Continuing frequency deviation in the Continental European Power System originating in Serbia/Kosovo

5 years ago
I assume the missing 113 GWh have gone down the Serbian Bitcoin Mines.

The Continental European Power System -- a large synchronized area stretching from Spain to Turkey and from Poland to Netherlands; encompassing 25 countries -- is experiencing a continuous system frequency deviation from the mean value of 50 Hz, and this since mid of January 2018. [...]

This average frequency deviation, that has never happened in any similar way in the CE Power system, must cease. The missing energy amounts currently to 113 GWh. The question of who will compensate for this loss has to be answered.

The decrease in frequency average is affecting also those electric clocks that are steered by the frequency of the power system and not by a quartz crystal: they show currently a delay of close to six minutes. [...]

For the system to properly function the frequency cannot go below 47.6 and above 52.4 Hz. At the extreme values of 47.5 (under frequency) and 52.5 (over frequency) all connected generation and devices would automatically disconnect. The average frequency of the period since mid-January 2018 until today was around 49.996 Hz.

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Oh, Hypnowheel, how I loathe you

5 years ago
Dear Lazyweb, what tools exist to tell me why my iMac has been hypnowheeling all the time?

Activity Monitor is useless. I don't think I have ever had it answer the question, "Why are things slow?" It seems to only be capable of ever telling you, "Load is zero! kernel_task has used 7 CPU-years!" The macports version of "top" seems similarly worthless. "fs_usage" can't seem to say anything other than "yep, iTunes is reading your disk" (which is not surprising as it's playing music).

I've got 51 GB free, 32 GB of RAM, zero swap utilization, and Disk Utility has no complaints, even in recovery mode. But it's behaving like, I dunno, some bus is saturated and everything stops. Even just typing this text into an Emacs buffer, it randomly gave me a hypnowheel for 30+ seconds. Opening a Safari window just took a full minute, but yup, load is zero. This is some fun new definition of "load" with which I was previously unfamiliar. Even "ps" is slow.

And then, eventually it stops and everything is back to normal again. For a while.

If the problem is that the disk is dying, I'd like some diagnostic software to actually prove that to me before I pull the machine apart, because replacing a disk in an iMac is a gigantic pain in the ass (not to mention the 3 days of downtime waiting for the restore to happen.)

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