Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2025-01)

Updated 2025-01-25 13:43 GMT.
By Damon Hart-Davis.
Tech updates: audio kbps, intensity, heater priority, indexed, gnuplot bar chart offset...
tools 800w JA
Conserdering a Royal Commission to guide the forming of a ministerial task force to consider scoping and creation of a focus group to sketch terms of reference for a study group to outline the agenda for a pre-meeting to form a steering group to get ready to think about upgrading the RPi server, easy does it... Heat pump tweaking will continue until morale improves....

2025-01-24: Gnuplot Offset Fun

I have been trying to improve the graphing style of my load profiles as generated by script/storesim/load_profile.sh. Part of the issue is making clear that the data point is for the whole hour (or quarter hour) and should be centred in it.

bucketed bucketed
Old (V1) and new (V2 as of ) styles. V2 may continue to evolve.

From:

plot infilename using 1:3 title "consumption gross W" with lines lw 2, \
 "" using 1:4 title "grid net W" with lines

to:

set xrange["00:00":"23:59"]
set style fill transparent solid 0.5 noborder
set boxwidth 1.0 relative
plot infilename using (timecolumn(1)+1800):3:xtic((int(timecolumn(1)/3600)%2!=0)?'':strftime(xafmt,timecolumn(1))) title "consumption gross W" with boxes, \
 "" using (timecolumn(1)+1800):4 title "grid net W" with lines lw 2

2025-01-20: All Sitemap Pages Indexed

When Google Search Console (GSC) reports any of my pages, especially main top-level pages named in the sitemap.xml, as Crawled - currently not indexed I take that as motivation to see if I can improve those pages in some way.

Sometimes that is better wording. Sometimes that is more or better (schema.org) metadata markup. Sometimes that is dropping in a note from the future as to how things turned out for a page that I may have written a decade or more before, which is fun!

GSC has had an ever-changing handful of pages in this state for months now. As of today all of those main pages are back in the index it seems.

AI/Bot Honeypot

For badly behaved scrapers including greedy AI bots, from a conversation online ... I'm tempted to build into my static sites a version of what I think you may be doing with an #MD5-URL-hash-driven maze in a few lines of #Apache config, which any dodgy request such as for a PHP file flings the visitor into. Won't care about the UA or anything else much, though could return 503s/429s randomly for fun.

I have added a Disallow: /_tarpit/ to the Gallery's and EOU's robots.txt, as that is where the maze would be at first. It will be interesting which bots if any attempt to scan that root just because they have been asked not to!

2025-01-13: Eddi Heater Priority

Preparing for the Thermino to be plumbed in again, I have a new script:

% sh script/myenergi/eddiSetHeaterPri-netrc.sh 2
{"hpri":2,"cpm":15}

The first argument is the Eddi heater priority, which applies when automatically diverting PV output. The DHW tank is 1, the Thermino will be 2. The default is 1.

If there has been a recent pasteurisation cycle then this shall be set to 2, since the Thermino will leak heat more slowly than the DHW tank.

I will only send the priority at times when I would consider running a cycle so as to slightly reduce load on the Eddi servers.

2025-01-06: Interconnector Carbon Intensities

I have looked at the latest () full-year average grid carbon intensities for the other ends of the GB electricity interconnectors at Electricity Maps [EMdata].

They do not look sufficiently different to me to warrant an in-year update now, which would make numbers for January up to now difficult to recreate. I have put the figures in for onwards to automatically roll in. But in February when averages should be available I will probably update the figures to be those. I have added a repeating calendar reminder every February to look for new yearly figures to use, likely from Electricity Map.

I have also noted in the intensity page that Electricity Map data is used, under a Open Database License (ODbL) licence, and added that licence to the known set for the bibliography.

Current country averages, being used for 2024/2025:

# DHD20231228: Electricity Maps / ENTSO-E 2022 whole-country intensity figures.
# Interconnectors to BE (NEM), DK (VKL), FR (IFA, IFA2, ELEC), IE (IRL, EW), NL (NED), NO (NSL).
# BE 2022 mean 0.123: Electricity Maps / ENTSO-E.
# DK 2022 mean 0.126: Electricity Maps / ENTSO-E.
# FR 2022 mean 0.062: Electricity Maps / ENTSO-E.
# IE 2022 mean 0.288: Electricity Maps / ENTSO-E.
# NL 2022 mean 0.262: Electricity Maps / ENTSO-E.
# NO 2022 mean 0.012: Electricity Maps / ENTSO-E.

country averages, currently scheduled to be used from :

# BE 2023 mean 0.126: Electricity Maps / ENTSO-E.
# DK 2023 mean 0.098: Electricity Maps / ENTSO-E.
# FR 2023 mean 0.040: Electricity Maps / ENTSO-E.
# IE 2023 mean 0.312: Electricity Maps / ENTSO-E.
# NL 2023 mean 0.226: Electricity Maps / ENTSO-E.
# NO 2023 mean 0.010: Electricity Maps / ENTSO-E.

Other than IE (Ireland) and BE (Belgium), intensities have dropped. GB does not import much from IE. BE has gone up ~3%, so in the noise margin. Retaining the older higher values this year is thus slightly conservative.

2025-01-02: Audio kbps

I have added a kbps (kilobits per second) indicator after the kB (kilobytes) part for the listed variant audio encodings under each AUDIO control. I think that many people may have a decent intuitive feel for how that correlates with any fidelity/size trade-off that they want to make.

This shows values ranging from ~16kbps (Opus) to ~600kbps (FLAC).

Screenshot 20240102 AUDIO control and kB kbps values
Example AUDIO control with new kbps values.

I did not do MIDI because it would just show as 0 or 1!

Archiving SVN repo

For future me:

# tar cfvz SVN-general-www.hd.org.20250102.tar.gz --sort=name general/www.hd.org

References

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