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Recently I replied to a comment on Youtube, and I decided it should be pulled out into an article of its own.

The comment was from user peepeepoopoo5932, who asked:

I'm curious why it would be a problem since by definition, all the coal and oil used to literally be CO2 in the atmosphere at one point. doesn't that mean we could literally burn all of it and we'd be the exact same as when it started?

Well, yes, we could, but the where it started was a rather different place and time.

For many years now I have occasionally looked at the world through a lens of "what is good for Society", as distinct from any individual or group, and where we are now has frequently fallen a long way short. Humans are of course social beings who naturally form groups, but Society is a construct that transcends any individual group. Society is the framework of expectation of behaviour humans in that Society have to each other. It is one of the largest components of Culture.

Relationship between Executive and Legislature

An affirmation of the principle that the Executive (Ministers) and the Legislature (sitting MPs) are equals in our system, that the Legislature is entitled to consultation on any matter it deems requires it, and very significant weight is given to the views it expresses. If at all possible, this should be enshrined as more than a 'convention' that can be broken at will.

Introduction

There are so many issues we have in the UK that I sometimes despair, but on the principle that you don't usually get what you never ask for, I have decided to post at least some of the changes I would like to see made by our next government. 

This will take the form of a series of posts, and I may amend posts after initial publication. Let's start at the top:

Why Build a Battery?

I have recently been building a solar-powered water pump for use in the field (so completely portable and no resources other than water). The main reason was to assist a friend in getting water out of a stream beside his allotment garden to water the plants, but I also fancied it as an interesting hobby project!

As part of that project I have learnt about  switching power supplies and solar panels, pcb design and testing, and more. This is the prototype PCB:

I thought it would be useful to post an update on how my M1 is going after a month's use.

In general, it is indeed a very nice machine, and despite anything noted below I am not at all sorry to have bought it sight unseen (ordered the day after launch).

Whether it is worth the cost for someone with a newer original machine (e.g. a 2020 MacBook) I cannot say; the additional performance is noticeable, but it would depend on you use patterns.

For the last couple of years I've been contemplating the replacement of my mid-2014 Macbook Pro 15" which I called Marvin, and which has been my workhorse laptop and one of my favourite computers overall ever. However, its battery has been aging, and the screen suffering from various blemishes, and of course the "new shiny" factor ...

A cookie is a name + a (short) value, such as "mysite = 3927y394AIcy" or "google = dbkfvhdbfkvhsudbcksjuc". Cookies are often used as index keys for data stored in a website database, such as the account details you are logged in as. The name is usually fixed for a particular {website & purpose} and the value is often a very large random string (as much as 60 letters), to make it very unlikely to guess a correct one. The site uses the number via an index table to get at the useful data. To be clear then, the cookie value not only looks meaningless, it is meaningless.

On Friday 9th August 2019 the 727MW Little Barford gas-fired plant went off line in an unexpected outage, followed two minutes later by the 1,218MW Hornsea 1 offshore wind farm. This caused such a drop in the available power on the national grid that the grid went into "self-protect" state, cutting power to prevent further damage. The result of a widespread power cut  across southern Britain for several hours.