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Author Archives: david
Variable Pitch Take 2
It’s fair to say that when I started the Variable Pitch website I didn’t know a lot about the energy market or the data that would be useful and available. I had an idea and some data and I started … Continue reading
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It’s just a number.
“Scottish wind farms paid £1 million to shut down one day” 1 “Record Breaking Day for Wind” 2 The above headlines have both been published recently. They both quote impressive facts and figures – or do they? Emotions tend to … Continue reading
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Quad Copter
Having the GoPro cameras has led us to open up our imaginations about how to use them. We’ve had one suspended from a kite (more to follow) but I’ve been pondering building a Quad Copter to fly a camera around … Continue reading
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Balancing Mechanism Data
In order to keep the UK National Grid working correctly a delicate balancing act must be performed. The various units generating energy must be matched with the likely demand in order to keep the system within strict limits of frequency … Continue reading
Ofgem Certificates
When looking at the certificates issued by Ofgem all seems simple and straightforward. Each station has certificates issued based on output and various factorings. Simple. Except it isn’t. certificates can be revoked (no explanation is provided so it’s unclear why), … Continue reading
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Spring Cleaning
Last week I noticed just how poorly organised the music collection on the home server had become. It’s inevitable that over the years things will change and so I was expecting it to be a little messy, but what I … Continue reading
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Spamassassin Storage
We’ve been using SQL for storing various Spamassassin data for the last few years. It’s allowed us to provide our users with a lot of control and has been a good solution. However, a mixture of a inattention and a … Continue reading
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Continuing CouchDB Experiments
I’ve been developing a small app that should be a good fit for CouchDB. It’s a small app that will allow me to keep a series of notes, some of which are plain text and some are formatted in particular … Continue reading
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Blast from the past…
This is another of the “this is to help me remember what I did to cure this problem” type posts. Having recently updated the mail server an old issue resurfaced that caused one of my users to be unable to … Continue reading
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Android Development Environment on Ubuntu 12.10
As with many people I’m using the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 12.10. This means that when you install the various pieces you need for android development the tools found in the platform-tools directory won’t run. They give the simple error … Continue reading
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Mainstream Fail
Making changes to a large project isn’t an easy decision and for a company like Google I’d imagine that such decisions are debated extensively, so when such changes are made I assume they bring genuine benefit. Having recently started using … Continue reading
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Chromium Buttons
I prefer to have the window buttons on the right, which I finally managed to do in gnome-shell using gconftool-2 –set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout –type string “:minimize,maximize,close” Happy days.
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Gnome Shell & Ubuntu 12.10
After less than 24 hours with Unity, I installed gnome-shell. After some 30 minutes I have a desktop environment than looks far closer to the way I want it to. Things are where I expect them to be and easily … Continue reading
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Back to Ubuntu
Just under a year ago I swapped from Ubuntu to Mint. This was a reaction to the awful Unity desktop that they had decided to use as the default in 11.10. The reaction to my blog post about the change … Continue reading
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Positive Reactions
When I started Variable Pitch my intent was to display the information in a clear, unbiased way as a counter to the frequently emotional debate around wind energy. It’s likely very naive but I believe that the information should speak … Continue reading
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Decision Makers
The following is a list of the members of the Perth & Kinross Development Management Committee which will decide on the application for a monitoring mast on Wednesday this week. Tom Gray (SNP) tomgray@pkc.gov.uk Bob Band (SNP) bobband@pkc.gov.uk Henry Anderson … Continue reading
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Round 2 – Development Management Committee
The council have considered the application for a meteorological monitoring mast and as expected it has been referred to the Development Management Committee. This group of 13 councillors will now decide on whether to approve the application. Sadly the Development … Continue reading
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The First Casualty
“In war, truth is the first casualty.” Aeschylus Greek tragic dramatist (525 BC – 456 BC) You don’t have to spend long looking at information about wind farm developments before the truth of the above statement becomes apparent. Whichever side … Continue reading
Posted in development, wind farm
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Django Auth Templates
I’ve just spent 10 minutes trying to figure out why the logged_out.html template I added for a website wasn’t being used. It was in the correct place (templates/registration) and the login.html template alongside it was being used without any trouble, … Continue reading
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Structuring an Android App?
My experiments with writing my little Android app have gone better than I expected and so far I’ve yet to find anything that I’m unable to do. Of course all these small building blocks need to contribute to a whole … Continue reading
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