penguin42 @penguin42@mastodon.org.uk

The UK is currently cooking on about 12.5GW of wind energy (about 37% of our load) - I think that's a record. It was a bit lower over night, but still electricity prices went very negative in the early hours. Although they were still running some gas (about 2.5GW) and a touch of coal (about 0.7GW - I guess so they didn't have to let it cool down)

This thrush provides a nice christmasy picture, sitting on our rowan, in front of our holly. Curiously it picked holly berries from the ground but not from the tree.
#photography #wildlife

#science words of the day; 'positronium' and 'onium';
(via Reddit) https://phys.org/news/2019-12-gamma-ray-laser-closer-reality.html

I'm confused if anything could have stopped Friday's attack in London; keeping him in prison for another 8 years might have only delayed it. He was apparently such a model prisoner he was invited to the conference. You can imagine the services monitoring him thinking that a conference on prisoner rehabilitation was as safe a place as any.

Looking at ~6 years energy usage; my electric usage is ~10% down, and my gas ~15% up. Hmm. The gas is very variable though; I guess based on weather and things like the mood the boiler is in and whether people decide they want a shower every day.

Today has mostly been toast, crumpets and paper work. Hmm.

Slides on the restoration of the 'Bloodhound missile control system'/Ferranti Argus 700:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NtBsNaRYYZq5R5AQYkKzNfaZLRGMIwOc
(Via Computer Conservation North West)
#retrocomputing

A 1970's tektronics spectrum analyser my dad has open on his bench; the design priority was obviously for it to be shiny. There's some crazy mechanics as well - knobs on the front that go via bevelled gears to move a lever that flicks a normal toggle switch somewhere inside.

I'd hoped the threadripper 2950x's would have dropped after the 3xxx were released this week - but nada; 2950x's seem to be rare now; and their bigger cousins, 2970/2990 have only dropped a few %.

Thanksgiving: how many others in non-us countries have had to correct others in other non-us countries who were surprised you didn't do thanksgiving. People seem to think the UK would.

Hmm another couple of short powrcuts this evening - I guess the last was a few months ago; but it's not something we have here normally; I guess it'll be like this until a cable really goes BOOM and they go 'ah. That'll be where the fault is....'

Fun bug of the week; something trying to allocate 2^49 bytes of ran (64-12 (4k chunk)- 3 (8 bits/byte)

A predator of some type has made it's home on a near by field; not sure what it is - but it's got a great fan tail when it's hovering looking for lunch.
This is as close as I've got it so far.

End of a holiday; done some paperwork (good), made small amount of useful progress on toy project 1 (Good, but wanted to finish it), started another toy project and got quite far (well OK, but as long as it doesn't end up as 1); got awful cold and have almost got over it (hmmm).

I don't see how anyone can promise a zero carbon economy on a day like this; a moderately cold winter day with moderate wind and we're burning away 25GW of gas, 2.6GW of biomass and 3GW of coal; we can get rid of that coal - but no one has any idea what to replace that gas with.

Sigh; tripped over kernel's printf now hashing all %p pointers - confused the hell out of me; even a NULL pointer comes out as some magic potentially legal looking value that confuses the hell out of you. I mean a NULL should look NULL.