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).

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...

180 pupils, 5 schools, 1 awesome concert! A little drizzle didn't dampen our thrill at hosting the Primary Schools Choir Concert in Christ Church Cathedral. Thank you to everyone who sang, listened, performed and directed - what a joyous way to spend a Monday afternoon! 🎶💙 #CCCSOxford #MusicMatters

* “average resurfacing cycle for all types of roads in England is every 103 years” factoid actualy just statistical error. average resurfacing cycle is every 12 years. Stonesfield megalosaurus pothole, which was caused by a 700kg dinosaur 166mn yrs ago, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

This is very neat: 3D city models made from OpenStreetMap data (inter alia) www.lichtbild-manufaktur.shop

For 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...

Clarion 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!

cycle.travel now has a fresh new look on iPhone and Android – clearer, easier to use, and with new features such as clickable route highlights. Take a look on your app store of choice! iPhone: apps.apple.com/app/id161963... Android: play.google.com/store/apps/d...

In the past month 3 transport routes have collapsed - but they aren't roads so don't make national news. All 3 have the same root causes, climate change, and Tory austerity passing responsibility for critical infrastructure on to charities and councils. This will happen more, and people will be hurt

@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

"average french person arrested 3 times a year for corruption" factoid actualy just statistical error. average french person arrested 0 times per year. Corruptions Sarko, who lives in le XVIe arrondissement & has over 10k convictions a day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

beginning to believe I would actually vote for a dead pigeon on a stick if it just promised to restore the fuel duty escalator

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

Walter de Staplecat, Simpkin IV, Teabag, Balthasar and Benny D Cat take the stage as we meet the college cats of Oxford. And, of course, Magdalen’s Ozymandias. Read on for our photo special. (Includes a cat map.) oxfordclarion.uk/college-cats...

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…)

George Monbiot - "We should never underestimate the extent to which the BBC changed this country by giving endless airtime to Nigel Farage, other far right extremists and the Tufton Street junktanks, while shutting out progressive voices."

I really like the Oxford Clarion which doesn’t get enough mentions when people write about local news startups.

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.

Everything good that's happened in UK rail in my lifetime has been stuff that's occurred despite the resistance of the Department for Roads, and the thing that the GBR structure does is to consolidate total power over rail in the hands of those bastards

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...

Absolute scenes in Oxfordshire. LABOUR voting WITH TORIES and the car brained IOA to remove a traffic intervention designed to speed up buses, and was recommended by 74% in the citizens assembly THEY ASKED FOR, AND that has already been praised by the BUS companies, after SIX days.

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...

KOM MAAR OP

Café ride to test the upcoming version of the cycle.travel app ☕️

Headed out on the Bike Friday to explore some bridleways around Oxford.

The Bluesky theory of moderation is one of those “I’d really like to believe in this, but I am dubious”, but I will put that aside for the iconic reply to “people who have convinced themselves that they are the boss of people they don’t give any money to“, a curse of social media.

Even after 35+ years of Providing Free Stuff To Strangers Using Computers (late 1980s public domain software for the Amstrad 8-bits ftw), the sheer entitlement of 5% of those strangers never ceases to amaze me

In one of those wonderful coincidences, the code to display cycle.travel’s app map yn Gymraeg was finished today just as the Welsh Government announced a project to crowdsource Welsh placenames for OpenStreetMap https://media.service.gov.wales/news/new-priorities-to-help-protect-welsh-place-names

just bored and thinking about how Freud's, the cocktail bar in a defunct Grade II listed church in Oxford, has been closed since 2023 'for renovations' but they haven't applied for any listed building consent and now it's the last remaining real estate in Radcliffe Observatory Quarter

Dobrinka Tabakova’s Truro Canticles are just full of gorgeous harmonies and you should listen to them, very very loud listeningproject.blog/2024/01/22/t...

AI instant answers have their uses but “is it safe to cycle across Sudan right now” is probably not one of them

Wait. The editor of Cotswold Life magazine was also lead vocalist in Inkubus Sukkubus? www.linkedin.com/posts/candia...

Lol. How well did the last govt insulting load-bearing parts of their electoral coalition work out for them? Like they watched what the Lib Dems did to the home counties and wondered what it'd be like if the Greens did that to the two dozen largest university towns.