The Skull Cinema

For me the term power station always conjures up images of monster buildings with attached chimneys and cooling towers. But times are changing. Over the last 5 years the decrease in coal powered generation in the UK has been dramatic; falling from 42% to 6% of power generated, an 86% decrease. From the charts it appears that we are soon to have quarters with no coal generation. In the weekly data for the past year this decrease is even more marked. During the summer months, when electricity demand falls by about 20% and solar generation becomes more active, there were weeks during which coal only provided 0.26% of total generation, and the UK had 1,898 coal-free hours during 2018 ( ie almost 80 days). So, to start with the basic questions. How many are left? Where are they? What size are they? Who owns them? How are they planning to deal with the increasing pressure to decarbonise electricity generation in the UK? As usual Wikipedia has the answer , that being sev...

Now the blog has reached 10 posts I have been through enough cycles to have a blog post creation process sort of worked out. Step 1 - 1 st draft text The initial drafts are written into OneNote , as that is the application that I use to organise most things. I could just as easily use word processing software ( Word , Google Docs , etc .) or even any old text editor , as formatting isn't crucial at this point. The aim of the game is to get the words onto paper (equivalent) and not worry about what it looks like. Any hyperlinks are put inside square brackets in the text so they can be copied and pasted into place in the second draft. Step 2 - 1 st draft graphics Most posts seem to be coming along with images, and this is unlikely to change unless I suddenly discover a literary bent (and am simultaneously and miraculously blessed with some ability to write fancy like). At the moment the graphics are a mix of photographs and screen grabs. The aim is to source the correct ...

In the general spirit of solving problems there are other ways to contribute beyond writing a blog that no one reads. Whenever I come across a situation that requires me to absorb some new information, whether that be what an earth leakage circuit breaker does, or what happened to Carwood Lipton after the war, or what the legend of the Wandering Jew is about, or how to spell tonneau my first port of call is Wikipedia . It is truly a fantastic resource and an excellent demonstration of what the web can enable people to create. It has its' issues though; the strength of crowd-sourcing the entire content of the encyclopaedia is also a weakness in that less popular subjects are often not covered to the same depth that some pop-culture topics are. Meaning that it is more or less incomplete in parts. I can help. It is possible to edit Wikipedia anonymously, but adding an account is straightforward and allows other users to give feedback on your contributions if required. O...

Now the blog is up and running it's time to review progress against the initial goals. Which were, Get blog on-line - Done Use own domain - Sort of Blog in private mode - Done If I had put my mind to it I think I could have set the blog up in an afternoon, apart from the hiccough with the domain name. The next thing to investigate is the Blogger dashboard . But as everything is basically working it's steady as she goes.

What could be finer? And easier to make? Having done this before, you need a sack of pickling onions and some vinegar and that's it, sort of. As, when I went for the pickling jars, I discovered that last year's batch of onions hadn't all been eaten. So there weren't enough empty jars to deal with the sackful of pickling onions that had been bought from the local farm shop. In fact, there were still 3 L of onions to eat and now a further 4.5 L to pickle. Oops! A trip to Amazon was required to get some clip-top pickling jars . Once they had arrived and been washed, they were sterilised in the oven at Gas Mk I until dry, sealed and left to cool. The method followed was a mish-mash of three [ 1 , 2 , 3 ] without any spices as the pickling vinegar was pre-spiced.No sugar was added as we like 'em sharp; the lack of it doesn’t affect the pickling process though. Briefly, the onions were dunked into a large pot of boiling water for 30 seconds or so, then ...

This post was supposed to be the one where, having a custom domain, I set up a blog account on Blogger and link it to skullcinema.com so that it defaults to showing the blog when skullcinema.com is entered. Unfortunately it didn't go smoothly for reasons that I am still unclear about, although it is likely that the order I attempted the process in was to blame. I started by setting up a blog on my existing blogger account as I wanted to get started drafting posts. After the domain was secured I tried to link/transfer the blog to skulcinema.com. But, instead of it appearing on www.skullcinema.com , my efforts produced a forward to a new subdomain of blog.skullcinema.com . Not what I wanted, but hey-ho it works. As documenting my f(l)ailing at the process wouldn't be very illuminating I won't bother, but at some point I should be able to put something up showing how to repair my botched set-up. For now the basic work of getting the blog active is complete (even if it...

So this was supposed to be the part where I buy the domain from a cheap domain registrar and then transfer it to GoogleDomains . Well, not quite… I went to tld-list.com and domcomp.com and identified that 1&1 were offering domains at $1.19 (paying in USD is no problem these days) with free WHOIS privacy, unlike GoDaddy who wanted a further £5.99 for it. OK, I haven't tried moving a domain from 1&1 to Google Domains but I got it to work with GoDaddy and there would be a year to organise it. So off to the 1&1 website. Huh? $16.34? Oh, I only want one year as I am going to move afterwards, let's change that. Ahh, there's the catch, you have to buy two years with one at full price. OK, let's try the UK website, as the exchange fees will jack that price up. Now even more, at £13.32 a year. Ho hum, may as well just go directly to GoogleDomains. Quick search for skullcinema and slap it in the cart. All present and correct. ...