Nicola Kerrison

Certainly less private motor vehicle dependence is a laudible goal.

Really very normal. Only a problem if there's overgrowth or overreaction to them.

Yeah I don't get it. I appreciate "don't use the street to store a fleet of vehicles for your business", but if they're working on a site with insufficient parking or they are somebody's primary vehicle outside their home, who cares as long as they're parked legally and not causing safety issues.

Demodex mites

I'm interested but can you please say which country you need the squares to be shipped to please? I'm in the UK and trying to work out what the cost of participating would be and when the shipping deadline is.

@cantabkitty.bsky.social (failed to tag properly first time)

YouTube video by Hannah Fry Cracking the code of hexagonal rocks (aka columnar jointing)

@cantabkitty found some hexagons for you www.youtube.com/shorts/Rvr0t...

You just intend to buy one before it gets hot, then it gets hot and they're sold out. Cycle repeats. (Have owned at least one fan since undergrad though). We store our big one under a tea towel dust cloth over winter, can't say I've ever cleaned one 🙈

This was great for lazy miles but the lag on starting meant I had to accelerate the whole heavy bike from every traffic light and made nuanced control in heavy bike traffic a skill to learn. My Felix has a Bosch mid drive and it just matches pedal input like magic, with extra when you're overgeared.

Yes. Not helped by some bike sellers being misleading. My first ebike was a rear wheel drive rebranded by a local business. It claimed to match pedal input but actually just dragged you at one of three powers provided the pedals were turning

Oh, and log it with bikeregister and put their stickers or etching on it. It makes it provably yours, enables return if the police or kind strangers get it and might deter theft. My local force run free marking days if the price or process worries you.

Also: if you'll be charging it in your home, consider buying a reputable brand. These are big batteries and a lithium battery fire in your home is a really bad thing.

With any desirable bike a good locking strategy helps: sold secure gold or better d-lock through the rear triangle to something solid to immobilise and guard against twist attacks. Consider angle grinder resistant lock eg litelock.

Other features: built in lights and mudguards are good quality of life for me
Can it take a rack or are you happy with a backpack
Do you need to carry it up steps and onto trains, or are you leaving it at the station? Top tubes make carrying handy aren't skirt friendly and need hip mobility to mount

Things to ask yourself:
price range
what drive type? (Mid drive is much nicer IMO)
what range (at least 2x your daily miles so you have room for the battery to degrade but more than that is just heavier IMO)
do you want a removable battery or not (can you take it to work for less theft risk?)

Following @cantabkitty. First: I'm very happy with my "Raleigh Felix plus" from Halfords, the non-plus version would have been fine too. It was worth it even through my employer doesn't do Halfords on their bike to work scheme.

Today I learned. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_ni... for the interested and lazy

Can it be used without streak tracking? "Not Amazon" makes it worth considering making the move from Goodreads, I just need to track what I want to read and what I have read.

paging @cantabkitty, intersection of textile art and religion. www.elystandard.co.uk/news/2516249...

Yesterday, a colleague alerted me that I had been "quoted" extensively in an article on how to get a "beach body". I was surprised and dismayed as I only have two tips for getting a beach body: 1) have a body 2) wear SPF

Just realised that my work lunchroom works on a rolling basis. People arrive and leave at different times but each time you get to talk to a selection of people and have different dinner companions through your meal. Maybe still isolating for ppl not on the group meal though.

I feel kinda guilty for not doing this because my parents did. But I think my car tracks it for me if I care to look

Ocado own brand hummus still comes with lids

A fair few drinks marketed as "alcohol free" are 0.5%, eg Punk AF

You have much more experience of work vans than me!

I guess might be handy if you're working out of a van and don't want to pay for the batteries for a portable??

There's a common path in the development of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, regardless of whether they are overseen by Catholic Inquisitors, Protestant enforcers, monarchists, fascists, Nazis, Stalinists, Maoists ....
First they eliminate words.
Then they eliminate people.

Never really thought about that, but yeah if you don't live somewhere that you can own and route a hosepipe and work off the road it's not a lot of fun. But you're supporting the local economy by paying someone. (You'd also be welcome to wash your car at mine but it's a long way!)

And it's at this point, after 15 mins of wasted human time and 8000 tokens (goodness knows how much energy that took), the LLM came clean.

It hadn't actually looked up and collated the information I asked linked to specific sources. It made it up and attributed it to plausible sounding sources

I'm sorry this happened to you!