Ecstatic Disregard

Ecstatic Disregard

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Latest — 06 Aug 2025

Solar Dividends And Gas Prices

I hold positions in several solar power generation companies and funds in the UK. How do they make money? Clearly they sell electricity! But it turns out it’s more complicated than that. There isn’t a simple flat rate per kWh (even though that’s what I get for

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Walks In Crete

A couple of weeks ago we headed off to Makrigialos on the south eastern coast of Crete. This is an excellent, relatively undeveloped resort, with plenty of amenities. I won’t go into detail except to mention the superb Splash Bar! Here however I want to mentions some walks we

AWS Operations AI Investigations

Recently AWS made a new feature available in Cloudwatch: AI Operations. What does it do? In it's own words: Amazon Q Developer now includes a new generative-AI investigations experience that helps you troubleshoot operational issues by automating information gathering, analyzing observability data, and providing tailored recommendations. With this

Creating An EPUB Book From Markdown

A quick and dirty guide to making an EPUB book from a set of Markdown files using pandoc. In this example I have strarted a book with chapters and a cover image. Prequisites * some markdown files * pandoc Markdown File Structure I have given the chapters numbered prefixes and added a

ChatGPT COVID-19 Guardrails

I recently came across a link discussing the submission of SARS-CoV-2 sequences to Genbank on December 28, 2019. You can read it all here. In the “background” section a brief description of the sequence of events in the early days is given. After wading through this on my phone screen

Ten Years Of Maze Woods

Ten years ago we bought a field: Just a couple of acres on the outskirts of our village. Then we planted some trees: We planted a lot of trees, and a hedge. Thousands of plants. The trees grew: And now we have a woodland, complete with twisty paths and hidden

An iPad For Coding

A while ago I wrote an article about using an iPad with RStudio. There are more options these days, and I spend more time using web-based tools like Sagemaker. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using an iPad for general coding? Pros: * The iPad Pro is lightweight and portable,

The Internet By RSS

Why Use RSS I consume a lot of stuff on the Internet. A pretty incomplete list would include: * Hacker News * Mastodon & other social networks * Assorted blogs and newsletters * YouTube A number of these come with unwanted baggage, for example spam posts in blogs and newsletters, ads all over the

Using RStudio With An iPad

I love my iPad. It’s not exactly new: it’s a 12.9 inch model from three years ago. But even so, it’s light and convenient and fast enough not to be painful. What I like about it: * easy to write with (I have this keyboard) * drawing with