Peter Oliver @mavit@bergamot.social

@jameswallis Re your article in today’s Telegraph, Trivial Pursuit is good now?! What was the fix?

Yesterday I ate my first Tim Tam. I was expecting Penguin, but there was something about it that put me in mind of the Tunnock's Caramel Wafer.

It’s feels pretty insulting to see West Midlands Cycle Hire bury the lede of heavy price rises behind dubious claims of “pricing improvements”. If you’re short on cash, or TfWM think the budget would be better spent on buses or whatever, be honest about it. You’re offering a public service, not selling a commercial product, so you don’t need the sales bullshit.

My typical journeys are now three to four times more expensive. The sad reality is I’ll probably drive more.

You know how people say, “My wife was talking about stepladders near my phone, and now whenever I go online I get all these adverts for stepladders”?

(I never believed it, but, whatever, use an ad-blocker)

Well, anyway, the other day I was listening to Black Country, New Road in the car, and the satnav on my phone diverted me down the Black Country New Road. Spooky.

Given that the combined Twitter/Mastodon client I use is now 50% useless, I should probably switch to something more Mastodon-specific. But... does anyone know of a combined Mastodon/Bluesky client?

@mavit Perhaps Threads federating helps crystallise people's choices.

Choosing a Mastodon server isn't like choosing an email provider, because, back when email was new and unfamiliar, you didn't choose. You just got given a mailbox by your university or employer or ISP.

By the time that independent email providers were really taking off, you had clear, concrete reasons for your choice, such as price (Hotmail), brand recognition (Yahoo!), features (GMail). But Mastodon servers all look kind-of the same, so how do you select one?

Digbeth's freshest street art.

Iron Horse has been groomed and moved.

This year, a song I like won a Grammy, and a film I liked won an Oscar. Is this what it’s like to be middle-aged? Am I middle of the road now?

I dread the day that manufactures of hotel smoke alarms catch up with the rest of the electronics industry by discovering the ultra-bright blue LED.

Brand meeting: "Let's make our card purple, so it stands out from all the other cards in someone's wallet!"

My wallet:

It was a left! I'll be wearing odd gloves from now on, which, whilst not ideal, is definitely an improvement on having one cold hand.

Lost one glove for the second time this winter. Can't wait to get home to find out whether the other was a left or another right.

With the recent spike in fediverse activity, I wonder if now would be a good time for someone to set up a https://joinmobilizon.org/en/ or https://gancio.org/ instance to replace the sadly missed http://livebrum.co.uk/ local event listings site.

This used to be built in to the Mastodon UI, but got removed because users found it too confusing (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/8127). Let's hope they figure out a way to re-add it, because the current process for following someone on another instance is uncomfortably clunky.