17 May 2019 Archives

Review of The Rusty Bicycle

This review of The Rusty Bicycle originally appeared on Google Maps. See more reviews by Dan.

The Rusty Bicycle, 28 Magdalen Rd, Oxford OX4 1RB, United Kingdom.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

Visited today for the first time. Discovered when I came to order that special offers (e.g. £5 lunchtime pizzas) on the menu aren’t actually honoured when you come to order unless you agree to install their “app”. Their app is appalling: currently averaging 1.7/5 on the app store, and I can see why!

By the time I’d looked at the app’s privacy policy, I decided it was better to pay full price rather than use it: the app requests permissions to access virtually all of your phone’s data and the privacy policy states that your use of it grants them the right to track your GPS location from then on (seriously!). No thank you!

Cocktails were okay. Food was pretty good, but not quite good enough to take away the sour taste left by the “app” experience. I’d visit again… but only if they moved towards honouring the special offers they advertise… WITHOUT the precondition that you agree to give all of your personal data to them first.

Permission to Write Stuff

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

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I would say treat the web like that big red button of the original Flip camera. Just push it, write something and then publish it. It may not be perfect, but nothing ever is anyway. I write all sorts of crap on my blog — some of it really niche like snippets for Vim. Yet it’s out there just in case someone finds it useful at some point — not least me when I forget how I’ve done something.

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Brendan Dawes

I write all kinds of crap on my blog, too, and for mostly the same reasons: my blog is for me, first and foremost. Hopefully others, from time to time, find it interesting or useful, but I can’t in good faith argue that I keep the shit I wrote in the 90s or early 2000s here for the benefit of the Internet as a whole! It’s for me first.

Good analogy with the Flip camera (follow the link through to Brendan’s post for the full explanation).

The Side Effects of Vaccines – How High is the Risk?

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell

Kurzgesagt tells it like it is. The thing I love the most about this video is the clickbaity title that’s clearly geared to try to get the attention of antivaxxers and the “truth teaser” opening which plays a little like many antivaxxer videos and other media… and then the fact that it goes and drops a science bomb on all the fools who tout their superstitious bollocks. Awesome.