kate

kate, 1 month ago to random

Brits ask “A penny for your thoughts?” and Americans respond with “Just my two cents”. At current exchange rates ($1.00 = £0.80) this means Brits are receiving 1.6p of American thoughts for just 1p. In this paper we propose an alternative asset pricing model for the marketplace of ideas, considering—

kate, 12 days ago to random

In the same way most of us say “goodbye” without realising it derives from “god be with ye”, maybe one day people will end conversations with “likensubscribe”

kate, 10 months ago to random

Seems appropriate that Twitter have changed their logo to a close button:

kate, 10 months ago to random

Some days I can really relate to our office shredder:

kate, 5 months ago to random

It will be a few days before we get official confirmation from the National Grid, but I’m calling it now: 2023 was the year renewables overtook fossil fuels as the largest contributor to British electricity generation. In the 12 years I’ve been running National Grid: Live at https://grid.iamkate.com electricity generation from fossil fuels has fallen from an average of 25.1GW to 10.2GW, while renewables have risen from 2.5GW to 10.8GW.

Figures for 2023: Demand 29.6GW Fossil fuels 10.2GW Renewables 10.8GW Other sources 5.9GW Transfers 2.7GW

kate, 5 months ago to random

I’m playing this first-person open-world game called ‘Life’, and it’s so hard it’s almost unplayable. The character classes are really unbalanced, and you don’t even get to choose one: it’s just assigned when you start playing. They introduced some assists to make things easier (if you can find them buried in the menus), but the elite players complained and they’re being patched out again. Accessibility features for those with disabilities are severely lacking. And it only has permadeath mode.

kate, 9 months ago to random

British politics at the moment:

Conservatives: We’re going to do X!

Labour: We oppose doing X. It harms the most vulnerable in society, damages the economy and the environment, and violates our international treaty obligations.

Conservatives: We have a huge majority, so we’ve done X!

Journalists: Will Labour reverse X if it wins the next election?

Labour: No.

kate, 13 days ago to random

We blocked Anthropic’s ClaudeBot across the 6,000 sites we host at 7:55 this morning. On our busiest server this caused traffic to drop from a peak of 493 requests per second to just 90:

kate, 7 months ago to random

The housing crisis and climate crisis come together in this bleak letter in the Woodland Trust magazine:

kate, 5 months ago to random

British wind turbines produced a record 21.81GW of power between 9:00am and 9:30am this morning. Over the past 24 hours wind turbines have supplied 61.7% of our electricity needs. Live data can be seen on my site at https://grid.iamkate.com.

kate, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to random

Attention retro-computing people: I’m giving away my Amiga 1200. It was a Christmas gift from my parents in 1993 and after 30 years it’s still in working order (if a little discoloured). It’s still in its original Desktop Dynamite box with Workbench, Deluxe Paint, Wordworth, and the special Amiga Format issues. It’s been upgraded with a 400MB hard disk.

Edit: Wow, I didn’t think so many people would be interested in this! I’ve now offered it to one of the responders.

kate, 1 month ago to random

The mnemonic I use to remember Markdown link syntax is that the square brackets look a bit like a button and then the round brackets mention the URL as a note afterwards:

button

kate, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago) to random

Early computer technology generally looks rudimentary and industrial, but the first commercially-produced microprocessor, the Intel 4004 from 1971, wouldn’t look out of place in a designer bathroom. Later versions switched to plain white ceramic, then dark grey ceramic, and finally black plastic.

(Photo source: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/history/museum-story-of-intel-4004.htm)

kate, 8 months ago to random

My National Grid: Live site at https://grid.iamkate.com now automatically updates every five minutes while you leave it open (including updating the pie chart in the favicon while the browser tab is the background)

kate, 5 months ago to random

My National Grid: Live site at https://grid.iamkate.com now includes data for Viking Link. This 1.4GW electrical interconnector between Bicker Fen in England and Revsing in Denmark is currently undergoing commissioning and is expected to be fully operational from 29th December.

kate, 30 days ago to random

Glen Sligachan, Skye:

kate, 2 months ago to random

If you watch The Little Mermaid backwards it’s about a young woman who decides not to marry a wealthy but bland prince, gives him the silent treatment for a week, then swims out to sea where a friendly witch turns her into a mermaid so she can spend her days singing with sea creatures

kate, 2 months ago to random

I wonder if the Highways Agency treats FIXME comments with any more urgency than the average software developer?

kate, 5 months ago to random

My niche skill is hand-coding SVG icons, but this afternoon’s project was more ambitious as it’s built almost entirely from Bézier curves. This is a new logo for my website: a letter K based on my signature but in the style of Proza (http://bureauroffa.com/about-proza), the typeface I used on my site. The SVG is 482 bytes in size.

kate, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

Bristol came so close to having the first Green majority on a upper-tier English council.

Edit: Here’s what the results imply for the Bristol Central constituency in the upcoming general election: https://iamkate.com/data/bristol-central/

kate, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

I’ve updated my historical (1751 to 2024) UK price conversion calculator with 2023’s inflation rate. Prices have doubled since 2005 and tripled since 1991: https://iamkate.com/data/uk-inflation/

kate, 3 months ago to random

This paragraph from Robert Macfarlane’s book The Old Ways is particularly meaningful for me, as it was in the vast landscapes of Skye and the Scottish highlands that I finally realised who I really am:

“For some time now it has seemed to me that the two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else? And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?”

kate, 1 month ago to random

Last night I discovered my christening candle in a box of childhood items my parents gave me. This morning the bathroom lightbulb died while I was having a shower. So now, for the second time in my life, I’m getting washed by the light of a christening candle.

kate, 1 month ago to random

If you’re designing a programming language, please consider allowing hyphens in identifiers. Hyphen-separated text (kebab-case) is more readable than camelCase, and doesn’t require use of the shift key like camelCase and snake_case. There’s no ambiguity with subtraction if you require spaces around binary operators (which every style guide I’ve ever used requires anyway).

kate, 1 month ago to random

British transphobia has now reached the stage of coercing young people into detransitioning using the threat of referrals to social services if they access treatment through private providers. The Good Law Project is crowdfunding for a possible legal challenge: https://goodlawproject.org/crowdfunder/nhs-cyp-guidance/