Adam Gripton
@dradam676.bsky.social
140 followers 420 following 430 posts
Norfolk-bred Scot, software engineer, passionate about maths, maps, better public transport, and xkcd references. Bluesky now my main source of witterings, with occasional drip-feed of migrated content such as maps I'm pleased with.
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Reposted by Adam Gripton
like basically everyone who works in software I embody this tweet and do not under any circumstances want to talk to my computer
Tweet from @PPathole

Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart. 

Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don’t recognize.
Confirmed on www.networkrail.co.uk/stories/a-ne... that this is, mercifully, true (they meet at the top on the minute, so outer ring is seconds) - but this has also unearthed this bizarre bit of detail... wtf?
If I've worked this out right, I think that would be exactly the case with the *outer* arrow.

(If the minute doesn't tick over when the things cross at the top, it's a bit of a design fail.)
This is, at least I hope it is, referring to A-Level standard in a foreign language as native speakers would refer to A-Level French or German. The problem is that this qualification simply does not exist; the headline is disingenuous, and perhaps purposely misleading.
I don't know much about these things but surely that sort of instruction kind of defeats the object of a press release? It's a bit like a supermarket asking you to let them know before eating its bananas so they can check it was one of the safe ones.
this is like a @soren.bsky.social fever dream made into reality
Ugh I hate this. Learn the damn words before you allow yourself to feel ready to play to actual people
THE SALAD BAR, PEOPLE, THE SALAD BAR!!
Reposted by Adam Gripton
This is an exact encapsulation of why I moved to Bluesky.

No amount of handwringing in the Atlantic about how I owe some eternal Promethean suffering to the discourse is going to make me stay on a site I hate, that stopped doing anything for me professionally years ago.
Well – no. Bluesky may or may not be, as one centre-right friend who felt unwelcome put it, “self-righteous island”. But the idea that’s why we went is nonsense. That I’ve largely stopped posting on a site that’s done more to shape my career and social circle than the rest of the internet combined is less about avoiding rival opinions (I love arguing with people who are wrong!) than with the fact the site simply became unusable. It stopped generating the things (good jokes, interesting debate, clicks) I wanted; it became extremely good at generating the things (racists, pornbots, racist pornbots) I did not.
Reposted by Adam Gripton
I mean, this is really desperate shit, isn’t it? I am a great deal more woke-sceptic than pretty much all of Bluesky but I honestly can’t be bothered to care about the National Trust putting vegan tampons in the men’s toilets and neither should you
Yokel here from deep in District 12. What in the urban shit is going on here, can someone who uses public transport more than once a week please explain?
Finally, a genuinely useful application for national ID cards 👍
You'll get the Nobel next year on this trajectory
Reposted by Adam Gripton
the people who built the trolley are never on the tracks. literally never
*sigh* St Andrews could be a much more pleasant place to walk around if the number of cars was slashed to, say, half of what it is now.

What was the old station is now a great big car park, and it shows.

Buses don't cut it with fairweather users and tourists. They never have and they never will.
by my calculations this leaves poor old Chathill as the *only* station on the whole ECML between Kings Cross and Edinburgh which you need to double back from one direction to access
lonely old Chathill
so, are you just a regular vanilla train nerd, or are you a "gets irrationally excited that one train per day will start calling at both Drem and Dunbar from December onwards" level nerd?
RTT screenshot showing the 2D84 0741 Dunbar to Edinburgh departing on 15th December 2025, calling at all intermediate stations including Drem
I don't use cafés to work, but I still absolutely use this logic. Which means two things: I'll absolutely pay a premium for a café with nice ambience; but also I often balk at the prices of takeaway coffees: in general they have no right to be anywhere near that of a sit-in. ☕
I look at the price of each coffee as renting that table as a workspace for another hour.
"So let's stop gabbing on about it, it's completely pointless, and it's getting us nowhere!"
Still from Monty Python's Life of Brain PFJ meeting scene
Blimey. Hadn't noticed this before but East Linton and Reston are getting a proper glow-up of service patterns in December. Exciting for train nerrrrds like myself

source: ecmltimetable.info
East Linton grid showing service to Newcastle doubling from 4tpd to 8tpd from December Reston grid showing services to Newcastle going from 6tpd to 9tpd from December
"Take a breath; try these for size: 'I don't know'; 'I've changed my mind'." - Frank Turner (Get It Right)
TIL that Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon are, in fact, different people. They were stored on the same bit of RAM in my brain heretofore