Latest thoughts, if any, of Rachel Lawson...

Beat up traffic warden with face bandaged. That one from the Threads movie.

Making my own federation decisions

Whilst I was a very happy citizen on strangeobject.space, their early decision to never federate with Threads.net never really sat easy with me. None of us at the time knew for certain how things would pan out and I knew several accounts there that I definitely wanted to follow. I wanted to make my own federation decisions.

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apostrophe

An hour of my life given to a pesky apostrophe

My iPhone has developed a kinda strange aversion to typing correctly. To be honest, I thought it was just my bad typing but, after spending some time typing slower, I realised certain parts of the screen are not reliably responding to my touch.

After calling Apple Support, they reminded me that, rather than jumping on the train to the Cambridge Apple Store tomorrow, they could simply send me a replacement as I have the AppleCare Plus package - great!

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Team of developers all looking at a laptop

Community Driven Development

For many years in the Drupal community, I’ve found that my greatest pleasure is not in actually creating the next awesome feature (and, wow, we have some awesome features coming…) but in helping to mentor those who will in the future. Recently, an opportunity came up that interested me a lot. Cambridge University Press & Assessment were looking for a seasoned Drupal developer to help grow the in-house team as they deliver projects built on the platform. I could hardly say no! I very much wanted to look at how better active participation in the community can be a key driver for development of the team’s capabilities..

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Screenshot of the Osmond app showing my geojson data

Oooh - I can ride down that track...

England and Wales have a somewhat arcane but interesting set of laws around what tracks are rideable by motorcycle. Some of them are nice simple lanes that could be ridden on any motorcycle by anyone. Others appear to be just a jumble of rocks that need a superstar to ride.

I must come back and write more about the laws but what interests me right now is being able to identify those rights of way and being able to navigate along them when I'm out for a ride.

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Our two motorcycles, a BMW GS and a Yamaha XT250, parked in the oued with a rough ground and mountains behind

A long, long day

My original plan, when meeting up with Sophie for a week in Morocco, was to follow a few of the routes that I have done before solo. Show her a few places I really knew well and knew what the conditions were like. Instead, we ended up trying a new route that turned out to be rather epic...

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Red cable car with a white roof

Skin in the game

Just chatting about cable cars, based on reading the good news that everyone rescued from the broken one in Pakistan. 
Decided they feel unnatural because the person in control doesn’t have “skin in the game” in the same way that a pilot does in an aeroplane. 
Then it occurred to us that the same applies to self-driving cars. Those in charge of, say, Tesla have no skin in the game if you crash. Think about that…

Captain Ehsan Haji Safi

A game of two halves

Ehsan Haji Safi, the captain of the Iranian football team at the World Cup in Qatar, spoke out ahead of their game against England today, saying "I would like to express my condolences to all of the bereaved families in Iran. They should know that we are with them, we support them...

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