Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2022-11)
Updated 2024-02-19.2022-11-30: A11y
I have marked up a set of my links to accessibility (a11y) resources with 'A11y' so that I can find them easily. I am pretty sure that I have missed out some, but I can fix that later. I will also try to remember to mark up any new links as I make them!
All this so that I can better curate/gather them and apply the tools suggested to existing and new pages.
Bibliography
Finally, I am going to have a go at a centralised public bibliography system that I can use on EOU and for my research
Because there is a fair chance that I will produce papers in LaTeX, and because there is zero chance of vendor lock-in, I am going with BibTeX (.bib) format. It seems that EOU serves that as MIME type text/x-bibtex. At some point I should probably make sure that that is encoded GZIP on request.
The database location is db.bibliography, at least for now.
I am starting with a generic public bibliography, and a public bibliography of my stuff.
I have cycled entries through Mendeley and Google Scholar to see how much 'wobble' there is in interpretation and format. Quite a lot!
There is now a basic HTML rendering and dataset.
(As of the evening of 2024-02-19 the bibliography has 306 entries!)
2022-11-13: Thermino RPi WiFi Swap
Having made the top-up energy injection more reliable, and also the gathering of grid-intensity numbers from the Internet, top-up is now being sabotaged by the network connectivity of the RPi that manages the Thermino!
So on the 7th I ordered from The Pi Hut a USB WiFi adaptor (USB WiFi (802.11 b/g/n) 2.4GHz adapter for the Raspberry Pi 1 to 4) for £6 (+£2.99 postage). I was vaguely hoping that simply swapping this for the existing one might nearly make everything just work, without even any reconfiguration. Maybe...
Yesterday the post finally arrived after about a week's gap. I plugged in the new dongle and of course things did not "just work"! Apart from anything else the MAC address, bound at the router to a fixed IP, will to be updated with that of the new dongle.
I did not see a new client binding for IP on DHCP though, so I will have to work a little harder at this. (Just putting the old dongle back in to a USB port restored connectivity.)
Today I tried again in the afternoon with fewer distractions, and expecting to need to indulge in some minor DHCP fun.
The old/extant WiFi dongle...
% lsusb Bus 001 Device 006: ID 148f:5370 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT5370 Wireless Adapter
New...
Bus 001 Device 007: ID 148f:7601 Ralink Technology, Corp. MT7601U Wireless Adapter
And now I can see a the new dongle being assigned a new IP address (so the Thermino RPi has two, should it wish to use them!) So I remapped the new MAC to the old IP address and am rebooting Thermino RPi and router... And that seems to have worked.
So then I removed the old dongle from the Thermino RPi and rebooted... And pekoe worked over the new dongle... Hurrah!
Now I will be monitoring for more robust networking from this RPi.
As of the morning of the 15th, there may have been fewer network dropouts than with the old dongle, but not zero.
2022-11-11: Twit to Toot
Given all the trauma at Twitter, with a lot of stuff moving fast and breaking... I have created a mastodon.energy account for @EarthOrgUK@mastodon.energy.
As of today, when auto-posting ('tweeting') an EOU article to Twitter, it is also getting published ('tooted') to Mastodon and the Fediverse.
Hat-tip to A Beginner's Guide to the Mastodon API - Post a Status Update with cURL or Python for making it so easy with cURL. Twitter was a complete nightmare and needed a special library (jTwitter). This case is one line of script. Hurrah!
2023-04-07: Twitter API dead
The final EOU automated Tweet went through today, ~3pm BST. This is from my logs: ERROR: could not send tweet: winterwell.jtwitter.TwitterException$E401: code 32: Could not authenticate you. So I posted and pinned It looks as if that was my last automated tweet to go through. I joined Twitter in June 2009 to provide this as a public service, and no longer can, here.@AJPPoole very kindly said
Thanks for doing that. You were first to make me aware how much the carbon intensity of electricity varies by time. I've been setting washing machine and dishwasher to run overnight since, unless it's exceptionally sunny (we have PV). Fairly small saving, but easy change.
2024-02-16: jTwitter gone
As of the V1.4.1 release of reutils grid-intensity calculator, almost all of the code and tests and even the JARs (such as jTwitter) to support Twitter access have gone from the code and classpath!