Nostr notes by Russ Garrett

In a move which will make a lot of recording engineers quite ...

2026-06-25T23:43:42+02:00

In a move which will make a lot of recording engineers quite angry, Jim Lill on YouTube comprehensively tests high-end mic preamps and concludes that they do absolutely nothing to the sound:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-vIeA7yy6Q

the Food Hacking Base usually does a bunch of this, and it's ...

2026-05-02T14:49:54+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…thnv
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the Food Hacking Base usually does a bunch of this, and it's usually very popular! But I don't think they're coming this year: https://foodhackingbase.org

Solar generation in Great Britain just hit a new record of 15.0 ...

2026-04-23T14:14:02+02:00

Solar generation in Great Britain just hit a new record of 15.0 GW (~43% of national demand)

https://www.solar.sheffield.ac.uk/pvlive/

Congratulations to the person who stood for election in two ...

2026-04-10T23:49:48+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…qsy5
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Congratulations to the person who stood for election in two neighbouring wards for two different parties (!), and even briefly made it onto the list of candidates before the returning officer realised.

Today is one of those days where a group of volunteers has to ...

2026-04-10T19:57:47+02:00

Today is one of those days where a group of volunteers has to semi-manually digitize the list of people standing in 3,074 local elections in May, because the UK is very weird and the only official data is published as PDFs.

https://candidates.democracyclub.org.uk/

Less than 1GW of fossil fuels on the GB grid klaxon! ...

2026-03-25T13:52:30+01:00

Less than 1GW of fossil fuels on the GB grid klaxon!

cc @npub12tr…tlud (!!)

2026-03-20T13:22:20+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…u563
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cc Tryst 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 🇮🇪 :ms_asexual_flag: :ms_cat_grin: (npub12tr…tlud) (!!)

Final report on last year's Iberian blackout has been ...

2026-03-20T10:34:03+01:00

Final report on last year's Iberian blackout has been released, including this very interesting diagram showing the contributing factors

https://eepublicdownloads.blob.core.windows.net/public-cdn-container/clean-documents/Publications/2025/iberian-blackout/Final%20Report%20on%20the%20Grid%20Incident%20in%20Spain%20and%20Portugal%20on%2028%20April%202025.pdf

you could move that phone number to AAISP for £1.80/month and ...

2026-03-05T21:21:02+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…a3zh
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you could move that phone number to AAISP for £1.80/month and they'll forward the SMS to email (and the calls to VoIP or wherever you want)

There is currently a scanning electron microscope on eBay UK for ...

2025-12-05T13:13:39+01:00

There is currently a scanning electron microscope on eBay UK for the incredible bargain price of £470. I do not have space for this.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/267500902096

Smarter Every Day somehow managed to get permission to film ...

2025-11-04T21:47:48+01:00

Smarter Every Day somehow managed to get permission to film inside an active nuclear power plant during refueling, and it's absolutely fascinating

https://youtu.be/v0afQ6w3Bjw

they mean equivalent fluency to an A-level in Spanish or German, ...

2025-10-14T23:10:00+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…ccmw
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they mean equivalent fluency to an A-level in Spanish or German, not the English A-levels that native speakers take. None of the news articles mention this, though.

You can't even get an A-level in English as a second language, it's just based on CEFR equivalence.

Periodic reminder that Airbus open-sourced their cockpit UI font ...

2025-09-03T15:55:54+02:00

Periodic reminder that Airbus open-sourced their cockpit UI font and it looks great on little OLED screens

https://github.com/polarsys/b612

they cancelled the prize ...

2025-08-20T13:32:54+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…al8m
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they cancelled the prize https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/aug/19/polari-literary-prize-cancelled-over-the-boy-in-striped-pyjamas-author-john-boyne

WiFi clients heatmap at #why2025. I spent way too long wrestling ...

2025-08-09T19:45:52+02:00

WiFi clients heatmap at #why2025. I spent way too long wrestling with grafana for this.

Ah Germany, where you can pay in cash and the 90s-looking till ...

2025-07-31T23:30:35+02:00

Ah Germany, where you can pay in cash and the 90s-looking till will somehow spit out a ECDSA/SHA384 signature. Love some base64 on my receipts.

I will allow that if @npub12tr…tlud does it and it's ...

2025-07-20T22:33:42+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…yk0q
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I will allow that if Tryst 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 🇮🇪 :ms_asexual_flag: :ms_cat_grin: (npub12tr…tlud) does it and it's well-executed

Also the orphan source jokes are almost as stale as EMF-the-band ...

2025-07-20T17:49:42+02:00

Also the orphan source jokes are almost as stale as EMF-the-band jokes at this stage, get some new material.

https://social.emfcamp.org/@emf/statuses/01K0M687FG89BJN0EWGG45XWBE

An update on how well the International Energy Agency is doing at ...

2025-07-10T01:24:00+02:00

An update on how well the International Energy Agency is doing at predicting solar generation growth.

(source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032125000449)

Very nice report on the fire at North Hyde substation which took ...

2025-07-02T09:53:50+02:00

Very nice report on the fire at North Hyde substation which took down Heathrow in March.

tl;dr:

* Fire was caused by moisture ingress in a high voltage bushing which was detected in 2018 but got lost in the system.
* North Hyde is an ageing substation which didn't have adequate protection against spread of fire
* Heathrow didn't think that a loss of grid feed was a plausible risk, so they assumed 10-12 hours was a reasonable recovery time from that.

https://www.neso.energy/document/363891/download

yeah I think they're the best of the worst

2025-06-14T22:01:20+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…6wdr
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yeah I think they're the best of the worst

they have a lot of faults but I think the BBC is probably still ...

2025-06-14T19:04:15+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…ujny
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they have a lot of faults but I think the BBC is probably still the most neutral Western news source

If you're the type of person who maps power infrastructure in ...

2025-05-05T18:36:46+02:00

If you're the type of person who maps power infrastructure in OpenStreetMap, you may be interested in my new PowerNetworkTools plugin:

https://github.com/openinframap/josm-power-network-tools/

The first tool allows you to estimate the voltage of a substation busbar from aerial imagery. Full details in the git README. Hopefully more tools available soon!

Available wherever you usually get your JOSM plugins (i.e. the settings dialog).

#OpenStreetMap #JOSM

According to ENTSO-E data, Spain's transmission network is ...

2025-04-28T20:36:25+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…paf3
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According to ENTSO-E data, Spain's transmission network is now handling 57% of forecast demand (from a low of 41%), and Portugal's is serving 14% (from a low of 11%).

The Portuguese network operator has denied they ever said ...

2025-04-28T20:34:03+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…97mt
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The Portuguese network operator has denied they ever said anything about "induced atmospheric vibration".

For some reason I suspect AI was responsible for that nonsense.

https://sicnoticias.pt/pais/2025-04-28-e-falso-que-fenomeno-atmosferico-raro-tenha-estado-na-origem-do-apagao-1a078544

"due to extreme temperature variations in the interior or ...

2025-04-28T16:32:59+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…lfjw
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"due to extreme temperature variations in the interior or Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 KV), a phenomenon known as 'induced atmospheric vibration'"

...what?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c9wpq8xrvd9t?post=asset%3Addda9592-0346-4fe8-a17a-2261efc1ba5b#post

Proximate cause maybe the loss of 1310 MW at Golfech unit 1 ...

2025-04-28T14:10:05+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…8wa4
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Proximate cause *maybe* the loss of 1310 MW at Golfech unit 1 nuclear plant in France? Time is a few minutes off but that might be a reporting thing.

My best guess is that Spain and Portugal are currently ...

2025-04-28T13:37:46+02:00

My best guess is that Spain and Portugal are currently experiencing a replay of July 2021:

https://www.entsoe.eu/news/2022/03/28/final-report-on-the-power-system-separation-of-iberia-from-continental-europe-on-24-july-2021/

The UK now has the world's first ETCS-enabled steam ...

2025-04-19T23:12:37+02:00

The UK now has the world's first ETCS-enabled steam locomotive, because we're a very silly country.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/apr/19/nobody-has-done-this-before-britains-beloved-steam-trains-trial-pioneering-technology

Someone nerdsniped me into making this so please enjoy this ...

2025-04-11T15:59:38+02:00

Someone nerdsniped me into making this so please enjoy this visualisation of the distance to every public transport station in London.

(Data from #openstreetmap, MapTiler)

Wind farm! ...

2025-03-29T13:47:09+01:00

Wind farm!

ECMWF is making all their (excellent) weather forecasts open data ...

2025-03-17T21:57:10+01:00

ECMWF is making all their (excellent) weather forecasts open data from October this year!

https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/news/2025/ecmwf-achieve-fully-open-data-status-2025

The Command and Conquer source code they just released is really ...

2025-02-27T23:46:41+01:00

The Command and Conquer source code they just released is really well commented. Surprisingly readable. https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Red_Alert

This is not a narrowly-construed piece of legal text. This is ...

2025-02-27T00:38:18+01:00

This is not a narrowly-construed piece of legal text. This is some boilerplate that a lawyer hammered out with very little oversight and nobody thought to question it.

And that makes me more nervous about Mozilla than anything else they've done in the last few years.

How is Mozilla "operating Firefox" on my machine??

Spent 50 minutes on the phone with Thames Water yesterday trying ...

2025-02-11T12:19:13+01:00

Spent 50 minutes on the phone with Thames Water yesterday trying to tell them that my water bill was too low because they had my water meter swapped with another property. Maybe I shouldn't have bothered.

Fairly sure they could have isolated that line at the local ...

2025-02-09T22:52:29+01:00

Fairly sure they could have isolated that line at the local breaker first, but they kept it energised so they could get a more exciting video of the disconnection.

https://mstdn.social/@noelreports/113972984053584494

The Baltic states have successfully synchronised with the ...

2025-02-09T16:20:00+01:00

The Baltic states have successfully synchronised with the European grid

https://elering.ee/estonian-latvian-and-lithuanian-power-systems-successfully-synchronised-continental-europe

the SP series of connectors are decent and very cheap: ...

2025-01-20T13:08:57+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…exgg
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the SP series of connectors are decent and very cheap:

https://www.weipuconnector.com/products/sp13/

(This is one manufacturer but they seem to be kind of a de-facto standard and you can find lots of sellers on Aliexpress, and also some western distributors sell them)

To every American who's complaining about having to enforce ...

2025-01-18T18:32:49+01:00

To every American who's complaining about having to enforce UK laws, I'd like to introduce you to FATCA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance_Act

Due to budget cuts we regret that we could only provide 24 hours ...

2025-01-06T11:22:10+01:00

Due to budget cuts we regret that we could only provide 24 hours of False Spring. We now return you to your regularly scheduled winter weather.

#ukweather

We should definitely try and reverse the bias against ...

2025-01-03T23:32:30+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…pjsz
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We should definitely try and reverse the bias against technicians! But also I think the spectrum is more continuous than a lot of people (in many technical fields) are willing to admit.

And also language evolves whether we like it or not. So it might be a losing battle.

this series of posts is great, and pretty thoroughly debunks that ...

2025-01-03T16:02:22+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…xnta
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this series of posts is great, and pretty thoroughly debunks that Atlantic article:

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/

Another great talk from Congress: Germany has a system for ...

2024-12-29T12:10:09+01:00

Another great talk from Congress:

Germany has a system for remotely controlling loads (streetlights, storage heating) over radio.
It's also used for controlling generation. Including 100MW+ solar plants.
It's completely unencrypted.

https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-blinkencity-radio-controlling-street-lamps-and-power-plants (talk currently starts ~16mins into the video)

#energy #38c3

FYI: the VW Volksdaten exploit wasn't quite an open S3 bucket ...

2024-12-28T10:22:56+01:00

FYI: the VW Volksdaten exploit wasn't quite an open S3 bucket - they managed to remotely extract AWS keys from a JVM heap dump using this (terrible) default configuration issue in older versions of "Spring Boot Actuator": https://www.wiz.io/blog/spring-boot-actuator-misconfigurations#1-exposed-heapdump-file-16

But also VW claimed they were truncating the precision of stored coordinates, but for a load of car models they weren't...

Hopefully there will be a full writeup somewhere soon, it was quite a good talk.

Turns out the UK government ran a second impact assessment on the ...

2024-12-21T16:38:41+01:00

Turns out the UK government ran a second impact assessment on the Online Safety Act in October, which I didn't know about. They seemed quite surprised to learn that individuals might be running in-scope services.

(I did respond to the original consultation and I definitely told them this then...)

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6716222b9242eecc6c849b09/Online_Safety_act_enactment_impact_assessment.pdf#page=91

cc Neil Brown (npub1huw…c5x7)

Synthetic aperture radar, East China Sea (Sentinel-1/Copernicus) ...

2024-12-19T18:10:07+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…qct6
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Synthetic aperture radar, East China Sea

(Sentinel-1/Copernicus)

If you run a small online community in the UK (or with ...

2024-12-17T18:41:36+01:00

If you run a small online community in the UK (or with significant UK users), I spent most of yesterday reading hundreds of pages of Online Safety Act guidance and summarised it:

https://russ.garrett.co.uk/2024/12/17/online-safety-act-guide/

There's definitely stuff you have to do if you want to comply with this law...

we use it for IRCCloud, so they're fine with small-ish users, ...

2024-12-17T10:34:01+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…xsrr
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we use it for IRCCloud, so they're fine with small-ish users, but I'm not sure if they'd accept tiny unincorporated websites.

PhotoDNA is free (a genuinely good Microsoft service) but I'm ...

2024-12-17T10:30:49+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…mf7j
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PhotoDNA is free (a genuinely good Microsoft service) but I'm not sure what the criteria are to sign up.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/photodna

I've been struggling to focus for weeks and the thing I ...

2024-12-17T03:10:16+01:00

I've been struggling to focus for weeks and the thing I suddenly decide to hyperfocus on is this stupid fucking legislation.

So anyway here you go, first draft of my Online Safety Act guide:
https://gist.github.com/russss/ca3fc44e8bd1c7278b81adcaa9073c3e

Comments welcome. There may be errors.

yeah I can probably arrange that - let me know the account name ...

2024-12-07T12:27:45+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…7yjr
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yeah I can probably arrange that - let me know the account name and email address for it, and I'll message you a password.

And [@dsn_status](https://bot.country/@dsn_status ) is back! ...

2024-12-03T21:48:39+01:00

And [@dsn_status](https://bot.country/@dsn_status ) is back!

(There may be a few glitches while I debug some problems...)

https://bot.country/@dsn_status/statuses/01JE7412T34CHSD7QDGTKGG3B7

Thousands of square kilometres of near-perfect geometric grid. I ...

2024-11-29T22:15:26+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…5z2k
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Thousands of square kilometres of near-perfect geometric grid.

I suspect this is the result of the world's most boring job driving around collecting geophysics for oil exploration.

New version of my visualisation of world power networks mapped on ...

2024-11-29T02:45:22+01:00

New version of my visualisation of world power networks mapped on OpenStreetMap, with data from today.

I've added power plants to this iteration - although these are covered by power lines in denser areas, I think they give a bit more detail in darker areas.

Rendered from 38.1 million power lines and 85,000 power plants in 86 seconds using datashader.

#energy #gis #openstreetmap

yes - [@emf](https://social.emfcamp.org/@emf )'s posts are on ...

2024-11-27T23:33:55+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…3rxx
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yes - [@emf](https://social.emfcamp.org/@emf )'s posts are on https://social.emfcamp.org

Horse (courtesy @npub19rk…873l) ...

2024-11-26T19:21:30+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…rkmv
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Horse (courtesy stml (npub19rk…873l))

Answers on a postcard for this one ...

2024-11-26T18:42:54+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…a0f0
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Answers on a postcard for this one

It's apparently a pomegranate? Here's another one ...

2024-11-26T18:39:38+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…qyn0
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It's apparently a pomegranate? Here's another one

Photovoltaic bird!! ...

2024-11-26T18:29:19+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…028d
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Photovoltaic bird!!

Photovoltaic camel ...

2024-11-24T21:23:13+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…w7g9
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Photovoltaic camel

Maybe I'll start a thread of cool satellite images I stumbled ...

2024-10-27T00:07:56+02:00

Maybe I'll start a thread of cool satellite images I stumbled across while mapping for OpenStreetMap. This one is good.

(Kebbi, Nigeria. Sentinel-2 Cloudless by https://eox.at)

this did get fixed in Mailman 3 which was released...9.5 years ...

2024-10-14T12:57:48+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…8jns
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this did get fixed in Mailman 3 which was released...9.5 years ago, but the upgrade path is sufficiently annoying that almost nobody bothered upgrading.

Good to see that the PyPSA energy system simulation toolkit has ...

2024-09-26T18:40:44+02:00

Good to see that the PyPSA energy system simulation toolkit has switched over to using OpenStreetMap as their source for the electricity grid layout in Europe!

https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.17178
https://pypsa.org/

I should really get round to having a play with PyPSA at some point...

#openstreetmap #energy

Dogshit reporting on a poor meta-analysis. Our media is not ...

2024-08-01T01:43:54+02:00

Dogshit reporting on a poor meta-analysis. Our media is not capable of reporting on scientific studies.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c84jdxd4x1ro