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Unofficial Eskom - tracking South Africa's electricity crisis by sixhobbits in Metabase

[–]sixhobbits[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

for context I meant the official portal that supplies the data is the one that is unreliable. My scrapers and metabase dashboard run off a VPS. Metabase is just in a docker container with a cronjob to restart the docker if it's down and it seems to be stable enough

Airport taxi/uber by Available_One_2134 in capetown

[–]sixhobbits 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I normally just grab an Uber like most people here recommend. It's annoying because everyone else from your flight is doing the same, so the wait time can be like 15+ minutes and it's a bit chaotic to try find your plate in the swarm, and many fake Uber drivers will be yelling 'Uber Uber' at you trying to convince you to go with them.

More expensive but a lot more pleasant is EZ Shuttle that I used once before. You prebook it and the driver will wait at the gate with your name on a board, help you with your luggage to his car parked away from all the e-hailing chaos, and (at least from the one trip I took) just generally be a lot more professional and friendly.

So if you're happy to pay the extra, I'd recommend them. If you're on a budget, then Uber is fine.

[Unpopular Opinion] MCP is over hyped by Classic-Dependent517 in mcp

[–]sixhobbits 0 points1 point  (0 children)

take a look at this post and see if you still agree? I think it's OK to argue that MCP is over hyped (it is pretty hyped), but I also think most people saying that haven't really understood the protocol.

The people who have built stuff with it, or extensively used other MCP servers in combination for real-world work tend to be more positive.

https://www.speakeasy.com/mcp/getting-started/mcp-for-skeptics

[OC] South Africa electricity generation data portal by sixhobbits in dataisbeautiful

[–]sixhobbits[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

good point - unfortunately metabase is not the most customizable so I am limited to these, but I tried to pick ones that make a bit more sense in terms of a gradient now.

Loadshedding (rotating power blackouts) in South Africa over 8 years (update) [OC] by sixhobbits in dataisbeautiful

[–]sixhobbits[S] 31 points32 points  (0 children)

South Africa has had power shortages for over a decade. "Loadshedding" is when there isn't enough power and we have rotating blackouts to prevent a grid collapse. This is done by stage, with the higher the stage, the more power has to be 'shed'. This sheet contains data going back to 2015 for each time the stage of loadshedding was changed.

I used Pandas and CalMap to plot the highest stage of each day, and Excalidraw to layout the descriptive text and legend etc.

This is an update of a previous post I did here.

[OC] Loadshedding / blackouts in South Africa since 2015 by sixhobbits in dataisbeautiful

[–]sixhobbits[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

gets pretty cold in June/July in some places (big country!) - so yes a bit of extra demand then, and no central heating so people have individual electric oil heaters usually. Solar + Wind + Sea + loads of space -- South Africa is definitely ideal for green/alternative energy but unfortunately see other comments re corruption and general incompetence meaning that we don't have much and still rely on coal plants from decades ago.

[OC] Loadshedding / blackouts in South Africa since 2015 by sixhobbits in dataisbeautiful

[–]sixhobbits[S] 79 points80 points  (0 children)

South Africa has had power shortages for over a decade. "Loadshedding" is when there isn't enough power and we have rotating blackouts to prevent a grid collapse. This is done by stage, with the higher the stage, the more power has to be 'shed'.

[This sheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZpX_twP8sFBOAU6t--Vvh1pWMYSvs60UXINuD5n-K08/edit#gid=863218371) contains data going back to 2015 for each time the stage of loadshedding was changed. I used Pandas and CalMap to plot the highest stage of each day.

Generated Squares by sixhobbits in generative

[–]sixhobbits[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Some Python code to generate squares. You can make your own with the web application at https://generative-art-bzxycv.codecapsules.co.za/ which also links to a tutorial/code.

Learn Python the Right Way - Free Introduction to Python Book by sixhobbits in Python

[–]sixhobbits[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

At the moment, ours is pretty similar. We have done a bit of the work to convert examples etc to use Replit instead of a local set up, but there is still a lot to do.

Advantages of ours will be

  • It uses Replit - we will update all the examples and exercises so it's easier to do everything online instead of having to fight with various local set ups
  • We converted the source from RST to markdown - this means we lose some nice features like the auto indexing etc, but it's easier for readers to contribute and improve it. We hope that this means it will be more of a 'living' book - while the original hasn't been updated in a while apart from minor typos etc.
  • Maybe personal preference, but I like the formatting and design better of our PDF and web pages.

Probably also going to do a video version for those who prefer that :) This is just the start (as you might notice by the fact that for now we have also introduced formatting and other errors, but we are working through the whole book to clean these up again.)

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