Doctor_Fegg

Sorry, you’re saying people shouldn’t be allowed to write about their career changes on (checks notes) their own blog?

I had a brief chat with the dev at State of the Map (the OSM conference) a few weeks ago. I think he'd appreciate some help, maybe even a co-maintainer.

My 10-year old loved it. I'd shown him a few Road Runner cartoons on YouTube beforehand.

> The OpenStreetMap community operates under the “on the ground” principle, recording what is actually currently used in a particular area, giving pre­eminence to data collected in­ situ.

https://osmfoundation.org/w/images/d/d8/DisputedTerritoriesI...

> No one stopped to question whether a shapefile of points of park benches could even be copyrightable in the first place.

Lots of people did, in fact, consider this.

Ah, the irony of posting "Your Mac is slowing you down" on the bloated JS hellsite that is X. That page took 10s to appear on my machine (before even thinking of rendering the video) whereas the HN front page is <1s.

I worked for a public sector organisation around then that had the same chairman (not CEO) as Iceland, sorry, “the Big Food Group”. He was genuinely one of the most obnoxious, bullying people I’ve ever encountered - known internally as the Poison Dwarf. So none of this greatly surprises me.

I remember seeing a river cruiser called "Sir Osis of the River"

I edited a boating magazine (inland waterways, not sea-going) and we got article submissions like this all the time.

I ended up putting in our 'Notes for Contributors' something like "Write about what will be interesting to the _reader_, not what is interesting to you" because apparently this eluded people.

Bending Spoons are all in on AI development. Look at Komoot’s release cadence but also the skyrocketing number of bug reports in the Komoot subreddit.

Generally this means “national” and the sub-board on the OSM discussion forum.

Google employs _engineers_ to figure out the truth. If an import pipeline is causing problems, a higher-up can just say “stop doing that or we’ll stop your pay cheque”.

OSM doesn’t have that option. If it didn’t have these guardrails in place, a million CS students will see some open-looking data (or not even that, maybe something scraped) and throw it into OSM with a cursory Python script, resulting in an almighty mess. We need the process because we don’t have Google’s leverage of “we pay you”.

2018 Mac mini, running Monterey, for webdev and Ruby scripting and it’s still fine. The biggest issue, as ever, is that the OS can only feasibly be upgraded to a certain point and that ultimately limits whether you can run current browsers.

Xcode and Android Studio do, of course, necessitate a more recent Mac.

> 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.