@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.

what3words is pivoting to AI to save their floundering business model and it makes NO SENSE. If "AI voice chat" can book you an Uber to "///frog.eats.donuts", it can also book you an Uber to "my mate Darren's house" and cut out the intermediate step of w3w coordinates what3words.com/products/pro

everybody talk about pop muzik

British NIMBYism is truly a sight to behold. “We are rejecting this solar farm, because one time I saw an electric vehicle on fire, which reminded me that decades ago a coal mining disaster killed lots of children”.

I call my type of cycling and walking “bimbling”. It generally involves low speeds, an indirect route and a pub.

I want to explain a few things and then it might be clearer why UK trans people are upset. In 2001 I married my wife, Sylvia. In 2005 I started medical transition. (1/13)

And the New Statesman printed my letter!

A Baptist minister has been arrested in Oxford for holding a placard reading ‘I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action’. Rev Grote of New Road Baptist Church said ‘I am doing this because of my faith. I’m doing this because I’m a follower of Jesus Christ, who broke the rules and created peace.’

There’s a strong Labour tradition of “the working class currently do/think this and so it is de facto right”. It’s just like the Oxford traffic debate with Labour councillors fervently defending people’s right to drive through residential streets to save 15 seconds on their journey

In a bunkhouse in St Briavels in the Wye Valley. Local lad Herbert Howells wrote a (very obscure) hymn tune called St Briavels and, well, it would be a shame not to

On a public footpath high up the Wye valley side and I am absolutely baffled how it got there #cantparktheremate

Looking forward to National Rail countersuing Jaguar Land Rover for infringing on the Pace(r) trademark www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/27f1c45...

There’s a literal railway station here with 300,000 passengers a year you absolute halfwit www.newstatesman.com/politics/soc...

My pics! (Very good-natured demonstration against Vance in Charlbury this afternoon - I went along to take some pics for the Charlbury website and figured I might as well send them to the Oxford Clarion. Lots of press there. Charlbury is “having a moment” right now…)

I realise Apple have fixed the “ducking” issue, but I’m in a pub in the orbit of the Black Country and the phone will _not_ autocomplete “faggot”

I just verified my age by recognising Happy Mondays-style typography on the signwriting of a passing boat and getting a thumbs up from the owner

One of these for Charlbury too please!

On the boat in the Midlands and it’s remarkable how much harder it’s become to find a decent pint of cider. Two factors: Marstons have gone all-in with Heineken, and CAMRA have gone uber-purist in their definition of real cider so their site now lists hardly any pubs with anything drinkable.