Services to be reintroduced at Aslockton

A consultation document for the December 2009 timetable was sent out to interested parties some weeks ago, but now those proposals have been summarised in a public meeting. So I guess it’s OK to give a precis of the proposals here.

Headline changes for December 2009

  • eight extra services to stop at Aslockton each weekday, including the 19:45 (ish) service from Nottingham
  • seven extra services to stop each Saturday
  • new commuter service from Aslockton to Grantham (leaving at approximately 8am) and a return service (leaving Grantham at approximately 17:45)

These improvements are still subject to formal approval by Network Rail, but David Horne says this is “effectively done”.

Meeting details

The meeting this evening was organized by Aslockton and Whatton-in-the-Vale parish councils (thanks folks!), and attended by three guests:

  • David Horne: Commercial Director, East Midlands Trains
  • Jim Bamford: Rail Officer, Nottingham County Council
  • Martin Suthers, Nottinghamshire County Councillor for Bingham

There were between 30 and 40 members of the public there too.

It was made quite clear that the new services at Aslockton are an experiment. EMT have heard our concerns about the service cuts, and have more-or-less issued us with a challenge: they want to see an increase in footfall at the station of between 15% and 20%.

This is a two-year plan – they need one year to get some meaningful data, then another year to give notice of subsequent timetable changes to Network Rail. So there you have it: EMT have done their bit, now we need to do ours.

Our challenge, in numbers

A while ago, I posted figures from the Office of Rail Regulation which detailed the journeys taken to and from Aslockton. Well, the 2007/08 figures have come out. So here goes:

                        ALK      BIN      RDF
        Year 2007/08    21473    29457    13305
        Year 2006/07    21363    25181    9326
        Year 2005/06    18538    26134    10892
        Year 2004/05    16064    28053    9565
        Year 2003/04
        Year 2002/03    15991    41038    13220

Hmm, very modest growth for Aslockton, and that’s before the December 2008 cuts were made :-/  To stand any chance of keeping those extra eight services (and the possibility of more) we really do need to hit 25000 passengers per annum.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , ,
Filed under transport : Comments (0) : Jun 29th, 2009

Fedora 11: you might as well quit guys

I thought I’d give Fedora 11 a spin, cos they’ve made some changes to power management, and my battery has been screwy since Ubuntu Feisty.

But what a mistake!

I don’t expect any distro to recognise all my hardware, nor do I expect any to be exactly tailored to my tastes.

But I do expect every distro to at least:

  • have installation docs that were not out of date two releases ago
  • get the time right when pointed to an NTP server
  • recognise my PS/2 trackpad
  • not clobber the contents of /boot
  • warn me before installing a non-backwards-compatible upgrade to Grub

It’ll be a very long time before I try Fedora again. :-(

Tags: , ,
Filed under tech : Comments (2) : Jun 20th, 2009

The man behind the leaks speaks

John Wick, the chap who passed on details of MPs expenses to the Daily Telegraph has spoken:

We’ve reached the stage in society where they want to know everything about us, I think we’re entitled to know about them.

Bravo! You’d get my vote! :D

Tags:
Filed under current affairs : Comments (0) : May 23rd, 2009

A simple UI for ‘vpnc’

I’ve been using the Nortel branch of vpnc for a while with great success, but it’s a command-line tool, and a drag to use now that Ubuntu 9.04 is so swish.

So here’s a 30-minute Python/Tkinter UI hack which wraps the vpnc and vpnc-disconnect tools.
Code follows…

Tags: , ,
Filed under tech : Comments (0) : May 20th, 2009

Killing two iTunes birds with one stone

Two things have been niggling me lately with iTunes, perhaps because I’m the kind of person who can’t stop fiddling with software.

Problem 1: reinstalling and reconfiguring iTunes is a pain

Man, all that scanning of the music folder. Then the recreation of playlists, and the hand-cranking of album art for the 20% or so albums which the iTunes Store doesn’t recognise. And, for a chap who re-installs Windows often, and fiddles around even more, it’s starting to be a pain in the bum.

Yes, there are ways to back-up the iTunes metadata (aka the “iTunes Library”), but who does that often? Who does it often enough?

Problem 2: iTunes resets the music folder location

My iTunes music folder is stored on a NAS box (the Kurobox), shared using Samba and mounted in Windows as a mapped drive. This is primarily for space reasons (20Gb of MP3s would be a lot for an ageing laptop), but also to have it all in a permanent place.

But there’s a problem: if I start iTunes before my wireless connection is established, then the mapped drive ain’t there – and iTunes helpfully resets the music folder location back to its default. Sure it can be manually changed back, but everything needs scanning afresh.

Killing two birds

I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before: relocate the iTunes Library (the metadata) onto the mapped drive too. That would mean that I can re-install iTunes (or even Windows) at will and even access the same iTunes library from multiple Windows installations. (Virtual machines, etc).

This has the added benefit of curing problem 2 as well: if iTunes can’t find the library files at startup, then it pauses – meaning that it’ll never get as far as resetting the music folder location back to its default, giving me time to re-map the music drive.

But, while it’s easy to change the location of the music folder, relocating the library itself isn’t as obvious.

The trick

The trick is hold down <Shift> while iTunes starts. It’ll ask for the location of the iTunes library – set it to a location on the mapped drive (making sure you’ve moved it there first ;-).

Thanks to Lifehacker for this excellent iTunes tip! :-)

Postscript: my first attempt at solving this was to install Firefly Media Server onto the Kurobox, which acts like a shared iTunes library on the local network. This worked great until I tried to sync my iPhone against it: it can’t be done! iTunes insists that synching is only done with stuff in the local library.

Tags: , ,
Filed under tech : Comments (0) : May 12th, 2009

“MyRail Lite” iPhone app – dead!

Although I didn’t think to mention the app in my recent Essential iPhone Apps post, the “MyRail Lite” app is (was) first-rate. But they today tweeted that the service is to close because their license to distribute real-time data from National Rail Enquiries isn’t to be renewed.

Several words spring to mind, the cleanest of which would be “boo”, “hiss” and “arse”.

There is another app , very recently released, called “National Rail Enquiries”… but at £4.99 it’s a bit feckin’ steep. It looks to be officially sanctioned by NRE and – while I obviously don’t know the details – I wonder if NRE licensed the data to MyRail, watched them prove the concept, saw it was popular, and then saw an opportunity to screw them over.

(Only guessing, like!)

Tags: , ,
Filed under tech, transport : Comments (0) : Mar 23rd, 2009

Oh noes, Genius Playlist!

Having just got around to turning on the iTunes Genius Playlist, I eagerly scampered to the iTunes store to see what’s being recommended. And lo! Disappointment!

We recommend:

The Very Best of Chas & Dave

Oh noes! :(

Tags: ,
Filed under humour : Comments (0) : Feb 23rd, 2009

SqueezeCenter Plugins repository

… for LiveDepartures and GoalRush plugins. Here: http://wiki.insignificant.org/images/Pluginrepo.xml

Tags: ,
Filed under SqueezeCenter : Comments (0) : Feb 4th, 2009

Essential iPhone apps (if you happen to be me)

Well I was sorely tempted by the Blackberry Storm, but Vodafone are making a fundamental error in their sales tactics: they let people play with the thing before they buy it. Usually that’d be a good thing, but I very quickly concluded that it’s a bloody awful device. (Stephen Fry was right, and I so wanted to like it too!)

So out went the Storm, and in came a shiny new iPhone.

But even the iPhone itself as its problems, and I was all ready to jailbreak the thing in order to get the functionality I wanted… but found it wasn’t necessary. So here’s some essential iPhone applications, if you just happen to be identical to me… Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: ,
Filed under tech : Comments (2) : Jan 26th, 2009

A cautious welcome to UK Govt’s alcohol policy changes

Keith Vaz, chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Committee, is absolutely right when he says:

The main responsibility in my view rests with the supermarkets

Indeed it does Keith!

It’s about time that the Government has a sensible approach to alcohol use in the UK, rather than just imposing punitive taxes which drive drinking away from public houses. Pubs are better places to drink than the home, and here’s why:

  • pubs reinforce the social aspect of drinking, rather than “drinking to get drunk”
  • pubs usually have a mixed clientele, where younger drinkers can be regulated and moderated by their older peers

So the Government might have finally realized that supermarkets are ruining the pub trade and encouraging bad drinking habits. They plan to tackle this problem by requiring supermarkets to make a profit on alcohol sales, and not use booze as a loss-leader. Good!

But they need to do one more thing: make sure that the brewers also don’t sell alcohol to the supermarkets below cost price too. The supermarkets have too much buying power, and faced with the choice “cut your prices or lose shelf-space”, few brewers or distillers will call the supermarkets’ bluff.

If the supermarkets can force dairy farmers to sell milk below cost price, they’ll try it on the brewers too. They mustn’t win.

Tags: , , , ,
Filed under beer : Comments (0) : Nov 10th, 2008

« Older Entries