tal

The 1965 failure resulted from the transmission capacity into the region being near exhausted, and then a failure on one transmission line triggering a series of other problems that blacked out the region. I'm just trying to give an example of where a failure of the sort that one might expect to potentially happen in Iberia -- having little spare transmission capacity, and then hitting some sort of problem that increases stress -- might result in internal blackouts in the region.

I'd also note that Spain and Portugal have very limited interconnection to the rest of Europe

this is known as the "Iberian energy island"

and addressing this has been the topic of some past European news coverage that I've read.

There are only three, limited-capacity electricity transmission links between them and France. In the past, they have been completely cut off from the rest of Europe's electricity grid when all three links were down for unrelated reasons at the same time.

I'd guess that this is probably a relatively weak point in terms of reliability in Europe's electricity grid.

Back in 1965, in the US, we had the Northeast go dark for a while after a failure on one transmission line into the region shut down, caused electricity to be shunted onto others, triggering them to also shut down; a series of cascading protection systems triggered to bring the system to a "safe" state and avoid damage and ultimately brought power transmission into the region and then other systems down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_1965

CNN, five minutes ago as of this writing:

https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/power-outages-blackout-spain-portugal-04-28-25/index.html

Some outlets are reporting a fire in the southwest of France is to blame, but French electricity providers have denied the claim. Portugal’s National Cybersecurity Center also said there was no evidence of a cyberattack being behind the power outages, state news agency LUSA reported.

While the exact cause remains unclear, governments have convened emergency meetings and electricity providers are working to restore power as soon as possible.

I do see other news articles on other sites speculating as to cause, including some about hacking, but that doesn't seem to be beyond guesswork. I'd think that if there were any firm information out, that CNN would have it.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/shortkeys/

Not to mention the bar.

I mean, I'll believe that OP is frustrated with the noise, but I can't see how he's going to get a useful answer from this.

Happy to stay on YouTube until they block my ad-blocker, then I’ll look around.

They do block yt-dlp from downloading at least some account-and-login-required-to-view content now, which wasn't historically the case, so they are slowly cracking down to some degree.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1336330

Is there a way to restore backspace button function in the newest version of Firefox, so when pressing it the previous page opened?

This function was very helpful for me!

To prevent user data loss when filling out forms, we’ve disabled the Backspace key as a navigation shortcut for the back navigation button. To re-enable the Backspace keyboard shortcut, you can change the about:config preference browser.backspace_action to 0. You can also use the recommended Alt + Left arrow (Command + Left arrow on Mac) shortcut instead.

Ive just been downloading videos direct with yt-dlp, but I think I’m going to extend it into a bash script which fetches the RSS of the channels I want, downloads them if they haven’t been downloaded, and then deletes them after they have been watched and after a certain amount of time has passed, or if I have marked them for deletion.

I wrote something a while back in bash that pulls down a channel with yt-dlp, remembers already-downloaded stuff, and doesn't redownload. Has a menu interface showing a list of "subscribed" channels to pull from. If you want, I'll throw you a copy.

I'd do stuff like this with caution, as YouTube temp-IP-banned me from anonymous use for something like a month after I sucked down the contents of an enormous channel in a relatively-short time. At the very least, I'd suggest having it put a cap on how much it downloads by default so that you don't inadvertently pull down way more than expected and run into trouble with YouTube. My own script doesn't presently have such a cap.

I liked Word Perfect for Dos but converting files to my linux desktop was a pain and I never found a workflow I liked.

I wouldn't do it myself, but if that floats your boat:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/20/wordperfect_for_unix_for_linux/

Tavis Ormandy ports WordPerfect for UNIX to Linux

Wed 20 Jul 2022 // 15:15 UTC

https://mendelson.org/wpdos/unix.html

Emacs continues to support MS-DOS in 2025, so I guess it'd be tolerable.

hibernating to disk means all my shell sessions and anything else disconnected anyhow.

If you can run tmux on the remote system, can manually reattach when you reconnect.

If you use the UDP-based mosh instead of the TCP-based ssh

it uses ssh to bootstrap auth, then hands off to its own protocol

(a) the system can use local prediction in some cases, leaving it feeling snappier, but also (b) the thing will automatically reconnect and resume sessions. I mostly find it useful on flaky/slow links, but it is also kind of neat to just close a lid, and then pop it open again days or a week later and then just resume working without any user-visible disruption.

I normally use mosh in conjunction with tmux, since with mosh alone, there's no way for another host to reconnect to a mosh session...but another host can connect and take over a tmux session being run by a mosh session.

I'm not sure how much of a setback this is.

If it failed and it's out of control, I assume that it's an issue with normal "satellite" things

the computer or the thrusters or whatever, stuff that's involved in maneuvering the satellite. A failure in systems that Russia can and has done before. Not with the radar systems onboard.

And I'd guess that the costs are mostly in R&D rather than the manufacturing of the satellite, costs that wouldn't need to be repeated for Russia to build such a satellite over again.

I assume that if Russia wants to do so, they can launch a replacement satellite.