Richard Fairhurst
Building the world’s best bike directions at cycle.travel
- This is the correct way of dividing Oxfordshire up into three councils and I shall not be taking questions
- Reposted by Richard FairhurstWith the future of the A379 / Slapton Line near Torcross in Devon uncertain following recent storm damage, here's a few other disappearing roads you may want to ride before its too late...
- This week in “maybe we should have supported proportional representation after all” news
- And I still have my Multimap mug! (with typo on the bottom)
- streetmap.co.uk appears to have finally keeled over and died. In the early 00s it was one of the two big online map sites in the UK, but whereas Multimap smartly sold out to Microsoft, Streetmap ploughed on with its frankly antiquated tech, at one point suing Google for market abuse (and losing).
- streetmap.co.uk appears to have finally keeled over and died. In the early 00s it was one of the two big online map sites in the UK, but whereas Multimap smartly sold out to Microsoft, Streetmap ploughed on with its frankly antiquated tech, at one point suing Google for market abuse (and losing).
- Keir Starmer’s chief secretary made a blame-the-civil-servants speech, praising “doers not talkers” and calling for “complete digital transformation”, at what3words HQ today. what3words has lost £150m in ten years and is showing no signs of ever making a profit. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
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- This is very neat: 3D city models made from OpenStreetMap data (inter alia) www.lichtbild-manufaktur.shop
- Reposted by Richard FairhurstFor clarity, this government has so far: - cancelled HS2 north of Birmingham (previous government hadn't actually done that formally) - cancelled electrification of the Midland Main Line - cancelled West Yorkshire mass transit - cancelled the trans-Pennine high speed line
- The Telegraph (usual fare: “The Car of the Year is the Mercedes CLA – here is why you should want one”) has an article on “Britain’s 20 prettiest streets”. _15_ of them are car-free (and 4 of the others are very quiet). Restricting cars makes for better towns. www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/desti...
- Reposted by Richard FairhurstClarion news: We’re leaving Twitter (’X’). We can’t condone the objectionable content it now promotes, which goes against everything we believe and the Clarion tradition. Our live posting is now here on Bluesky, with all this plus much more in our email newsletter twice a week.
- This keyboard actually _is_ an entire computer because, unlike the Spectrum, it has a mass storage device included
- 15ish years ago, when all the roads to Charlbury were snowed up, the one thing getting in and out was the train. But I guess the HSTs were made of sterner stuff than the current trains.
- Why don’t we have a successful mittelstand like Germany, why is Britain so bad at small/medium companies which just do what they do without fuss The Guardian: “companies which make enough money to cover their costs are zombies and must be forced out of business” www.theguardian.com/society/2026...
- This is amazing. A (not very large) language model that runs on a Z80. In 40k. You could run it on an Amstrad CPC. github.com/HarryR/z80ai
- Bag of Christmas cheese
- Christmas Eve 4pm: Denis Bédard ‘In dulci jubilo’ 6pm: John Cook ‘Divinum mysterium’ 11.30pm: Dobrinka Tabakova ‘Diptych’ Christmas Day 10.30am: César Franck ‘Sortie pour Noël’ Merry Christmas!
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- @rupertairbear.bsky.social Service bus passing a Bull special this evening. Routemaster doing a three-point turn is going to be fun!
- First carol service of the season…
- “Reading for displeasure” is probably the most accurate description of Ian McEwan I’ve ever heard pp1-8: sad thing happens pp9-263: bad consequences of sad thing are drawn out in excruciating detail
- The Coopers! Waterways World’s local, and a cracking pub for the post mortem on each issue when it came back from the printers. (It was better when they served Staffordshire oatcakes though.) www.thetimes.com/life-style/f...
- Impressive new official UK online railway map. Appears to be vector tiles, Maplibre JS, manual selection of stations for each zoom level, hints for label placement baked into the tiles. No authorship information that I can see, but someone deserves plaudits for this. railmap.nationalrail.co.uk
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- For at least ten years, every music recommendation engine has been telling me “you should listen to Boards of Canada”. I finally listened to them and am now wondering why I didn’t do so ten years ago www.youtube.com/watch?v=St-m...
- No words
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- cycle.travel has a bunch of code to handle this specific elevator! (Otherwise it really wouldn’t want to route up a hill quite as steep as that…)
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- Pshaw. It’s biased in favour of a deeply regressive set of small-C social conservative views. It doesn’t have the imagination or the coherence to be either left-wing or right-wing.
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- Very sorry to hear of the death of Terry Darlington, the endearing nutcase who took his narrowboat across the Channel (and various other entirely unsuitable places) as chronicled in ‘Narrow Dog to Carcassonne’.
- Another thoughtful piece about Adventure Cycling’s travails in the bikepacking age. Some suggestions in the comments that “it’s a bit more complex than that” but the core is: long-distance TransAm cycling is a rapidly ageing market. theradavist.com/whats-next-f...
- Welp. Turns out the kid I used to sit next to at school aged 10 is actually Lord Voldemort collider.com/harry-potter...
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- Given that our local River Learning Trust primary has got through five heads in five years, I’m not convinced they need any help from the congestion charge for staff to start leaving
- The New Yorker wrote about the app I’ve spent most time in over the last 20 years: TextEdit, Apple’s bare-bones WYSIWYG text editor. Always works, never gets in the way. Less nonsense than Word 5.1, less nonsense than ChatGPT. Thank you, whoever maintains it. www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...
