h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

It's a great time to read Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air, an easy to read book asking if/how we can stop using fossil fuels. There are great ballpark estimates, which make the huge numbers instantly understandable. Free pdf. https://withouthotair.com/

How many disks can you add to a virtual machine?
https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2017/04/25/how-many-disks-can-you-add-to-a-virtual-linux-machine/ #computing

LightSail 2 will be unfurling its solar sail on Tuesday. The crowdfunded spacecraft plans to accelerate by reflecting sunlight off the solar sail. http://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-davis/ls2-sail-deployment-live.html #space

Music recommendation: Ecuador by Sash! The song is just so ridiculous and awesome. https://youtu.be/9cQlVww0zKo

Drama as two conflicting proposals both want to use the same TCP's congestion notification flags. https://lwn.net/Articles/783673/ #networking

Liquid chromatography in beer glass. Draw line in felt-tip 2cm from the bottom of kitchen towel. Place in 1cm deep water. Water carries felt-tip mark upwards. Chemicals have different friction from paper, so colours separate. #chemistry

A new process to make ammonia
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/04/25/who-cares-about-making-ammonia-you-do #chemistry

What's wrong with signals in Unix and Linux? https://lwn.net/Articles/414618/ #linux

Did you hear about the town in Ireland whose population went up by a factor of two? It was Dublin!

Does the news reflect what we die from?
https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die-from #world

Up close with NeNe Geese at #london wetland centre

New #debian version is released this Saturday. AppArmour and Wayland by default, upstart removed, Python 3.7 (which supports type annotations) https://wiki.debian.org/DebianBuster

Game recommendation: FTL: Faster Than Light. Send the crew to frantically patch up the spaceship, while being chased across the galaxy by an overpowering foe. Which is basically the plot of star wars, firefly, etc. Great soundtrack. https://www.gog.com/game/faster_than_light

Political party destruction
https://timrollpickering.blogspot.com/2018/02/can-established-party-truly-vanish.html #ukpol

QR https://dbatley.com/blog/2019/06/qr-squared.html

Soccer world cup: VAR? More like VCR! It takes that long because they need to rewind the tape.

When algorithms go bad http://timharford.com/2019/03/just-because-youre-paranoid-doesnt-mean-the-algorithms-arent-out-to-get-you/

It's midsummer, the longest day (in the northern hemisphere). A time of travel and calm seas, of bonfires and barbecues.

I now run a service which helps you diagnose slow queries in PostgreSQL. It makes a diagram from the query planner output, helping you see which bit is slow.
https://dbatley.com/blog/2019/06/dbplanview.html #postgres #sql