Notices by Quixoticgeek (quixoticgeek@social.v.st)

One thing Germany got right in their bottle deposit system is if you sell drinks in a type of plastic bottle. You are legally required to accept the returns, and pay out the Pfand.

Except two of the places I tried in this station refused. Fortunately the Relay had no problem giving me 25c back as coins.

This is really bad news for the Netherlands. The entire country is built upon the problem of too much water. But that infrastructure is built upon maintaining just he right amount of water. If the dijks dry out they crack, and when the water returns in the winter, flooding happens. The flow of fresh water coming from the Rhine, the Meuse (which becomes the Maas), and to a lesser extent the Scheldt, is also what keeps salt water from infiltrating the ground water.

1/n

https://nltimes.nl/2026/07/13/persistent-drought-higher-demand-netherlands-heading-water-shortages

The Netherlands is the world's second biggest exporter of agricultural products, by value. The one sector represents almost a ⅕th of total exports. Crop irrigation becomes one of the first things to curtail.

A key problem however that arises from the Dutch treating water as a too much problem for their entire history is the population as a whole seems entirely devoid of knowledge on water conservation actions. Even simple stuff like watering plants at the right time of day.

2/n.

"this is an ICE4, it's not the fastest high-speed train"
"Yes but it can do 250kph, which meets the EU definition of high-speed"
"Yeah, but it's still slower than some"
"There's slow, and then there's overtaken by the local wildlife"
"Um, that's an S-bahn train"
"Seems pretty wild to me"

"the ICE trains are Germany's high speed trains right?"
"Yes"
"And this is an ICE4 train?"
"Yes"
"I don't want to alarm anyone, but we just got overtaken by a deer"

If you ever look at the area of track between the rails. You'll see it's covered in all sorts of crap. Oil, lubricants, and all sorts of other fluids fall out the bottom of trains into this space, along with dust, sand (from brakes), leaves, litter, etc... This will all need to be cleaned off to keep the panels operating at peak performance. Except you can't just send a student down with a mop and bucket. You need to arrange track possession, and do all the risk assessment stuff.

3/n

Railways also come with a lot of extra gubbins beyond the two rails nailed to wood planks (or more often bolted to concrete these days). In more modern networks, rather than burning dinosaurs, the railways have power which comes from all that knitting above the tracks. The above here is the problem. Cos it's going to shade the panels. "But it's only a thin wire, so a small shadow" I can hear some techbro angry typing. You don't need to fully obscure a whole panel to reduce it's output.
4/n

Partial shading of panels is a big problem that is often overlooked by solar installers. Any shading of a section of a panel not only stops they bit of the panel generating electricity, but it turns it into a higher resistance section of panel, reducing even further the output of the rest of the panel. Having support posts and knitting and all that other gubbins above and around the track to shade the panels is a really suboptimal situation to build solar.
5/n

Unfortunately because it hasn't resulted in fire and death, the company behind it are trying to do it again. This time in Italy.

https://www.euronews.com/2026/07/05/italy-could-be-the-next-country-to-build-a-solar-railway-after-switzerlands-successful-tri

The problem is, it's still a fucking stupid idea. Railways are a really bad place to do anything. Vehicles weighing hundreds of tons doing high speeds on rails, with stopping distances measured in kilometres. Railways are safety critical infrastructure. Which means there's processes and procedures to follow everytime you need access.
2/n

Ye fucking gods, just like how techbros keep reinventing the bus, it seems in solar circles, the idea of putting solar panels in transport surfaces is an idea that a) should never had be got off the fag packet sketch, b) keeps coming back.

We had the trial of a 100m long 18KW install in Switzerland. Which unsurprisingly, did generate power. Noone is surprised by that. It's quite hard to fuck up a solar install so you don't get power from it. But. Does it mean it's a good idea ?

Fuck no.

1/n

What the utter fuck are modern programmers all smoking? I just tried to install a simple recipe manager written in rust, it has 580 dependencies in cargo... *HOW*? Ye fucking gods.

@GreenSkyOverMe " maximum transmission unit " aka max packet size for a network connection. If you have a mismatch at different ends of the connection fun failures happen.

Spent the last couple of hours debugging a mail server problem. The fix? MTU.

Phew. Mail is coming in now.

Realised my postfix config hasn't been touched since 2007. Probably time I actually sat down with @mwl 's book, and set up something a little more modern.

Well fuck. This train doesn't actually stop at my destination as normal... Fuck. Guess I'm going to Den Haag

There's meeting strangers off the internet, and then there's @fluffcthulhu ...

A ferry to Dover, a night in Kent to pick up my camping gear, then it was trains to London, then onwards oop noorf to get a ferry across to Douglas, then the Manx tram and a short bike ride to my destination.

I still occasionally think about the stranger on that train who overheard a phone call and checked on me. There are good people in the world.

3/3

Ten years ago. I was on a train talking to a friend on the phone. I was explaining to said friend how I'd got on said train.

"I was contacted by a man in the middle east who said that if I gave him my bank details, he would send me the money so I could go to the event on the isle of man that I'm heading to". After a bit more discussion. I hung up. A woman who was the only other person in the train carriage came over and sat opposite me.

"I'm sorry, I couldn't help overhearing your call"

1/n

"oh"
"Yeah, I'm sorry to say but I think you've just been scammed."

It takes me a moment for the penny to drop. I laugh.

"The guy in the middle east is a friend who I've known for 15 years, it's all good"

"You scared me for a moment there"

"Oops"

That was a very surreal trip. It was too late to take a Eurostar, so I'd taken a slow train to Antwerp, then on to a local Belgian train to De Panne, where I cycled on my Brompton across the border to the Dunkirk ferry terminal.
2/n

For reasons the topic of super heroes came up during therapy. I mentioned how batman had been ruined for me when I fully understood that Bruce Wayne as a billionaire could have solved all the problems of Gotham city, but instead chose to spend his nights beating up the poor and mentally ill.

"Now you've ruined batman for me too"

"Oops"