Notices by iona 🐝 (iona@social.coop), page 67

Driving through a nearby city yesterday I saw two men at two separate sets of traffic lights, one with a cardboard sign saying "homeless, need work" and another waving a plastic cup of change at passing cars.

It's the sort of thing you only ever used to see in American films. Have we really descended this far as a country that we can't feed and house all of our people?

@priryo @devurandom I'm not sure mocking people's appearance is really a good way to go.

If our national discourse is reduced to "OI! SNOWFLAKE!" "F*** OFF, GAMMON!" then get me the next plane back to wherever I came from.

@memhaz Thank you! One of the only three British cities I've never visited - Brighton, Cambridge and Derry/Londonderry. I'm fixing the latter next month. :)

@priryo I think it's a case of needing to weight results a bit better. If I searched for hotels in Boston, for instance, I'd expect it would assume I meant the Boston in Massachusetts and not the one in the middle of the pea fields in Lincolnshire.

If I specifically wanted to go and stay in a hotel in Boston, Lincs I should have to specify it in the query.

Example of the latter: a simple DDG search for "Indian restaurants Bradford" brings up a result listing restaurants in somewhere called Bradford West Gwillimbury, Ontario.

Bradford, England is well known for its South Asian food. Bradford in Ontario, it would appear not. A little bit of intelligence as to what you're most likely to be looking for wouldn't go amiss on DDG.

+ Super convenient links to commonly used resources, StackOverflow, Wikipedia, GitHub etc for common queries
+ Much improved results since last time I tried it out a year or so ago

- Too US-biased and crap for UK-specific and local stuff even with the UK switch toggled on, usually end up using !g for that.

@Graham_Mitchell His wonderfully bananas 3D model of a masterplan for Barnsley was on display in the town's museum last time I was there, too.

He was a total lunatic, but in a nice, transformational way.

@memhaz Where's that? I recognise most places in Britain and it's annoying me that I can't tell where it is.

@aslmx @cathal We've just voted them out and returned a council controlled by one party, Labour. Hopefully there will be some improvement now one party has control.

RIP Will Alsop. Who can forget The Public - sorry THEpUBLIC, the Black Country's Kafkaesque black box... https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2013/aug/14/public-inevitable-end-arts-centre-architecture

@aslmx @cathal That would entail the local authority agreeing on something and making progress on an issue, something they appear to lack the capacity to do.

@bob How long before this gets its very own logo, domain and catchy name?

@cathal The sort of people who take one look at a multicultural area with a multitude of delicious, cheap, quick food options from all over the world and go "I know, I'll have a Maccy D's"

@cathal We have a McDonald's close by, and around it what I like to call the McDonald's Ring.

About a mile radius from the "restaurant" is a distinct ring of rubbish, where people have finished their burger and thrown it out of the car.

Who *are* these people?

Saw an ice-cream van earlier with FREE PALESTINE written across the back.

What it didn't say was "...with every Cornetto"

@clacke I must look out for all these cheeses! Swedish cheese has never really caught on here, though. We have shops where you can get hundreds of different cheeses from all over the world, 12 different sorts of paneer, but very rarely anything from northern Europe.

@priryo @clacke Living so close by, I've become the literal IKEA QUEEN. I know exactly where everything is, and I go in there first thing before all the hordes from the nearby cities make it. I think my record for an Ikea visit was 6 minutes from parking up to leaving with the thing I needed.

I have an idea for a new Mastodon instance for a specific community of people, but no idea how to actually set one up.

I was a sysadmin for a few years but last time I tried to set an instance up (purely as a test to see how it all worked) I followed the instructions and failed miserably.

I presume you can't install Masto on a server that already has a bunch of websites running on it - it needs its own VPS at the very least?

@dajbelshaw @Graham_Mitchell The main thing for me with London is cost. If you want to make the most of an event there, you invariably need a hotel because the last train back to Bradford leaves too early, and you can only afford so many hotel nights a year.

The rail network is too focused on getting people in and out of London! You are totally right - connections *between* not-London cities are poor. Try getting from Leeds to Sheffield in <1 hr.

Selfishly, I drive to non-London events...

@Graham_Mitchell Great that they had it somewhere other than bloody London, too!

Nothing against London, I love it, but there are so many cool things I see publicised on here and elsewhere and the venue is invariably central London. Great if you are a reasonably well off professional flying in from Berlin, not fantastic for working class Brits due to expensive transport and expensive London.

More stuff out of London! :)