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Ugh, this time of year. The animals, with their hibernation and their seasonal migration, have the right idea.
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Some work. Made an experimental new sort of map – one interesting thing about it is the use of Ordanance Survey’s vector map tiles, which are pretty and detailed and accurate but:
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I have doubts about how free-to-use they really are. They’re allegedly free to use for at least some purposes, but nothing’s free these days, and you know what cartographers are like, I can just imagine one of the mapping agency’s flat-nosed geezers at my door with a baseball bat.
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Obviously they only cover the island of Great Britain, so you’ve got to do something clever to automatically switch to a different source for other parts of the world.
Incidentally, the planned upgrades to the (Irish) National Transport Authority’s GTFS-R stuff are taking their pretty little time … the Attention Developers article has been quietly updated, “the third quarter of 2022” has gone down the memory hole and now it’s “early 2023”, which is fine, it’s actually comforting that all IT projects everywhere always overrun.
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For years I’ve had a sensor in the outdoor letterbox here that uses two AAA batteries and the obscure Sigfox wireless network and sends me an email when a letter arrives through the flap. It actually works brilliantly, most of the time.
Then last month it stopped working, as if in solidarity with members of the Communication Workers Union, and I guessed the batteries had lost their fizz – they’d had a good innings. But new batteries made no difference, so the electronics must finally have succumbed to the ravages of the weather – the 3D-printed case is all cracked and hardly waterproof, so it was only a matter of time.
Well, just as I was coming to terms with having to go downstairs and check the letterbox myself like a low-tech animal, the sensor rose from the dead and sensed something. (A flyer advertising an estate agent, boring.) So that’s good. But one day it will be truly dead, and I won’t be able to replace it – the online shop says out of stock, and I pessimistically think it’s unlikely to be replenished – and it will be a sad day.
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Went to great lengths to reset my Nectar (Sainsbury’s loyalty card) password just to find out that I was Norwich’s eleventh most prolific buyer of halloumi and roasted vegetable wraps last year. It might have been higher, but once or twice I carelessly bought a horrible chicken and tzatziki wrap by mistake instead, also I’m not sure if it counts the wraps I bought in other cities. Needless to say, I’d love to meet the ten people above me in the league.
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Steve Easterbrook, a former high-ranking official in the McDonald’s Corporation, was in the news. A lot of news outlets used the same picture of a man in a suit grinning next to a clown, and I was disappointed that none were thoughtful enough to clarify who was who, because that’s always a little bit of fun. None but Forbes…
🤡👨🏻
Steve Easterbrook, right, pictured here in 2015…so well done Forbes.
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I like the short squat pint glasses they have these days. It can be a stretch to get your hands around them, my thumbs can’t even play guitar, but maybe with practice they’ll stretch bigger, like how in olden times naturalists thought giraffes’ necks got like that just from the effort to reach the tops of trees.