u/tomayt0

My father has had some health news which has made him change his outlook on life.

Many years ago in 1996 he wanted to travel to China with me, but I was a young boy and scared of traveling that far from Scotland.

In 2024 I traveled to Asia with my wife and had a nice time in China. My Father has always wanted to go. I now feel bad that he missed his opportunity to travel there.

I am worried my father would struggle with the culture clash in Asia especially the "Face" concept. He is a very friendly and gregarious person who will be anyone's friend plus he cannot speak any other languages.

He is Scottish and likes to talk about culture, he is hoping to talk to Chinese people about whisky

I suggested booking a "tour" but he doesn't like how expensive and touristy they are.

He would like to just travel to different places and stay in a hotel and walk around.

This is what I suggested to him, can anyone recommend or add suggestions. He enjoys walking, technology, industry, nature, cars etc.

(this is essentially a reverse trip of what my wife and I did)

0. Fly to Hong Kong
1. Hong Kong - 4 days to acclimatise
2. Shenzhen - 3 days
3. Hangzhou - 3 days (plus stop in Guilin for Karst mountains)
4. Shanghai - 4 days
5. Beijing - 4 days
6. Fly home

Maybe I should suggest X'ian?

TL;DR

Live demo here

Github Repo

story

Solr is an awesome search engine DB that I used to love using back in the Spring Boot 2.x days.

Sadly in 2020 the original spring-data-solr was discontinued and archived in 2023.

I think it was because of a few things, dev burnout and ElasticSearch popularity.

However Solr is still an active and popular search engine which ironically uses the same Lucene search engine under the hood as Elastic. https://solr.apache.org/

I wanted to use Solr in a newer project but the problem is that Spring Boot is now 4.x.x and Spring Framework is onto version 7.

I hacked in SolrJ but then I thought, wouldn't it be cool if I rebuilt Spring Data Solr for the newest versions of Spring Boot?

With the help of Claude code and analysing the old code and taking some inspiration from Spring Data MongoDB I have managed to assemble a version 1.0.0

It's just gone live on Maven Central 🎉

Add it to an existing Spring Boot app

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.tomaytotomato</groupId>
  <artifactId>solr-spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
  <version>1.0.0</version>
</dependency>

It's not a fork of the original - https://github.com/spring-attic/spring-data-solr

Features:

• Auto-configuration for standalone and SolrCloud modes
• SolrRepository<T> with full CRUD, pagination and sorting
• Derived query methods — 18 keywords (Containing, Between, GreaterThan, IsNull, etc.)
• @Query annotation for raw Solr query strings
• Highlighting (HighlightPage)
• Faceting (FacetPage)
• Cursor-based deep paging (CursorResult)
• Partial updates — atomic set, add, increment
• Actuator health indicator
• Micrometer instrumentation

There's a live bookstore demo on Railway if you want to poke at it before committing. Swagger UI is at /docs.

Have a play with it pllease.

I have a 2008 Passat B6 2.0 TDI (CBBB engine) Estate

Thankfully she is still going strong but she is getting some serious wear and tear problems which could be costly in the future.

EGR is cracked and leaking into the engine compartment and the clutch sometimes feels like its slipping.

I think I will get a few more years out of her, but I am starting to research a successor.

Currently I have a few options in mind:

1. Newer Passat B8 (2016 era)
2. Skoda Octavia or Superb Estate
3. Audi A6 Estate (2016 era)

My one concern is they all seem to be a bit smaller in boot space and I see complaints online about electronics on these cars.

Curious what things you have found annoying or problematic?

Do you miss not having a 2.0TDI and the torque?

I am getting a bit of decision paralysis on whether to save my money or just whack a 10% overpayment on my mortgage.

The dilemma is based on me being a high earner and that I will be taxed on putting money in a fixed savings account.

When I try and calculate it out it seems that my savings account after tax would only be 2.25% but I am not sure whether that is the correct calculation or not.

e.g. if I put a £1000 in a savings account at 4.5% and I get £45 after the end of the year.

Then I minus 40% tax off that is £18, so I only save £27 which is 2.7%.

Versus a 3.69% mortgage makes me poorer after a year.

Is this logic correct, or am I missing a component?