Posts by agurney 221 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2015
Today we consumed 24kWh - north UK, no EV, no AC.
However, our solar panels generated 27kWh, with any excess stored in batteries which keeps us going overnight, so currently NOT "contributing to our current CO2-apocalypse."
"Additionally, I don't think people realize how fast water can rise from flash flooding. "
In the late 1970s we (me & future Mrs. G) went to the Linn of Dee, put a bunch of tinnies in the river to cool and pitched our tent a dozen feet (no metres in those days) above the river; woke up in the morning to the water lapping the edge of the tent and the beer long gone. Eye opening and scary!
...started writing about 50 years ago
I wrote a program that takes Dover HW and LW times and creates tide tables and corrections for a variety of locations on the Scottish west coast for sailors .. I only run it once a year so have never bothered converting it from QBASIC .. hence having a rarely used Windows 98 (or is it '95?) VM. If it ain't broke don't fix it (there be dragons!)
What an odd image to illustrate the article, no doubt AI generated - split down the middle but the edges don't match; T on the left is intact but the right has a shred of T; and amazingly the end of three lines of text has been torn from the left side without the paper it was printed on! ... and those fingers are decidedly odd :(
I think you mean "principles" not "principals", and I seem to remember enjoying "The White Company" when I came across that and the bookshelf of simlar tomes in the local library 60 years ago ... but I've also enjoyed troublesome works such as Peter Wright's Spycatcher and those of Solzhenitsyn (First Circle was stolen from me on a train in Yugoslavia .. but I didn't make a fuss as it was in the days of Tito).
I've had some AI images created that bear a similarity to some of my stuff that's online, but they could probably be fobbed off as "derivative" - maybe that's why ChatGPT and their ilk have a tendency to misspell common words in their graphics renditions.
..run a training course and finding at the last minute it wasn't quite what he was hired to do..
I had something similar to that in Mumbai for a national Telco. I was booked to run a course on SMS fraud and similar stuff for a handful of techs (state of the art at the time). We were squashed into a hot cramped cupboard .. but when I laid out the agenda for the sessions there was a bit of consternation and folk started making apologies and leaving the room. Within a few minutes I was ushered to a lecture theatre and asked if I could do my presentation on the LIVE system in front of a hundred or so folk!
[Yes, everything went well; I knew my stuff, answered all the questions that were thrown at me and did some requests that identified SMS spamming in progress in real time so a good session and a happy customer]
Interestingly, $largeNuclearSite down the road has started doing just this, and is causing a drain of teachers from the area as they're offering much higher salaries and better working conditions..
Similarly, when I was starting out in education (teacher, then industry .. I could do so did!) at the start of the oil boom in Scotland, new science teachers who were being recruited for the northern isles (Orkney/Shetland) were being poached by the oil companies at massively inflated salaries.
"Not a battery as yet. I'll look at the figures after a full year of running.."
I'm happy with my numbers thus far; i've had one solar inverter failure (easy DIY replacement after 9 years) and the batteries 'should' have a good life:
As a fairly early adopter (2011) I'm getting around 73p per unit for FIT + (deemed) export which brings in around £2K per annum.
I'm paying about 8p for an EV tariff for a few hours overnight to charge the batteries (15kWh).
At the moment I'm using more than I can store overnight and the solar's doing next to nothing, but within a couple of months I expect to be able to charge the batteries mostly from solar so should have a minimal off peak electricity bill along with income from the FIT so more £ in than out.
.. " .. the bullshit about saving money, being more economical, is really annoying. If people want/need to use less they know how, and it doesn't take a smart meter to tell them..."
I find my smart meter very useful. I have solar + battery storage + a low cost nightly tariff (used to charge the batteries). The smart meter lets me monitor consumption in real time so I can see if I'm dipping in to the grid at peak rate times so can balance kettle/oven/heaters/whatever if necessary (target is: Usage Now=0 on the smart meter)
[ .. per another current thread I have ESP32s/ESP8266s monitoring water temperature, humidity, solar and battery inverters, and more, all feeding a Raspberry Pi running an MQTT broker and displaying via another ESP32 so I can see consumption and status across appliances.]
[ The OVO reference hit a nerve; I've just had a smart meter fitted to MIL's remote property because of the radio teleswitch service cutoff and they still haven't sorted the bills out after nearly two months]
WOW, that brings back memories .. there's a fair chance that you used one of the BASIC and COMAL open learning courses that I wrote for TVEI way back when (1987-1988). The language and environment (compiler, interpreter, whatever) wasn't important, but the approach I took to logic and code structure was.
Coincidentally I'm retiring today after several decades in the industry (real world, not Scottish education) with no regrets.
There doesn't seem to be anything close to a universal standard.
A good start has been made in the US for new 'phone systems:
- “Kari's Law” has been enacted, whereby any calling device within a property must be able to directly dial 9-1-1 without a prefix, with a notification being sent to a central location (e.g. security, reception, front desk),
- Ray Baum's Act takes it a stage further and mandates that location information be included (e.g. address, hotel name, floor, room number)
"The reason they teach drivers to keep the wheels straight (in a right hand turn situ in driving on left side countries, and left hand turn in driving on right side countries) is to avoid the problem of the car jumping into oncoming traffic in the case of being rear-ended."
..and why here (UK) you're taught to apply the hand(parking) brake when stationary at lights or in a queue.
"one less car"
I gave up at less (see icon)
The trial will involve just 175 carefully selected people in ...
What criteria? There's no point calling an UBER if you have a wheelchair or other awkward load .. and if they can take a wheelchair I believe there's a surcharge for the extra time involved (please correct me if I'm wrong)
As a student (in the 70s) I had a couple of summer jobs in a Dutch pickle factory. The 'superviors' were students from a local engineering college whose tools were a monkey wrench (adjustable spanner) and a large screwdriver.
When the production line jammed the monkey wrench was used to smash the offending jars of gherkins and the screwdriver was used to clear out the mess .. I don't think the students were actually allowed to use the tools to adjust the machinery.
I'm writing this via a data-only FTTC line in Edinburgh. It works fine.
.. I'm using FTTP just along the road from you, however I also have a "careline" system that requires POTS; if there's a power cut the copper phone line still works and the panic button will still call for help.
Going fully telephony over FTTP I could probably run my UPS to the ONT and phone to ensure that I have a connection, but there's no suggestion BT will provide a UPS to every premises to keep the system working the way it's done for decades with the power provided by the cabinet/exchange.
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