h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

🆕 blog! “Gadget Review: Windfall Energy Saving Plug (Beta)”
★★★★☆

The good folks at Windfall Energy have sent me one of their interesting new plugs to beta test.

OK, an Internet connected smart plug. What's so interesting about that?

Our Windfall Plug turns on at the optimal times in the middle of the night to charge and power your…

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/03/gadget-review-windfall-energy-saving-plug-beta/
⸻
#electricity #gadget #internetofthings #review

Currently enjoying: graphs of solar panel output from yesterday with a pronounced dip around the time of the eclipse

“The sky was the color of television tuned to a dead channel”

80s meaning: grey
90s meaning: blue
Today: full of ads from the smart tv vendor

I'm kind of surprised that the US government has not yet tried to unilaterally meddle in the DNS root and IANA IP numbering policy and am almost scared to speak of it in case it gives the wrong people ideas.

"A very theoretical scenario, DNS edition"

https://jpmens.net/2025/03/27/theoretical-scenario-dns-edition/

During research for a column I stumbled upon the eggs dashboard by the European Commission and it is...mindblowing.
https://agriculture.ec.europa.eu/document/download/9bdf9842-1eb6-41a2-8845-49738b812b2b_en
#OMGraphs #GraphPolice #GrafiekPolitie

Some news: I'm presenting and co-writing a new short Radio 4 series, Untaxing.

It's about how tax affects our lives: from the Laffer Curve, to the Beatles, to Jaffa Cakes, and modern day avoidance.

1.45pm on Radio 4, every day next week, and on BBC Sounds as each episode airs.https://buff.ly/G3hSxlQ

There is much excitement today. The mining bees that have been in my lawn for 34* years have expanded to a flowerbed around the back.
*They could have been here for a thousand years, I've only lived here 34. #MiningBees #SolitaryBees #GoodNews.

The Observer’s editorial is full-on straight-up transphobia this morning.

What really peeves me about stuff like that is that (left leaning guardian reading) folks are going to read it. And think it’s an acceptable point of view.

Cos it really really fucking isn’t.

Spider-Crane, Spider-Crane
It's a winch on a leggy frame
Spins a drum, makes things rise
Lifting girders into the skies
Look out!
Here comes the Spider-Crane

On the beach after the gold rush

I wrote this article for Mark Ellen at The Word Magazine fourteen years ago (I hope he won't mind my putting it up here). The events described - my awkward progress through the dotcom boom (and the crash that followed it) already felt like a long time ago then… You can download a PDF that preserves the magazine layout if you'd prefer.

https://bowblog.com/2025/03/16/on-the-beach-after-the-gold-rush/

🔗 Websites vanish. Links break. But knowledge can live on with your help. Use the Wayback Machine’s Save Page Now tool to archive webpages that are important to you. 🕰️ 💾

📌 Try it now: web.archive.org/save

Out to Chelmsford for a couple of hours with #TheDoodle chuckling at the signs and weeping that they are a product of councils giving up.

Black-headed gull.

This is an amber-listed gull in the UK and is commonly seen around both coastal and inland waterbodies. It has a chocolatey brown head in breeding plumage, which gives rise to the name. The gull I've photographed here is a "first-winter" bird and has slightly different colouring compared to the adults.

Stockport, UK. Feb 2025.

#Birds #BirdPhotography #Nature #NaturePhotography #Wildlife #WildlifePhotography #UKWildlife

Internet now reaches 79% of Indonesia’s population, up from 53% in 2022. The rise of digital wallets, meanwhile, means that seven times the population of Switzerland has been added in the past decade to Indonesia’s banking system. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/02/rise-of-ai-in-indonesia/

"This project demonstrates how the frequency data from the Great Britain electrical grid contains embedded information about carbon intensity. By using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to decompose 1D time series frequency data into its constituent frequencies, we can extract features that allow us to predict carbon intensity with high accuracy."

https://github.com/JamesTwallin/GridSeis

I’m so pleased with how this turned out & it’s great to get back to launching stuff
https://vole.wtf/styscraper/
Tip: if you build piles of matching height you can then put a pallet across