HN user
Richard Fairhurst. OpenStreetMap pioneer and former news-stand magazine editor, now building the world's best bike directions at https://cycle.travel/
https://www.systemeD.net/
There only seem to be two things that this “app” does, that a webpage might not have, and they’re both anti-features:
It reports tracking data associated with your Google Account back to the developers.
Fortunately webpages never do any tracking whatsoever, let alone “Gobshite LLC and its 1131 partners need your permission for (contd. p94)”
CRT data is not open - it has an (entirely pointless) non commercial clause.
Your regular reminder that OpenStreetMap has something like two or three FTEs and anchors $1bn of value.
Please consider diverting your efforts to OpenStreetMap! The TIGER-derived basemap still needs fixup, but your work will benefit everyone, not just the Google shareholders who ultimately own Waze.
Switching modes like that was common practice on the Amstrad CPC (which used the same 6845 video chip), but as time went on, people also learned how to change the base address of screen RAM part way through each frame. This gave you super-smooth hardware scrolling for the main game area while still retaining a static score display. Unfortunately it came too late in the machine's history to be used for more than a handful of games, but demo coders used it extensively (and still do).
I’ve never actually had anyone complain about me sending them ODT or ODS files since even the said MS Office doesn’t have a big issue with those.
On a Mac, I can read .doc(x), .xls(x) and .rtf without installing any additional software. I can’t do that with ODT/S.
90% of open data spreadsheet downloads could just as easily be provided in CSV format (looking at you, gov.uk).
Luxury. I dialled into FidoNet with my 64k Amstrad CPC (contd. p94. Mein gott I’m old)
Mapillary is of course owned by Meta these days.
Ah, we haven't had an "ORMs bad" post for at least three days.
Disk was already the standard spelling in the UK by 1984 (in a computing context), just as program was used in preference to programme. But Amstrad mistyped it as disc on the plastic mouldings for their first CPC, and were too cheap to change them. Consequently CPC 3in disks were always called discs even into the 90s.
Interesting! I've recently plumped for UIKit (with bits of SwiftUI dropped in) for a new mapping app because, as you say, SwiftUI map support is virtually non-existent. Have you thought about adding Maplibre support as an alternative to MapKit?
You literally get shadowbanned for posting the three letters “cis”.
Absolutely yes. It’s happening every week of the year with the better Substack-style startups in the UK (London Centric, Manchester Mill etc.).
Also known as Oxford Time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_time
Organ improvisation is a remarkable art, whether or not accompanying a silent film. In any of France's great cathedrals, the foremost musical experience is to hear the "titulaire" (essentially the headline organist) improvising on whatever theme they've selected for the day - sometimes chant, sometimes a hymn tune, sometimes something entirely frivolous and inappropriate that takes on a life of its own.
Even here in the UK, where it's not such a big thing, there's often an enjoyable few minutes at evensong where the organist improvises in the gap between finishing the prelude and the choir processing in. But France does it like nowhere else. One of the finest musical experiences I've ever known was Olivier Latry, titulaire at Notre Dame, giving a recital at Worcester Cathedral. After the appointed recital, he performed a 20-minute improvisation on the hymn chosen for evensong earlier that day (Herbert Howells' "Michael"), which he had never heard before. Superb yet entirely ephemeral - like most improvisations, it was never recorded.
It’s second nature very quickly. Our train into Oxford leaves at ten past the hour. You find yourself thinking “oh, I’ll aim for the ten past eleven” an hour or two beforehand and organise your morning accordingly. It’s absolutely no hardship.
Ruby doesn’t follow semver.
Yes.
Not mentioned in this review is that the scheme to reduce Oxford's traffic actually took effect in October: https://oxfordclarion.uk/clarion-weekly-31-october-ghost-edi...
So far it seems to be making a noticeable, albeit modest difference. Traffic in the city centre is clearly reduced. Buses are no longer queueing for ages at the Plain (the notorious roundabout that connects East Oxford to the city centre) - in fact, bus journey times are improved throughout. There are some knock-on effects, particularly in North Oxford in the evening peak, but generally it's working well. Footfall in the city centre remains high according to official figures, and certainly it was pretty rammed yesterday when I was doing my Christmas shopping.
It's only the third congestion charge to have been implemented in the UK, after London and Durham. (The Oxford scheme thus far is a slightly watered-down version of the full "traffic filters" mentioned in the review, because of the overrunning closure of the bridge by the railway station which cuts off one of the main routes into Oxford.)
So Tolkien was right. Ignore the conspiracy theorists. Have courage and fight back. Cars in historic city centres like Oxford are not something we have to just accept.
For UK readers, this is eerily similar to the typeface originally used on the "Thames Turbo" trains (class 165/166) from their construction in the 1990s until a refurb about five years ago - I could believe it was the same manufacturer. Some photos:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:166207_DMCO_Interior...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:British_Rail_Cla...
You just named three code editors. TextEdit is not a code editor. Not everyone is a developer.
My favourite Mac app for over 20 years.
I used to edit a news-stand magazine: every article that went into the magazine was subbed with TextEdit. All my daily notes are in TextEdit. My todo lists are in TextEdit. If I'm writing longform for the web I draft in TextEdit and then copy and paste.
It's just so immediate. Write, save. WYSIWYG formatting in the way the Mac has always done it.
The author says "It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning, the way Spotify does". I think it changed its interface once, c. 2005. Before then you could just have a window with no chrome whatsoever, just a blank slate to write in. Now you can't get rid of the formatting bar - the one with the typeface, size, bold/italics/underline. That pissed me off for a while. But compared to the ongoing hurt of 25 years of a broken spatial Finder, I can cope with it.
Thank you, whoever in Apple maintains TextEdit.
Which made it much easier to block ads than it is now.
Services at Oxford’s cathedral (Christ Church) still start at 5 past the hour because that’s “Oxford Time”.
The artist, Folon, also made this gorgeous close-down animation for French TV channel Antenne 2: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzy9GGbcvSI&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5t...
Wikipedia bio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Folon
Fixed that for you: _American_ writers have always used the em dash. In British English orthography, space-en dash-space is much more common.
App Store search takes a while to surface exact-name searches for newly released apps. No idea why.
The Online Safety Bill was introduced by the previous Conservative government.
Absolutely yes. Just expanding on the point that the "scale" in question was how Komoot chose to run their operations, not the size of customer base addressed. Bending Spoons have, quite adroitly, figured that they can serve 90% of the customer base with 10% of the operations costs.