Off to Manchester! The walk-on peak fare is the £115.10 Anytime Return. But the walk-on Anytime Return to Stafford is £23.20. And an Anytime Return from Stafford to Manchester is £36.80. split.traintimes.org.uk/BRV/MAN/n/07...

Off to Manchester! The walk-on peak fare is the £115.10 Anytime Return. But the walk-on Anytime Return to Stafford is £23.20. And an Anytime Return from Stafford to Manchester is £36.80. split.traintimes.org.uk/BRV/MAN/n/07...

I have to re-apply for tax free childcare every three months, even though they would/should know if any of my details have changed. I always wonder each time why the whole byzantine system exists like this (also, if you apply for TFC, you lose Universal Credit?)

🌟 Tomorrow! 🌟 We've had a fantastic run of events all about the power of freedom of information to make real world change, and I think this one could be our best yet! We'd love to see you there! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/networked-...

“finding out which Strictly celeb’s rumba has been voted the most mediocre is deemed more important to the schedule.” Strictly is on at the same time as in 2017. Then, it was 6.20 Countryfile 7.20 Strictly 8 AR/Blue Planet. This year, it is 5.25 Countryfile 6.25 Kingdom 7.15 Strictly 8 AR.

You don’t realise how much you’ve come to rely on the bus live departures and live locations, until they’re not working today and you’re like “I have to turn up at the stop for a pre-published time? And hope the bus appears?“

Different calendar, though. It was 8th November “secundum computationem Ecclesiae Anglicanae”, so Old Style; that would have been 18th November in the Gregorian calendar already used in Catholic countries, and would be 21st November this year (Julian has had three more leap years since).

Kinder Surprise eggs are banned in the United States. I added three new suicides helped by ChatGPT to Wikipedia today: en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...

“But the undeniable energy of the Mamdani campaign has been joy — an effusive, exuberant, contagious joy. Even when times are hard, maybe especially when times are hard, people are drawn to that joy. And they've been missing leaders who offer them a positive vision.”

The flags on the street lights now mean walking down the windy street is a weird strobing nightmare of flickering lights

If you select “Least walking” in Google Maps, it changes to first suggest you… walk the whole way instead

“Huntingdon, near Cambridgeshire“, @theguardian.com? Huntingdon is in Cambridgeshire, Cambridgeshire isn’t a spot, you’ve got a pin on Needingworth, a little village, also in Cambridgeshire

I wondered what the most common score in Strictly was, and if it was more often one less than a multiple of four. Taking only the dances in which Anton voted (easiest proxy for current set of judges), the most common score (49 times) is 39. Then it's 32, 30, 31, 35, 29, 33, 27, 28, 40.

Happy Hallowe’en. My annual chance to put out the one piece of amazing tat that I own

Near disaster averted when a trio of children arrived at the door and I hadn’t realised my chocolate tub now contained only two sweets. I had another tub, but couldn’t get the sticky tape off. Quickly found some open chocolate chip cookies instead. Soundtrack: Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead

In love with this chord progression, – Ic, then vii°7 and I in the relative minor. Probably more famous uses, but works so well here

South Birmingham Sinfonia playday today, doing both Fountains of Rome and Pines of Rome (and me filling in sight reading on piano in one movement). Smell of Crunchie from the factory on the way, and some flash flooding

This was an excellent game, I did have to break out a spreadsheet in the end to keep track, but the fact I bothered to do that shows how good it was!

Did the AI write this paragraph

New thing 4: A new interface for managing keyword email alerts as a parliamentary monitoring tool

Agreeing with all this, but not the slight at Zork which handled both take and pick fine ;) if50.substack.com/p/1977-zork is a great look back. I love GUIs, I love CLI too; brilliant for processing, chaining things together, can be much faster than GUI. The problem is this browser isn’t doing that.

We’ve added the future devolved legislature boundaries to @mysociety.org’s MapIt: www.mysociety.org/2025/10/23/f...

New thing 2: MPs profiles now have a 'Signatures' section, covering open letters, EDMs, and motions to annul.

UK based MySociety is looking for a business development manager to help them keep their work supporting democracy and digital transparency sustainable - UK remote - £40-50k - They seem hella nice apply.workable.com/mysociety/j/...

Let’s see how many people put all their eggs in one AWS shaped basket. (OS Maps API has gone down, related? Switched FixMyStreet to OpenStreetMap. Deploy was fine, apart from the notification to Slack *about* the deploy got stuck...)

Putting out a fire inside the bin by the bus stop

Running theatricalia.com means I get questions such as “Was Tim Curry really in the 1968 original London production of Hair?” from an American news company (yes), and “What Cyril Fletcher pantomime was on at the Everyman in Cheltenham in 1971?” (Mother Goose). Neither answer was on the site though 🤣

I see the Christmas market huts are already present and waiting on the old wholesale market ground

Liked this :) Lots of failed memories for me here (in that I have no actual memories, only stirred emotion; I’ve accepted I’m not a chronicler). web.archive.org/web/20010603... has a section on getting online, that dates from some point in the 90s. I hung out on argonet.zfc and Acorn related mostly

ok, the CR search engine now works fine if you search for accented text without the accents, hooray. (www.kryogenix.org/crsearch/?q=tir+cruthu is an example.) The management apologises for the delay. Hat tip to @dracos.co.uk for the database help!

“we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues” vs www.theguardian.com/technology/2... ChatGPT, for me, is on the same list as Amazon, Nestlé, McDonalds, Barclays, L’Oreal. YMMV.

Taking some things off lampposts that shouldn’t be on lampposts

Make sure you apply before the deadline tomorrow: www.tfwm.org.uk/plan-your-jo...

I was going to complain that Apple Calendar was ignoring refresh-interval, fetching one identical calendar file over 100 times today, but then I saw the IP address was in Finland and the calendar was the bin times of a house in Beckenham, and why is so much of the internet just filled with waste

Today was the day! Relive how back in 2012 @sil.kryogenix.org told my computer to delete my home directory in a tweet, and it obeyed: dracos.co.uk/wrote/tweet2...

Any article like this, no matter the horrors it shows, always seems like it has to have a little bit where it says “AI is amazing and it has the potential to help a lot of people”, and how about no. That reminds me, everyone, read mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/team-dy... by @duncanjbrown.com

Very interesting report (they don’t actually link to it from the press release, it’s at www.ippr.org/articles/the...) I’ve thankfully never needed a car in Birmingham, would be great for that to apply to more people

Both people “shafted” in the game show waiting for Strictly, and an excuse to post the correct way to deal with this stupid endgame: www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0qj...

The most stressful film I have ever seen was, having no idea of the plot, “An Ideal Husband”, the 1999 film starring Rupert Everett and Julianne Moore

I have spent nine months feeling bad about a bug in something I’m responsible for that only kicks in if someone tries to amend a booking, *but* doesn’t amend the date, *and* if there are no more booking slots left for that same day, that has proved tricky to fix. rodriguezcommaj.com/blog/why-doe...

Twenty five years on, key parts of the compensation scheme for post office Horizon victims are just now being put in place. In the new era of generative AI, how do we bring issues to light and address them before they create this kind of tragedy? www.publictechnology.net/2025/10/07/s...

A domain is for life, not just for Christmas. This is why I mostly use subdomains for my things (apart from a couple of obvious ones), and keep memorial pages on our removed services. If I were a publisher, I’d say all links had to go through my site. But then I know I’d be able to maintain that!

Alma played second violin with me in South Birmingham Sinfonia for 18 years, after taking up the violin in retirement; she was looking forward to our next programme. She was also in a wide array of other ensembles, from choir to folk. I went to her funeral today, and it was standing room only. RIP.

this short and sweet blog from @dracos.co.uk is worth two mins of your time, it's important to us to be able to support other good bits of the internet, and it's important to me that everyone is reminded of this classic @xkcd.com

Along with our parent charity @mysociety.bsky.social, we're pleased to now formally sponsor OpenStreetMap and MetaCPAN – two key external pieces of digital infrastructure that help us to run our services. www.societyworks.org/2025/10/07/w...

Moon over Cadbury

The only issue I have with this, is that the spirit of gungeing is still very much with us every Saturday morning on Saturday Mash-up, where they now called it getting slimed: www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2PS... Umm, and get your dog poop flags from www.fixmystreet.com/about/posters ;-)

I am reminded of the graphs I made some months ago: bsky.app/profile/drac...