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The 2019 UK Power cut & Future Power Infrastructure

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.

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Is all nuclear power created equal?

With the apparent rise of energy scarcity in the UK some in the media have been asking whether the Govt is indeed correct in wanting to build more nuclear power stations, and of course that is one option. However, when you restrict nuclear power to mean only uranium fission reactions, you get a distorted picture.

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serzgrep

This is a tool to enable textual search through directories of files compressed using the serz.exe compression algorithm, such as those used by RailWorks. The utility is used from the command line to locate files that contain specific strings and is perhaps most powerful when used in conjunction with find and xargs.

Book: The Blackstone Key

This book was written by Rose Melikan and published in 2008; I "read" it as an audiobook - a format I increasingly find myself using - and enjoyed it immensely. In style it is Historical Romance and Mystery combined and is set in the year 1795, mostly in East Anglia.

The story concerns the adventure of a young lady, Mary Finch, who has been orphaned and then receives a message from her estranged Uncle...

Placemarks

This is a very useful hack. The National Monument Record office department of English Heritage can search for aerial photographs. They return searches as Excel files with the location of each photo as an OS grid reference (e.g. TL 483 607).

This Perl program reads the Excel file and creates a Google Earth KML (layer) file of pushpins for each photo. Loading that into GE shows you each photo on the map and you can "point at" the photos to get the associated date, reference numbers etc.

Thanks for all the Fish: Can the world continue to fish the oceans?

Back in January I suggested a number of possible blog posts. Though it is disappointing that nobody commented publicly I have had a few encouraging conversations, so here goes on one of those...

Human Beings have fished for food for a very long time: it is certainly measured in multiple millenia. The seas and oceans are also vast, which in the past meant that the human impact of fishing was negligable. In the last few centuries, we have very rapidly increased the population by nearly a thousandfold. The sea, however, has much the same capacity as it always had...

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