Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2026-08)

I am working on first-round updates/corrections to my paper currently in flight with a journal.

One improvement asked for by the editors and reviewers is higher figure quality. I take this to be both technical presentation/resolution and content/labelling, etc.

Many of the figures are gnuplot line graphs. For HTML pages I am now using SVG where possible because scalable and often much more compact than PNG, especially brotli-compressed. But pdflatex with which I am preparing this paper does not handle SVG, so initially I had reverted to PNG, but there are visible artefacts from the 640x480 pixel raster format used.

I have started to generate PDF output alongside SVG and PNG, as an alternative scalable vector format (ie without raster artefacts) that pdflatex does accept.

I hope that this sufficiently addresses the technical issue for those graphs that I can easily regenerate from data. Some historic PNG snapshots (eg screenshots) may be harder to improve.

I was away at a music festival for a few days and while obviously I logged in from my phone via ssh to commit the bulk of the EOM data, some parts of the ritual work better locally, while sober, maybe... I think everything is now done.

More carbon negative

Net electricity utility energy kgCO2e over the last 12 full calendar months: -64

Net kgCO2e for each of the last 12 full calendar months: -40 -8 11 27 42 52 28 -2 -22 -40 -52 -60

At 16WW over 367 days from 2025-08-01 to 2026-08-03: electricity import 3.1kWh/d (net -2.2kWh/d).

uptime

% uptime
 15:50:25 up 337 days,  3:21,  1 user,  load average: 0.39, 0.41, 0.44