GB Energy - Changes

Following Twitter’s restrictions on API usage there will now be significantly fewer tweets than before, going to under 50/day across the 9 accounts. The new schedule is below, explaining the hours of generation referred to by each tweet.

• Twitter Schedule

  7:05 - Overnight (22:00-7:00) Generation

  9:30 - Forecast tweet (Wind Only)

  11:20 - Daily Chart -
  Jan 1st - Previous Year
  1st Feb-Dec - Previous Month
  Mondays - Previous Week
  All other Days - Previous Day

  12:05 - Morning (7:00-12:00) Generation
  (Skipped on 2nd &16th of month)

  17:05 - Afternoon (12:00-17:00) Generation
  (Skipped on 2nd &16th of month)

  22:05- Evening (17:00-22:00) Generation

  2nd & 16th of month

  12:05 - Trend Chart
  2nd - Last 7 years
  16th - Last 3 years

  17:05 - Day (7:00-17:00) Generation

The Mastodon account will remain unchanged and still provide hourly updates and the full array of charts that were previously on Twitter.

A list of all accounts and both Mastodon/Twitter schedules can be found here: https://andylawton.com/gb-grid

Future of the accounts

I’ve mentioned previously that Twitter’s API changes and their handling of them have demotivated me in terms of the development of these accounts, but while I can still justify the costs of maintaining the accounts I have no intention of shutting them down.

There are upcoming changes to the energy data feeds API and a decommissioning of the existing one. I fully intend to keep everything maintained to make use of the new data feeds.

Possible improvements

Embedded Wind - There is ~6.5GW of embedded wind that is currently not included in any of the accounts figures, the National Grid does now provide estimates and forecasts of this generation. In the future, I’d like to combine these with the metered figures.

Solar - The Sheffield Solar project has helped significantly in providing a fuller picture of grid energy sources. Their work with the National Grid means the national grid now provides this data themselves, I will probably switch to their data sources. A days ahead forecast, similar to the one on the Wind accounts is also planned.

Combined Grid Account - While the accounts are at the tweet cap (47/50 a day), treating this account as a new app should be possible. This would be a new single account showing statistics of the grid as a whole.

If anyone has suggestions for other improvements to this suite of accounts or what you’d like to see on a combined account, feel free to get in touch and let me know via this website or social media. Though I make no promises on any future changes.

Support these accounts

The servers running these accounts and storing the data costs money, while I intend to keep the accounts running regardless, any support towards these costs will be greatly appreciated.

Buy me a Coffee over at Ko-Fi

GB Grid Twitter updates

Twitter has today finally switched off part of its free API. This was expected in March, then April and finally done on June 13th.

These automated accounts have always been a side project that has cost me significantly more in server costs and time than the small number of donations I’ve received justifies. (Not that I’ve ever advertised the donations) As such, I will not be paying for any premium API access, and Musk’s mindset in regard to these API changes has demotivated me in making further changes to these accounts.

However, I do not plan on closing these accounts, there is now a free tier of the API which I will be using. To use this tier as it’s intended to be used will mean some changes, this will include reducing the number of tweets per day. There will now just be 4 updates a day:

Overnight - 10pm - 7am
Morning - 7am - noon
Afternoon - noon - 5pm
Evening - 5pm - 10pm

Tweets will show the average generation over the period.

There will likely be a reduction in the total number of charts tweeted too. However, media uploads have only been allowed on their disabled version of the API, so will be finding out over the next few days whether I can still keep having the charts or not.

Finally, there may be some disruption to the tweets over the next few days, my twitter developer account, rather than switching over to the free API has instead been broken and would likely not even work on a paid tier. This means I’m having to fix things in real time, which will likely mean some missed updates.

Changes have been implemented- update here: https://andylawton.com/home/2023/6/19/gb-energy-changes

Bee's Dice Roller

Fully customisable 3D dice roller.

Find the dice roller here: dice.bee.ac

Example roll

Following a request for a custom on stream dice roller I took to adapting Teal’s dice roller to allow for some more customisability.

Teal’s dice roller creates dice using Three.js with results truly randomised using random.org integration.

Changes for Bee’s dice roller:

• Clean design with no links for stream overlays.

• Customisable Dice and Label Colours.

• Default to a chromakey throughout with a customisable colour.
  
  
  
  

As well as clicking to throw the dice, dragging in any direction will throw the dice in that manner.

Customisation and URL options

The dice roller is fully customisable using URL parameters.

Available parameters: (all hexcodes are without the #)

• dicehex - hexcode - sets the dice’s body colour.

• labelhex - hexcode - set’s the number’s colour.

• transparency - number 0-1 - set’s an opacity on the dice.

• chromahex - hexcode - sets background colour

• dicescale - number 0.05-4 - increase or decreases size of the dice. (multiplies size by number)

• shadows - 0 or 1 - turns off dice shadows.

• noresult - no input- turns off the results text

• resultdetail - no input- breaks down the result for each die clearly

• resulttotal - no input- gives the total of all dice rolls without a breakdown by die.

• resulthex - hexcode - set the colour of the result text

• resultbghex- hexcode - set the colour of the result text box’s background. (accepts alpha channel)

• resultsize - integer- sets the font size in pixels

• roll- no input- immediately rolls on page load.

• d - dice notation (see below) - set’s the starting dice

example link: http://dice.bee.ac/?dicehex=4E1E78&labelhex=CC9EEC&chromahex=FBFF00&d=2d20&roll

dice notation

standard dice notation, multiple dice separated with +. can also include @ to set the numbers they will roll.

examples:

• 3d4 = 3 four sided dice

• 4d20+2d8 = 4 twenty sided dice and 2 eight sided dice

• 2d20@1%201 = 2 twenty sided, both will roll 1’s. (results separated by a space, url encoded)

• 2d20+1d4@1%201%203 = 2 twenty sided, both will roll 1’s, 1 4 sided die, will roll a 3

Adding to OBS

Set as browser source and add a chroma key filter to match the chosen chromahex and dice colours.

To roll the dice right click source and choose "Interact" to pop up window to roll.

If you make use of the roll&d= notation you can set the source to ‘shutdown source when not visible’ then any time you toggle the source visible (via hotkey) there will be a new roll.

Huge thanks to Teal for doing the hard work of creating the framework of this dice roller and making it open source allowing for this customisation.

Should anyone have any questions or would like further customisation options, feel free to get in touch.

Find the Dice Roller here: dice.bee.ac

Help keep the Dice Roller Running

Keeping the server running costs money. While I intend to always keep the dice roller running and ad-free and tips would be greatly appreciated.

Buy me a Coffee over at Ko-Fi

Updates:

2021-10-24 - Fixed D100 pre set results.
2022-01-16 - Added dice scale parameter
2022-04-03 - Added result parameters
2023-04-04 - Added resulttotal parameters

Football Kit Colours

Update 30/08/2019 - Colours updated for the 2019/20 season.

I needed a set of colours to use for a football score display i was building, unfortunately I couldn’t find any available source for this, so I set about creating my own.

AFC Wimbledon’s InfoBox

Fortunately Wikipedia was able to come to the rescue. Wikipedia is great for finding lists of items and it does have a list of all football clubs within the first 10 levels of the English Football League system. Wikipedia.

From this list it also links to the Wikipedia page of the club where one exists (a few of the clubs in the lower tiers do not yet have Wikipedia pages). The infobox on these football club pages also show the clubs kits, this may be empty for some of the smaller teams, just show the Home Kit or show the Home, Away and Third kits.

Through python’s Beautiful Soup library I was able to go through the complete list of football teams and find these kit images for the team. These images were then analysed by Python’s Pillow library to break them into blocks of similar colours. Any colour meeting set thresholds were then stored as primary kit colours for that club.

Currently these colours are for the 2018/19 season and will be updated for 2019/20 near the beginning of the season once new kits have been revealed and their wikipedia pages updated.

These club colours have been made available at https://sandbox.andylawton.com/football-colours/.

Should anyone have use of this data in a different format i will be happy to provide it, get in touch using the contact form on this website.

Bitcoin Energy Use

"Bitcoin now uses as much energy as Ireland" was a recent headline in the Telegraph and across many other news sites. This follows analysis  by PwC that the bitcoin network now uses 2.55GW of electricity and that could triple by the end of 2018.

Why does bitcoin use so?

The simple answer is that a lot of computing power goes in to mining bitcoins and all these computers require electricity.

To Kai's comment of "Because of all the computing power" while, yes that is correct the next question should be "Why does bitcoin need all that computing power?". This, to the surprise of many, is that it doesn't need it. For bitcoin to function it needs just one computer, However this would make it a centralised system, it needs more to be decentralised. but nowhere near as much as it has.

So, why does it have all this computing power if it doesn't need it?

It's profitable.

Miners compete every 10 minutes for 12.5 bitcoins. Or at $7,000 a bitcoin. $87,500 every 10 minutes. or $4.6 BILLION in a year.

Estimates suggest currently around 10% of this is spent by bitcoin miners on the equipment, assuming 5% is required for man power / profits that means 85% of this can be spent on electricity costs and mining remains profitable.

 Basically Bitcoin makes it profitable to spend around $4Bn on electricity

What can be done about it?

Every ~4 years the number of bitcoins rewarded to miners halve until it will eventually (another 200 years) hit zero. As the reward reduces there will be less to be spent on electricity. This of course all depends on the value of bitcoin, Should its price double every 4 years, electricity usage will remain constant.

With the greening of the electricity mix there will be less CO2 produced through this electricity use, but no less electricity used. In fact, if this were to reduce electricity costs, it will increase use, increasing the cost would reduce it.

These calculations are specific only to Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies have different reward structures and electricity usage will be based around that. One clear result you get from these calculation is, unlike many claim, cryptocurrencies don't have 'real' value because of the electricity it costs to generate bitcoins, the electricity used to generate a bitcoin is tied directly to what they already cost.

 A fully centralized cryptocurrency that doesn't need to offer rewards at all would not have these energy costs.

 N.B. These calculations assume energy parity is always met, obviously mining power does not and cannot react instantaneously to bitcoin prices.

I have also attached below my calculations I had previously done to inform myself of bitcoin energy use, where I had specific interest in CO2 per bitcoin transaction. These transactional costs are fixed in many other cryptocurrencies by just allowing more transactions per block.

Bitcoin transaction fees etc.

---------------

Bitcoin Reward (every 10 mins) = 12.5BTC

Bitcoin Value = $7,000 / £5,250

Reward Value = $87,500, £65,625

Bitcoin block = 1,000,000 Bytes

Avg Transaction size   = 495 Bytes

Avg Transactions/block = 2020

Reward Value/ Transaction = $43.32/£32.49

Profit = 5%

Equipment = 10%

Energy = 85%

Energy Value/ Transaction = $36.82/£27.61

Energy Costs = 14.37p/kWh

kWh / Transaction = 192kWh

2017 GB avg Carbon intensity = 292 g/kWh

gCO2 / Transaction = 56,064g

Footage from the Phantom

Footage from yesterdays flight.

Sheffield from the sky 2015-03-07 Music: "Clear Air" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Testing the Phantom 2

Testing the DJI Phantom 2 on what was a beautiful day in Sheffield for March.

View fullsize

Phantom 2 + GoPro 4 (Still image taken from video)