#osmand one of the most powerful #openstreetmap-based app has published their 2026 resolutions: https://osmand.net/blog/ny-resolutions-2026 and 2025 achievements. The expected changes for 2026 are quite interesting, but if I would highlight the option to "Share your location" with colleagues […]

Interesting talk about connecting to the computer interface of washing machines, dishwashers, and other household appliances. https://youtu.be/Q1S-PVo3GlA?si=g5FiWO5lKlDuf_dU

RE: https://mastodon.online/@parismarx/115838147626103231 If you're mad enough to do something about Trump before he gets everyone killed, there are a lot of options. One of the lowest effort options with the highest amount of plausible deniability is economic. The system needs money to […]

Any Czech/CD experts out there? Why, when I book Prague-Bratislava do I only see couchettes, but if I book Prague-Budapest on same train, couchettes & sleepers appear? I've already added a tip to book to Budapest and get off in Bratislava, but that won't work northbound.

Billionaires with $1 salaries – and other legal tax dodges the ultrawealthy use to keep their riches Billionaires can enjoy growing wealth entirely free of income tax and reporting […]

Being aesthetically impaired I rarely post photos or art, but this… A Man Feeding Swans in the Snow, Poland | Marcin Ryczek

Agrivoltaics boost crop yields even when the solar panels aren’t generating power. New research from Canada shows that shading crops with elevated solar panels creates a cooler, wetter microclimate that can lift yields and improve performance across dozens of crops, from peppers to pasture grass […]

I have decided to start fighting back linguistically; in future I will speak of: ▪️ The Far Wrong, far-wrong politics ▪️ Sad wives ▪️ Fiction Nationalists/✝️ Frictions ▪️ Crapsculinity Please inspire me with more improved terminology 🙏🏼

Heatpump install In June 2025 I got a heat pump installed in my 3 bedroom semi-detached house built in 1900. I thought I'd document the process as it may be of interest to others, particularly some aspects of the heat pump sizing and installation of the underfloor heating, which on discussing […]

Figured out why my mirrorless camera was doing heating photos. It was set to max ISO.

I'm attempting to cook Christmas dinner with a single oven. Really could do with another to get good roast potatoes.

Trying to reverse image search (one of the great features of Google in recent years) on an image I know to be a mundane Edinburgh Corporation electrical transformer room, to try and find an original source for it, Google now instead confidently tells me this is an image of the control room in GCHQ 🤦‍♂️

Thinking about this more, there is one #OpenStreetMap tag value which is particularly handy, and it is reservation=recommended. Quite often on trips I stumble upon restaurants, only to discover they're fully booked. If I could get a list of places where it is recommended to book, I could […]

We need YOUR help! 🫵 Are you maintaining (or have you spotted) a website / app using old or incorrect tile.openstreetmap.org tile URLs? There are tens of thousands out there, and they need to be updated. Please check your projects, shared examples, and help us fix them […]

Everytime I do a thread on energy someone drops into my mentions to tell me we shouldn't be building energy generation capacity. Whether I talk about Nuclear, or Wind, or solar. Someone says we shouldn't do it. Fucking BANANAs everywhere. I sometimes wonder if BANANAs are more annoying than […]

Yesterday I had a trip to London for work. Sleeper train both ways. Before the event went to the British Library and seen the exhibition and then had a little walk along. After the event I headed south past St Paul's cathedral, over the river and then headed west along the river. Dinner was a […]

So: #mozilla's got the next CEO with a corporate background determined to make yet another futile attempt to beat big tech at their own game, when in fact the obvious way to secure relevance and a good market share for #firefox is, to combine privacy and security with good usability on all […]

I have a new hobby. You see, our local Lidl is where a lot of the refugees in "temporary asylum accommodation" shop. And they are trying to get food that feels like actual food, in a place where there have been some really nasty xenophobic protests. The other day it was two guys from South […]

Nothing can make a student feel like they are "totally lost" and "will never get it" more than suddenly not even knowing what the symbols are or how to write them or even find them on a keyboard. If you teach CS keep in mind that many people don't know how to type [] or {} and things like [a […]

I have discovered that teaching programming goes much better with my fifth grade students if I take the time to teach them about all the symbols I think of as "normal" that are totally new to them. "These are square brackets, you'll find them over the 'enter' key we use them for lists. In […]

I find “but jobs!” arguments which appears a couple of times in this article completely disingenuous. Yes nuclear might create specialist jobs. So might bringing back the death penalty. If regional leaders are blinkered about economic diversity they insult their people. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

For instance, yes the North Sea oil and gas industry creates thousands of jobs. But you insult workers if you say they’re unretrainable one-trick ponies. Renewables need engineers, electricians, divers, helicopter pilots. If NE had got its arse in gear in renewables, Aberdeen wouldn’t be in slump.

I see the English Broadcasting Corporation news article on Great British Railways conveniently fails to mention that services in Scotland and Wales are run by the devolved governments, or that peak fairs have been scrapped in Scotland reducing the costs to commuters, something that GBR won’t do. […]

It's rather windy out there. Slightly what window for whipped open by the wind and the window ledge, carpet, pillow and duvet are wet enough that I needed to change the duvet and pillow, and run the dehumidifier to dry things out. It's not the quietest of dehumidifiers and it's right beside my bed.

Zuckerberg has blown 77 billion – enough money to revitalize entire countries – on an idea so overwhelmingly, obviously stupid that I have never once heard anyone, from the Thanksgiving avuncular table to the most wretched depths of social media, say they liked it or even tried it. He was so […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@eunews/115673826414965291 I call for the abolishment of billionaires like Musk Forever.

A severe #accessibility issue I've seen very few people talking about is the widespread adoption (in my country at least) of touch-only card payment terminals with no physical number buttons. Not only do these devices offer no tactile affordances, but the on-screen numbers move around to limit […]

The busiest pavement in #Edinburgh? A normal city that’s survived with only one lane for vehicles for 7 years would just make the pavement much bigger and put in the planned bus gate when the scaffolding comes down. Edinburgh: sorry, it’ll revert to a dual carriageway with meagre pavements 🤷‍♀️

General-purpose laptop and desktop computers? Nope, can't have those, AI needs the hardware. Living wages and secure employment? Nope, can't have that either, need to AI-ify the workplace. Clean water and a solution to the climate crisis? A regulatory regime that allows, or at least doesn't […]

After nearly 30 years, Crucial will stop selling RAM to consumers https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/after-nearly-30-years-crucial-will-stop-selling-ram-to-consumers/ Micron cites AI data centre demand as reason for killing DIY upgrade brand.

Eek the Crucial memory brand is going so the parent company can focus on AI customers. I can remember buying my first memory upgrades as a student from Crucial. https://www.theverge.com/news/837594/crucial-ram-ssd-micron-ai

A huge unforced error by senior management at the University of Nottingham: https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/nottingham-news/university-nottingham-selling-80m-campus-10675585 Utterly disastrous for University staff. A second round of early retirement/voluntary redundancy, or more, is in the […]

My spicy take of the day: Bring. Back. Administrative Assistants. For fucks sake, have people in the office who are literally professionals in drafting and editing memos, scheduling meetings, figuring out travel, coordination with other folks, hell, making a good cup of coffee. It's IMPORTANT […]

USAID’s dismantling is estimated to have already killed 600,000 people, ⅔ of them children. Officials simply deny any harm, while halting data monitoring and firing inspectors general who’d have documented it […]

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@DoomsdaysCW/115635737595903648 @Anne_Thomas Thought this might interest you

National Rail's new zoomable route map is very cute. Especially the request stop icon 👋 https://railmap.nationalrail.co.uk/#/mapview ( via https://bsky.app/profile/markonthemaps.bsky.social/post/3m6osatchqc2r )

🔗 StreetComplete - Contribution while passing by I have been working with #openstreetmap for a while now from the developers’ perspective, who can use it to conjure up attractive maps, such as my Photo Map, on the web free of charge. However, I am not part of the community, nor have I given […]

Funny how much less depressing late January is than late November, even though both periods are equally far from the solstice and has equally short days. It's because from 21-28 November we lose 27 mins of daylight in Stockholm. From 21-28 January we *gain* 31 mins. #depression #November

The floor is literally lava over there

TFW a volcano on your island erupts but you're stuck at 4,200m (13,800 ft) on another volcano full of space nerds. :(

Want to get hands-on #sysadmin / #devops experience with mentoring? We're looking for a volunteer to help run a new #OpenStreetMap Spyglass service: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/looking-for-sysadmin-help-with-new-openstreetmap-spyglass-service/138487 🎓 🤓 :openstreetmap:

Something odd in #homeassistant and the Octopus integration yesterday as it's basically doubled my usage for the day due to some data error in the first hour of the day. Odd.

In wake of Windows 10 retirement, over 780,000 Windows users skip Win 11 for Linux, says Zorin OS developers — distro hits unprecedented 1 million downloads in five weeks […]

Randall Monroe's #xkcd comic has the power to make you laugh, to make you think ... and sometimes to make you cry. For the right reasons. * Posted in Nov 2012: Two Years * Posted in Dec 2017: Seven Years * Posted in Nov 2020: Ten Years * Posted yesterday (Nov 2025): Fifteen Years […]

And the #interrail Winterrail Wintersale is on - a 25% reduction in standard fees. Or put another way: a free first class upgrade and maybe an extra day for the price of a normal pass. Or an adult pass for the price of a youth pass. The sale is on until 10am CET Wednesday 17th December - just […]

Yet another reason to not fly with Ryanair. If you are a doctor and help someone who is injured on the way to the gate they'll charge you a rebooking fee with no good will to waive it. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/nov/24/ryanair-expects-me-to-take-the-financial-hit-for-helping-others

We’ve had our heat pump for 12 months now estimate that we’re about £280 better off. That surprised me as we moved from oil which is cheap, and I was expecting the heat pump to be marginally more expensive. Just goes to show! Buy a heat pump folks!

"Qualcomm-owned #Arduino quietly pushed a sweeping rewrite of its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, and the changes mark a clear break from the open-hardware ethos that built the platform." (source: Adafruit […] [Original post on waag.social]