I have broken my ATGATT streak. It was only 300 metres, to put the bike away in the garage, but I couldn't be bothered putting the full set of gear on yet again, and the speed and duration, and therefore the risk, were pretty minimal, so I didn't. So I did this instead. I passed a few pedestrians on the way along the road to the garage and I'm sure I must've got a few double-takes. 😝

(It was kinda worrying though, don't think I'll do that again!)

I managed to get hold of a replacement battery for the bike today, phew. Was going to order from MDS (my usual go-to place for UPS batteries) but found the local Halfords had it £5 cheaper and available to walk in and collect rather than waiting a day or two (or paying another £5 for next-day). So that's now sitting on charge. Turns out they no longer sell these batteries un-activated with a bottle of sulphuric acid because the acid's now classified as a poison. So it turns out the label on the box says the battery was activated last month, which could be up to 8 weeks ago, so I'm giving it a good charge first, and installing it tomorrow.

I had the steering head bearings replaced today (which involves taking the whole front of the bike apart apparently so I'm glad I didn't try to do that myself), and while I haven't tried the steering with the front wheel off the ground I did give it a ride around and… I think it's better? I think it's more subconscious, but I think I can detect myself riding a bit more confidently, which would be because the handlebars are no longer trying to pull to the centre when they are *nearly* centred, which is what the problem with the bearings would have been causing.

So, battery swap tomorrow morning, MOT test tomorrow afternoon, trip to Wales soon after that…?

Content warning: Commenting on a Twitter post Reveal/hide

Oh. In the text entry box in Friendica it shows the username I'm replying to, but that disappears when I actually post - I assume it's in metadata so Friendica decides it doesn't need to be in the actual post text. But then I do see plenty of replies posted from Mastodon which also don't start with a username, but *are* threaded properly, so the post it's a reply to must be correctly listed in the metadata there too. When I click through to my reply on your instance it does show it properly threaded, so… I dunno? As you can see in the screenshot below, most of the other replies in this thread don't have a username at the start either, as shown on my Friendica instance. On the other hand, clicking through to the same thread on your Mastodon instance shows usernames at the start of every reply except mine. I don't know. It does seem to thread correctly though.

My biggest niggle is that Friendica shows only @-style usernames inside replies, but only display-names at the top of posts and replies, so matching them up sometimes requires annoying mousing-over to check usernames. 🤷‍♂️

Sorry, it's annoying, I guess it's just slightly different interpretations of some spec by different software.

Pippin

2023-07-03 10:18:29

Yeah, that does seem to happen occasionally. I assume it's a bug somewhere. It happens rarely enough that I can say "oh, that again" and ignore it though. 🤷‍♂️

Okay, that was a rather nice time! From the moment I got there I was swamped with people wanting photos. Walked around the showground once or twice, had a lot of nice encounters and a small number where I wasn't sure what was going on but none that were actually bad, which is good. 🙂

No time for pictures while I was there, but I did get a few on the way home.

This font reminds me of the font in some old Atari 8-bit games by Russ Wetmore.

rolltime

2023-03-06 18:29:26

a friend is nearly in tears because changing their KDE font to opendyslexic also changed the font ePubs render in in okular, meaning they can actually read their assignments.

this is why apps respecting your preferences is important, and it's why libre software (and KDE in particular) is so awesome.

unrelatedly, fuck electron.

Content warning: Okay, let's have a bit of a rant about car infrastructure. Reveal/hide

I went to our local supermarket for the first time in months last night (we have had them deliver since just after the pandemic started) and was annoyed by this short bit of road.

A bit of background: a developer has got planning permission to build some huge (well out of keeping with the local area!) blocks of flats on what used to be part of the local Tesco Extra car park - I'm guessing since the pandemic started they've not needed as much parking space. One of the two supermarket access roads went through the site where the flats will be and has now been closed. From what I remember of the plans, the final position of the access road was to be pretty much the same route as the original, so I can only assume the new access road they've just built (pictured) is temporary.

So, we have a development and they've built an entire, fully finished access road with signage, pedestrian crossings and all the other stuff, presumably just as a temporary measure while the flats are being built. The space it runs through used to be buildings (old and run-down, but still), so they must have bought those and demolished them just to build this temporary road. And this kind of thing seems to be considered an "incidental" when big developments are happening. And it just reminds me - it's considered normal to spend quite a lot on facilities like this for cars. If anything like that amount was spent on bicycle infrastructure, we'd have amazing cycle routes everywhere, wouldn't have to share with cars anywhere, and *lots* more people would cycle! But the money doesn't get spent (in anything like the amounts it could be) because "people drive, so we need to spend on that". 🤷‍♂️

(I should say, yes, the road pictured does have a contraflow cycle lane on one side while being a one-way road for cars, but it's clearly built mainly for cars, not bikes.)

If you must blink, do it now.