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.

My take on most of the big digital projects is that the scope is far to ambitious at the start, because during initial planning the details are ignored and so it looks easy. As the project proceeds, a number of things happen:

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.

I recently saw this picture in a local supermarket, and was struck by the dichotomy.

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.

I am getting fed up with TV cameramen of late....

Specifically those commissioned to take pictures in science and technology programmes...

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...

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.

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...

This is a very simple text editor, based on the Scintilla text editor component to edit
Railworks serz-compressed files.