Unprincipled populist nonsense.

what3words is an abomination.

Amazing that Press Gazette keep running headlines like this and they don’t mean Newsquest, Reach or whatever the other one is called this week pressgazette.co.uk/news/the-seo...

This is batshit.

L'application iPhone cycle.travel est désormais disponible en français. (Bientôt disponible sur Android!) apps.apple.com/app/id161963...

🇫🇷 New route guide – Saint-Malo to Nice 🇫🇷 1000 miles/1600 km across France. Stunning gorges, medieval towns, brand new voies vertes, minimal traffic… from Brittany to Provence via the Loire, Lot, Tarn and Ardèche. Full mapping, stage-by-stage guide, GPX and more: cycle.travel/route/saint_...

And here’s Manchester’s finest with Everything’s Gone Green. www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_gg...

From Penzance to Thurso (and Marazion to Hoy)… it’s finished. After 25 years, I’m delighted to report that the New Adlestrop Railway Atlas now covers the whole of England, Scotland and Wales in one big PDF. Every* passenger line and station. Download it here: www.systemed.net/atlas/

And anyway, this is why cycle.travel doesn’t unthinkingly route over highway=track www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The Green Party candidate has the right answer here (although ‘Columbia’ would have been acceptable as Oasis’s one surviving baggy song before they embarked on the Beatles>dadrock trajectory)

News! streetmap.co.uk is back up, blaming Storm Goretti for a month-long outage, and is plastered with “Donate here” ads. They have launched a crowdfunder for £16,000 annual running costs. I am not entirely convinced this is a sustainable model. www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/streetmapc...

Jim Ratcliffe, owner of Ineos: “The UK has been colonised by immigrants” Number of British riders in Team Sky, 2018, before it was bought by Ratcliffe and rebranded: 10 Number of British riders in Ineos Grenadiers, 2026: 6

what’s the point of that

Labour: we're banning asylum seekers from using taxis to get to medical appointments. Also Labour: Greens should stand aside in Gorton and Denton by-election to prevent the horrible racist party getting in.

This is the correct way of dividing Oxfordshire up into three councils and I shall not be taking questions

With 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).

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