Yesterday and today, the whole of Spain, Portugal and parts of France, Italy and Belgium lost their power inexplicably. This happened about 12:30 local time here in Spain.

The power was out for about 26 hours here, a bit less for some areas as they brought up the grid piece by piece.

The mobile base stations were the first to go.

We have solar panels and batteries which carry over the night, and it was a sunny day, so we maintained power here in the house over the event.

This Mastodon instance was inaccessible for 11 hours, because apparently the fiber optic substations lost their emergency battery power after 6 hours or so, and the final internet connection we had was cut.

There is still no conclusive determination for what happened or why. It seems the most likely explanation currently is some sort of an atmospheric event causing resonance in the electric grid.

https://elpais.com/economia/2025-04-28/apagon-electrico-masivo-en-espana.html

At night, our house was pretty much the only one with power. The other lights visible in the photo are largely cars and flashlights. We still have our Christmas lights in the yard...

The stars were well visible in the sky.

So, lessons learned:

1. Apocalypses (or pseudo-apocalypses) don't necessarily come with a bang. They come with an eery silence and darkness, and no one knows what is happening.

2. I am still unable to play my local Plex series with the good TV, because everything seems to require internet connectivity for no good reasons. I can play them with my phone and on laptop (but with proprietary codecs and without hardware accelerations it's in practice impossible). Playstation Plex simply refuses to function without internet.

3. Don't run multiple high power cooking appliances at once because it overloads the inverter.

4. The house water pump isn't in the emergency power circuit, which is inconvenient and needs fixing.

5. Need to have physical keys for things easily available, and not hidden in places you'd look in the last.

6. Even if the local internet networks would still work, if the global networks aren't available the ISPs happily just cut off all the networks and don't even try to maintain just local networks for convenient local emergency communications purposes. Ditto for electricity.

#SelfHosting #RukiiNet #apocalypse #resilience #blackout #Spain

#Coffee offers performance boost for #concrete - #RMITUniversity

"Lead author Dr Rajeev Roychand from RMIT University said the team developed a technique to make concrete 30% stronger by turning #waste coffee grounds into #biochar, using a low-energy process without oxygen at 350 degrees Celsius."

https://www.rmit.edu.au/news/all-news/2023/aug/coffee-concrete

#RukiiNet update:

Sad news: A large amount of data was lost. I was doing maintenance and deleted a jiva pod to make it remount stuff. This was a mistake as it was actually the controller pod, not a replica pod. It caused the whole Postgres volume to be nuked.

Anyhow, I have backups for just this thing, the latest from the day before. In two different instances to be sure. And from the last four days to be very sure. No worries? Murphy's law strikes again.

Turns out I had two separate backup scripts running on different times on two different nodes, to be extra sure that I had backups. The thing is, these processes took a long time and it seems they actually co-occurred, and using the same sqlc dump file name on the pod, they both wrote to it at the same time.

All backups were corrupted. On all the nodes. On all the days. The last backup which wasn't was from the end of January... I restored that one, and everything I could recover from the latter backups, which sadly didn't include all the posts. Luckily pretty much no one on my instance had posted much, except me. Sadly the follow lists were gone as well.