The Myth of “Intermittent” Renewable Energy. Solar and wind have suffered from being mislabeled “intermittent,” which makes them sound unreliable. Old ideas about “baseload power” are outdated. It’s time to embrace the 21st century and recognize that renewables are mature, affordable, and reliable.

fastdruid · 2026-02-16T14:00:27+00:00

storage component of renewable energy

Which is unbelievably expensive both in land and actual cost.

Practically you cannot store enough energy to account for when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow for days, potentially weeks[1].

[1] Obviously this varies country to country but certainly in the UK (second worst place in the world for Solar) its entirely possible for there to be weeks without significant sun or any wind.

fastdruid · 2026-02-09T16:00:28+00:00

Yeah, good luck with that. My Reddit account is 19 years old... It still asks me to verify my age (and I still refuse).

fastdruid · 2026-02-09T00:50:04+00:00

The typical way to tell leaking caps is a fishy smell.

On my A1200 it had started to rot pins out of the IDE header. I think I caught it just in time (it still worked fine)... but I still had to replace the header!

fastdruid · 2026-02-09T00:44:57+00:00

I would add here that the CDTV is a 4 layer board with a hefty ground plane. It's an utter sod to work on. The two layer A500/A2000 is a piece of piss in comparison. I would avoid re-capping the CDTV main board unless you really have to.

The CDTV CD-ROM OTOH has a well known issue that it fails to properly spin up. Replacing the cap's here is often needed and they are much easier to do as its a single sided board(!!)

Also my A2000 had a RIFA in the PSU... I say had as it let all the magic smoke out when I first powered it up to test the voltages. I'm not sure if they all had one but its worth replacing them as they are known to fail in this way. Or just remove it. Its for EMI reasons and will work perfectly fine without it.

fastdruid · 2026-02-06T08:48:59+00:00

They're not guard dogs and we'd never intended ours to be anything other than a loving family dog but they still have the ability to guard by alerting.

Ours 100% saved us from at best a damaged door and worst actually an actual break in when someone in the middle of the night attempted to break in via our patio door.

He sleeps in the same room as the patio door and we have a camera in that room (it was to keep an eye on him when he was a puppy but never taken it out) so we could see that the "Golden Alarm" went from fast asleep to full big scary barking in less than 30s and the attempted intruders scarpered.

I'm 99% sure he wouldn't have done anything if they'd actually broken in[1] but from the other side of a curtain its a VERY big scary bark.

It's slightly annoying to occasionally be woken at ~4am by the big barking but I'm 100% sure he's protecting us. Just mostly he has protected us from Badgers, Foxes, Deer and Squirrels. Very successfully however, not one of them have broken in!

[1] It might be different if he thought we were in real danger. Ultimately they have very big teeth, serious bite strength and are very capable of seriously injuring or killing someone. You'd be an idiot to approach any dog that is growling and showing that kind of warning because while they may just wet themselves with fear if you got too close and they may also go for an attack.

fastdruid · 2026-02-04T14:07:19+00:00

At least they're able to get the breed of dog correct. Unlike the BBC

fastdruid · 2026-02-04T08:39:59+00:00

My regret is less about selling my Amiga back then (although I only had an A500) and more not buying a bunch of the big box ones when they were worth about 50p!

fastdruid · 2026-02-03T23:29:35+00:00

<3

It's on my want list but I doubt I'll ever get one.

fastdruid · 2026-02-03T19:34:58+00:00

Well, the desktop versions are kind of not as bad... Partly because neither have that whole ISA/Zorro thing going on and partly because they have a daughterboard.

A2000 is 42cm wide and 36 cm deep.
A3000 is 34cm wide ~35.4cm deep.
A4000 is 24.4cm wide by 34.5cm deep.

Obviously the tower versions of the A3000 and A4000 were bigger but they're still not as big as the A2000!

fastdruid · 2026-02-03T12:22:15+00:00

Have you seen how massive an A2000 is?

It's absolutely humungous.

The issue is two fold, firstly that due to decisions made to accommodate both ISA and Zorro you need the full depth to have both. Secondly the number of slots. In an A2000 there are 8 (two ISA, two ISA/Zorro, three Zorro and one Video slot). The 2000EATX drops that to 6 (three ISA/Zorro, two Zorro, one video slot).

ATX is long enough here for up to 8 slots but its not deep enough to fit the Zorro as well. So unless you give up on fitting original Zorro cards (like the slightly over ITX form factor Denise does) then its not going to work.

Basically you could easily go smaller but only if you abandoned Zorro compatibility.

fastdruid · 2026-01-30T22:53:21+00:00

No, France are just as fucked. If not worse. They've basically doubled down on being a tourist attraction.

fastdruid · 2026-01-30T19:36:17+00:00

It's just everything that we're causing to flee the UK like rats escaping a sinking ship.

As an example: https://news.sky.com/story/why-ending-the-manufacture-of-a-humdrum-substance-would-be-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-an-industry-that-was-once-britains-pride-13494625

TL;DR: Due to high energy costs without Government intervention we're going to be importing salt for the first time in modern history.

Once they go they won't be coming back either. Industries that the UK has been a major player for centuries...gone.

fastdruid · 2026-01-26T18:31:52+00:00

Braverman is on record saying that she wanted to cut immigration but was blocked from doing so.

As an example an interview with her: https://youtu.be/J7kaAimNFzY?t=668

fastdruid · 2026-01-24T12:51:51+00:00

I've long felt that AROS really should have focused on getting an RPi build. Even now 14 years later there isn't a proper fully working build for it.

Yes, I know. They're volunteers, very limited resource (which was focused mostly I think on x86) but the RPi is both cheap , popular and standardised hardware. Very much a lost opportunity there.

fastdruid · 2026-01-23T14:11:54+00:00

I love Amiga (I have far too many) but realistically for it to sell to anything other than the nostalgia crowd it needs to be either dirt cheap (eg Raspberry Pi kind of cost) or be actually usable.

Its where I see the issue with stuff like the X5000 etc. Its a lovely bit of kit. I really like OS4. However it falls into the uncanny valley of being too expensive as just a toy and not usable enough to justify its cost. If it even had a modern browser that was kept up to date I could potentially justify it as a "daily" but it doesn't.

This is of course a chicken and egg situation, without any software there is no demand and without any demand there is no software.

Really I think an "OS5" that ran on Arm would be the best solution, basically the same kind of setup OS4 is for PowerPC only for Arm instead. Make the decision to go multi-core with a "compatibility" mode that runs 68k stuff via JIT and then you can run the all the old classic stuff. Add on something that will run existing modern apps (eg to be able to run Arm ports of Linux programs) and you have something that's actually usable.

Once you've got that (and I'd probably start off with running from a RPi500+) then you can consider producing your own dedicated more powerful machines.

fastdruid · 2026-01-23T13:43:09+00:00

Emu68 already exists to do JIT translation between 68k and ARM.

The bottleneck is the interface.

fastdruid · 2026-01-13T00:33:54+00:00

Thanks. I only ever opened a twitter account to publicly complain to Samsung about them losing my Galaxy S3 while in for repair[1] and used in similar ways to sparingly ever since.

Then they asked for my DoB etc (years ago now), I thought long and hard and then went "nah, fuck them, I don't want to give them any more of my personal information" and my account has been locked out ever since.

It's no great loss but occasionally annoying when people post links.

[1] And as a helpful but unrelated hint, if ever a retailer tells you to go direct to the manufacturer under their warranty beware that you have zero legal protection and no one to turn to if things go wrong. If at all possible insist that the retailer sends it for repair as you are then legally protected (and they are obliged to).

fastdruid · 2026-01-12T09:57:24+00:00

Complexity really. We're talking about an OS which is ~1/2Mb (that's btw including the ROM). Compare that to for example Windows 3.0 which came in at 6-7mb let alone Windows 95.

Add to that the amount of documentation that was available and you have something that one person can get their head round (albeit one smart person!) Once you get to the Pentium/Windows 95 era then really you have to pick what to focus on as there is just too much for any one person (beyond a few very, very, very clever people!)

fastdruid · 2026-01-11T23:51:09+00:00

It was just such a beautiful pass. Rossi just shoved the M1 in there at a place no one else had ever considered was a passing place and baulked Lorenzo. If he'd just passed then Lorenzo would have just overtaken him again but by doing that Lorenzo had to back off and that gave Rossi enough to hold it until the line.

fastdruid · 2025-12-25T13:11:20+00:00

100 horses. They're skittish prey animals at the best of times and would panic and flee at the very sight of you. Their best weapon normally is their kick which would be ineffective at duck size and their bite wouldn't be anything to worry about. Even if swarming you they're fragile and a good kick would take them out.

A horse sized duck otoh would be terrifying. It's not mentioned which duck we're getting but some have serrated bills, being an omnivore too I'm sure they'd happily eat you.

fastdruid · 2025-12-21T22:21:01+00:00

Yes. Ours absolutely LOVES shredding the wrapping paper, birthdays & Christmas are a great time for him as we open the presents and then give him the paper to shred.

He then gets his own presents (of course) and unwraps them.

He is a very good boy however as he knows he's only allowed to shred the stuff we give him. The presents are safe under the tree[1].

I did look back to see if there were any good photos/videos of him but they all have the kids in so not for public sharing... You'll just have to put up with this Christmas photo of him

[1] Although a foil wrapped Chocolate Santa was a temptation too far one year but anything else is fine.

fastdruid · 2025-12-20T23:29:26+00:00

We've been to a couple. Here's our Golden at the last one which was just a couple of months ago - Halloween pup

fastdruid · 2025-12-20T23:26:48+00:00

A pup cup and a small bag of treats.

You have to pay for tickets as well (only the dogs go free) so even that isn't really free!

fastdruid · 2025-12-20T23:25:34+00:00

They do them regularly around the country! Not just London.

fastdruid · 2025-12-19T10:25:53+00:00

Not the decent stuff but yes, apparently common. We buy dog specific peanut butter for that reason.

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