Hacker News: Doctor_Fegg

New comment by Doctor_Fegg in "Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia"

Doctor_Fegg — Wed, 27 May 2026 07:07:14 +0000

Your regular reminder that OpenStreetMap has something like two or three FTEs and anchors $1bn of value.

New comment by Doctor_Fegg in "Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia"

Doctor_Fegg — Wed, 27 May 2026 07:02:36 +0000

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.

New comment by Doctor_Fegg in "“This is not the computer for you”"

Doctor_Fegg — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 23:33:53 +0000

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).

New comment by Doctor_Fegg in "LibreOffice: Request to the European Commission to adhere to its own guidances"

Doctor_Fegg — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 22:19:48 +0000

> 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).

New comment by Doctor_Fegg in "MacBook Air with M5"

Doctor_Fegg — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 22:00:57 +0000

Luxury. I dialled into FidoNet with my 64k Amstrad CPC (contd. p94. Mein gott I’m old)

New comment by Doctor_Fegg in "Google Street View in 2026"

Doctor_Fegg — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 22:42:40 +0000

Mapillary is of course owned by Meta these days.

New comment by Doctor_Fegg in "Postgres Is Your Friend. ORM Is Not"

Doctor_Fegg — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 13:10:14 +0000

Ah, we haven't had an "ORMs bad" post for at least three days.

New comment by Doctor_Fegg in "What's the difference between a "disc" and a "disk"? (2023)"

Doctor_Fegg — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 21:32:37 +0000

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.

New comment by Doctor_Fegg in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

Doctor_Fegg — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 11:23:08 +0000

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?

New comment by Doctor_Fegg in "xAI joins SpaceX"

Doctor_Fegg — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 06:32:07 +0000

You literally get shadowbanned for posting the three letters “cis”.

New comment by Doctor_Fegg in "Local Journalism Is How Democracy Shows Up Close to Home"

Doctor_Fegg — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 17:20:04 +0000

Absolutely yes. It’s happening every week of the year with the better Substack-style startups in the UK (London Centric, Manchester Mill etc.).

New comment by Doctor_Fegg in "Start your meetings at 5 minutes past"

Doctor_Fegg — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 10:13:39 +0000

Also known as Oxford Time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_time

New comment by Doctor_Fegg in "The Organists Improvising Soundtracks to Silent Films"

Doctor_Fegg — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:48:50 +0000

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.

New comment by Doctor_Fegg in "Toll roads are spreading in America"

Doctor_Fegg — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 08:54:44 +0000

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.

New comment by Doctor_Fegg in "Ruby 4.0.0"

Doctor_Fegg — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 18:36:28 +0000

Ruby doesn’t follow semver.

New comment by Doctor_Fegg in "Isengard in Oxford"

Doctor_Fegg — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 12:21:04 +0000

Yes.

New comment by Doctor_Fegg in "Isengard in Oxford"

Doctor_Fegg — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 12:09:09 +0000

Not mentioned in this review is that the scheme to reduce Oxford's traffic actually took effect in October: https://oxfordclarion.uk/clarion-weekly-31-october-ghost-edi...

So far it seems to be making a noticeable, albeit modest difference. Traffic in the city centre is clearly reduced. Buses are no longer queueing for ages at the Plain (the notorious roundabout that connects East Oxford to the city centre) - in fact, bus journey times are improved throughout. There are some knock-on effects, particularly in North Oxford in the evening peak, but generally it's working well. Footfall in the city centre remains high according to official figures, and certainly it was pretty rammed yesterday when I was doing my Christmas shopping.

It's only the third congestion charge to have been implemented in the UK, after London and Durham. (The Oxford scheme thus far is a slightly watered-down version of the full "traffic filters" mentioned in the review, because of the overrunning closure of the bridge by the railway station which cuts off one of the main routes into Oxford.)

So Tolkien was right. Ignore the conspiracy theorists. Have courage and fight back. Cars in historic city centres like Oxford are not something we have to just accept.

New comment by Doctor_Fegg in "Fran Sans – font inspired by San Francisco light rail displays"

Doctor_Fegg — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 19:30:43 +0000

For UK readers, this is eerily similar to the typeface originally used on the "Thames Turbo" trains (class 165/166) from their construction in the 1990s until a refurb about five years ago - I could believe it was the same manufacturer. Some photos:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:166207_DMCO_Interior...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:British_Rail_Cla...

New comment by Doctor_Fegg in "TextEdit and the relief of simple software"

Doctor_Fegg — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 22:07:37 +0000

You just named three code editors. TextEdit is not a code editor. Not everyone is a developer.

New comment by Doctor_Fegg in "TextEdit and the relief of simple software"

Doctor_Fegg — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 21:42:53 +0000

My favourite Mac app for over 20 years.

I used to edit a news-stand magazine: every article that went into the magazine was subbed with TextEdit. All my daily notes are in TextEdit. My todo lists are in TextEdit. If I'm writing longform for the web I draft in TextEdit and then copy and paste.

It's just so immediate. Write, save. WYSIWYG formatting in the way the Mac has always done it.

The author says "It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning, the way Spotify does". I think it changed its interface once, c. 2005. Before then you could just have a window with no chrome whatsoever, just a blank slate to write in. Now you can't get rid of the formatting bar - the one with the typeface, size, bold/italics/underline. That pissed me off for a while. But compared to the ongoing hurt of 25 years of a broken spatial Finder, I can cope with it.

Thank you, whoever in Apple maintains TextEdit.