July 2025: Sun, Sea, and Soldering

There’s something magical about those long July evenings when the sun doesn’t set until past nine. This month had a perfect mix of everything I love: family time in the sun, catching up with friends, and yes, spending far too many hours hunched over a workbench with a soldering iron.

Canary Island Family Getaway

The first week of July saw us trading the unpredictable British weather for guaranteed sunshine in Gran Canaria. Alex’s dad Nick had hired a villa to celebrate his birthday, bringing the whole family together – and what a crew we were. There was me and Alex, Nick and Jo, Amy and William, plus Charlotte and Sean with their two little ones Hallie and Summer. Nine of us under one roof, which sounds chaotic but was actually brilliant.

The highlight was definitely the boat trip along the coast. There’s nothing quite like jumping off a boat into crystal-clear water with dramatic volcanic cliffs towering above you. We rented a CUPRA for getting around the island, which was an absolute blast on those winding mountain roads. And naturally, we had to check out the local Hard Rock Cafe for an evening of live music – caught a brilliant Queen tribute band that had the whole place singing along. Not a bad way to celebrate a birthday!

Escape Room… Experience

Back home, we fancied a bit of puzzle-solving action and headed to The Escapologist with some friends. Now, we all love a good escape room, but I have to be honest – this one was a bit of a letdown.

We completed it, sure, but the whole thing felt a bit cheap and thrown together. The staff seemed like they couldn’t care less whether we succeeded or not. Compare that to some of the brilliant escape rooms we’ve done before where the game masters are properly invested in your experience, and it was pretty disappointing. Won’t be rushing back there, put it that way. If anyone has recommendations for good escape rooms in the area, I’m all ears!

Workshop Tinkering

Of course, I couldn’t let the month pass without some project time. Mid-July found me back at the workbench, wiring up motor drivers and microcontrollers.

I’ve been working on a little automation project that I’ll share more about once it’s actually working properly. Let’s just say it involves motors, an ESP32, and possibly too much ambition for a weeknight project.

Tech Corner: Docker Health Checks

Speaking of projects, here’s a quick tip I picked up this month while debugging a container that kept failing silently. If you’re running Docker containers, especially for home automation or self-hosted services, you should be using health checks.

Add this to your Dockerfile or docker-compose.yml to catch issues before they become problems:

healthcheck:
  test: ["CMD", "curl", "-f", "http://localhost:8080/health"]
  interval: 30s
  timeout: 10s
  retries: 3
  start_period: 40s

The start_period is particularly useful for services that take a while to initialise – it gives your container time to start up before health checks begin failing. You can check container health status anytime with docker ps and look for the health column, or use docker inspect --format='{{.State.Health.Status}}' container_name for scripting.

Combine this with something like Uptime Kuma monitoring your containers, and you’ll catch problems before they ruin your self-hosted movie night.

Looking Ahead

July reminded me why I love summer – the freedom to switch between family adventures and solo tinkering, between sunshine and soldering. August is looking equally packed, and I’m already eyeing up a few more electronics projects that have been gathering dust on the shelf.

Until next time!