on Spotify. I’ve since bought three of their four albums, went to see them play live in Leeds in 2012, and right now they’re the third highest-ranked band in my last.fm library. Their fourth album, Sunset on the Golden Age, was released recently and I got halfway through listening to it on Spotify before buying it. It’s one of their best.

Their first album, Captain Morgan’s Revenge, was okay, but I much preferred their second album Black Sails at Midnight – which I listed as my second-favourite album back in 2011 (it’s probably my third or fourth nowadays). Back Through Time, their third album, was okay – some good songs let down by rough and (in my view) poorer production quality. Sunset on the Golden Age, by contrast, has the production values of their second album and sounds much better for it. I also note that Alestorm’s lead singer Christopher Bowes has consigned his keytar to Davey Jones’ Locker – they’re actually playing real instruments instead of synthesising their sounds.

Though not very politically correct, Alestorm’s music has surprising staying power, considering that they’re arguably a novelty act. But, a novelty act that has released four albums and been on several world tours is not to be sniffed at. So crack upon a bottle of rum, fire your cannons and grab yourself a copy of their latest album – it’s on Amazon or iTunes. And they’re touring the UK again in the autumn. Plus, if you like Alestorm, you may also like Christopher Bowes’ other band Gloryhammer, who songs include the wonderful Unicorn Invasion of Dundee amongst others.

Making do with last year’s model

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Nokia 100 and Apple iPhone 5

It’s almost August, so I’m within a couple of months of my initial 24 month mobile phone contract with Three coming to an end. I bought my iPhone 5, along with a new contract, in September 2012.

At the time I decided to go for a new contract because my current phone at the time, an iPhone 4, was not in a good state. It would randomly reboot around once a week, and sometimes when it came back up it would ask to be connected to iTunes, as if it hadn’t been activated. The battery life was starting to get rather poor by this point as well. Rather than spend money on a new battery and hope that it would also fix the reboot problem, I decided to take advantage of the launch of the iPhone 5 and just get a new phone. And because iPhones are so expensive when bought without a contract, I took on a new two year contract at the same time.

This time, my iPhone 5 is in a better state by comparison. Admittedly it too doesn’t have the same battery life as it did when I got it, but that is to be expected, and I have backup batteries in both my usual bags to top it up if needed (which actually isn’t that often). It’s as reliable as it was when I got it, and thanks to the improvements in iOS 7, it’s more useful now than it was two years ago. And iOS 8 will hopefully make it even better.

So, unless the rumoured iPhone 6 is amazing and has must-have features, I’ll sit it out and stick with my current model for the next twelve months. Not only will I not have the upfront cost of a new handset but a SIM-only contract will be much cheaper – around £14 per month instead of the £34 per month I’m paying now, saving me £240 over the year, or £5 per week.

Christine is in a similar position with her phone as well, so hopefully between us we’ll have the capacity to save quite a bit of money over the next year. There’s no point having the latest and greatest model if the current one works fine, and does everything I need it to. I’d rather have the extra money.

Roku 2 XS Streaming Player review

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A photo of the box for the Roku 2 XS Streaming Player

Last week I purchased a Roku 2 XS Streaming Player from Amazon. Normally costing around £80, Amazon are now selling them for £55, making them just £6 more expensive than the slightly newer but more limited Roku Streaming Stick (sponsored link).

When I discussed streaming media boxes last month, the streaming stick was my original first choice, but this was before the drop in price of the Roku 2 XS. Compared with the Streaming Stick, the 2 XS adds a number of extra features:

  • A USB port, for plugging in external hard disks to watch video files from.
  • A Micro-SD card slot to expand its storage space from the 256 megabytes provided as standard.
  • An Ethernet port.
  • Analogue outputs for televisions that don’t support HDMI.
  • A motion-sensitive remote for playing games, with Angry Birds included.

The latter two don’t bother me too much, but extra capacity could be useful if I end up installing lots of extra channels.

I’m really impressed with it, actually. The box is tiny and can sit comfortably in the palm of your hand – in fact, the remote control is longer than the box itself. Speaking of which, the remote is simple and doesn’t have lots of seemingly useless buttons like most of our other remotes. It doesn’t come with HDMI cable as standard, instead shipping with an analogue cable, but you can get a reasonable HDMI cable from most pound shops these days.

Setting up the Roku

Device setup is quite easy – plug it into your TV and the mains, and then the device will try to connect to the internet. If you haven’t plugged an Ethernet cable in, you’ll get to select a Wifi network, and enter the passcode. Your device will now ask you to go to a computer and set up a Roku account, and then enter a code to link your device to your account. You do need to enter either a credit card number or PayPal email address to create an account, but you won’t be charged unless you purchase an app which costs money.

Roku will offer several channels to you, and then you’re ready to go. It’s easy to navigate around, although sometimes there’s a bit of a lag between you pressing a button on the remote and the box reacting. The newer and more powerful Roku 3 should have less lag but it’s quite a bit more expensive.

Setting up your Roku with your YouTube, Facebook and Flixster (for UltraViolet) accounts is done on your computer as before, but the Netflix app requires you to enter your username and password on the device itself. You can use an on-screen keyboard, or a mobile app for iOS or Android which turns your phone into a remote control, with keyboard entry. I found that the Netflix app would not accept a password with special characters so I had to change it first.

Using the Roku

Once set up, the device is really simple to use on a day to day basis. Firstly, you don’t need to turn it off, as it effectively runs on the same power as a Raspberry Pi and can be left plugged in and switched on without drawing too much electricity. This means it doesn’t take ages to boot up when you want to watch something. Apart from the slight interface lag as mentioned before, it’s quick to navigate through, and as most of the apps are official and authorised you get a consistent experience – the iPlayer app works in a similar way to the BBC’s web site, for example.

I’ve mentioned BBC iPlayer, but ITV Player, 4oD and Demand 5 are also available, covering all four main free-to-air broadcasters in the UK. Of the paid-for streaming services, Roku supports Netflix and Sky’s Now TV, but not Tesco’s BlinkBox or Rakuten’s Wuaki TV. US users can get the Amazon Prime Instant Video channel but it hasn’t launched in the UK yet.

If you want to watch content on your own computer, such as films that you have copied from DVDs, then you can install the Plex app on your Roku, and the Plex Media Server app on your computer. The Plex app on the Roku is free for 30 days and then there is a small charge to keep using it – I paid £1.49 but I think this was a special offer.

Another nifty feature allows you to beam content from the YouTube mobile app to your Roku, in a similar way to Google’s ChromeCast stick and Apple’s AirPlay. An icon appears on your screen, which will show the video on your TV, but you retain control on the mobile device. Right now, YouTube and Netflix are the only two apps which support this although I haven’t tried Netflix myself.

On the whole I’m really impressed with the Roku. At £55 it’s only just over half the price of the Apple TV, and can do just about everything its more expensive competitor can do, and more. The interface is simple and enjoyable to use, apart from the slight lag as mentioned earlier. I would definitely recommend it.

Un-cancelling Dropbox Pro

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Yes, I know, that didn’t take long. But having spent a week with Microsoft OneDrive, I decided that Dropbox Pro was actually worth paying extra for after all.

I originally cancelled Dropbox Pro because I didn’t need the extra space that I was paying for, and indeed had access to enough extra space in OneDrive. So I spent most of last week moving my photos (which take up most of the space) from Dropbox to OneDrive – almost 15 GB in total. This took several days to upload, on and off.

I then decided to enable the photo backup feature in OneDrive’s iOS app. Dropbox has a similar feature, as does Google+ and Flickr – all of the photos in your camera roll are backed up. And this is one of the key reasons why I decided to go back on my original decision and re-subscribe to Dropbox Pro – OneDrive is a bit dumb. It wanted to upload every image on my iPhone again, even though they were already there, having been copied across from Dropbox.

To put this into context, this amounts to over 1000 images, plus a few videos. That’s a lot of data to duplicate. I’m lucky that both my home broadband and mobile internet services are “unlimited” but it would still take a long time and require tidying up afterwards.

This is something I mentioned a couple of years ago in the technical superiority of Dropbox. Dropbox does a lot of things to reduce the amount of bandwidth it needs, by automatically detecting duplicate files, only uploading the modified portions of files, and synchronising files on the same network directly as well as with Dropbox’s servers. And last week an update to the Dropbox desktop client enabled ‘streaming sync’, which should allow large files to upload more quickly. OneDrive is evidently a much more basic client, that doesn’t check for pre-existing files.

What’s more, when I copied all of my photos back into my Dropbox folder, there was no need to upload them all again. Dropbox keeps copies of all files deleted within the past 30 days – or, for an extra $39 a year, its packrat feature will keep any deleted files indefinitely (business customers get this as standard). So it was able to bring all 15 GB of photos back online within a few minutes, and not several days.

Of course, cloud storage is pretty much the only thing that Dropbox does as a company, so of course it has a greater focus on the quality of its product. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple and most of Dropbox’s other rivals all focus primarily on other products, with cloud storage as a small sideline.

As much as I would prefer to pay less for Dropbox Pro, my experiences over the past couple of weeks have convinced me that it’s worth paying a bit more for a better service. OneDrive may now be giving me over a terabyte of storage as part of my Office 365 subscription, but I can do so much more with the 100-and-a-bit gigabytes I get with Dropbox Pro, even though it costs extra.