Next bus to Altrincham delayed by Windows Defender BORK! BORK!BORK! There was a time when catching a bus meant knowing how the local network worked: a dog-eared timetable or encyclopedic knowledge of routes and numbering systems was required before you even got on board. Not anymore. Modern mapping apps now bake in bus guidance, and route data flows freely from web services. The …
making it a natural fit for a bus shelter's lighting system.
I'm trying to think of some, and that's before the scallies get at them, which never takes long. But the idea of wiring up all the existing bus shelters seems like a non-starter. Much better to give them a solar panel (or a windmill in Manchester), a battery and a blessing!
Fun Facts.
Manchester is actually the 3rd wettest city in the UK behind Glasgow and Cardiff. Where did we get the nickname from though? Well, cotton is much better in damper conditions as it's less likely to snap hence why the textile industry was in the north. Apparently there was also a 1926 council planning rain map which I guess stuck. Plus it was grey, murky and damp looking everywhere till they built all the big towers.
I can't see scallies getting at them unless they work out a way to adapt them for the scooters and e-bikes which they ride around (dangerously) on all the time.
As for the article windows really is overkill for a bus sign...
but.... but.... but what about the poor millionaires at Microslop? They need the licensing money for each bus shelter, Train Platform so that they can foist yet more AI and slurping on every user.
IMHO, Linux would be a far better choice for this sort of app but all those VB6 progs need to find work somewhere. VB6 you say? Yes. I was called by an agency a few months ago about a 1 year contract for VB6 development. I said no naturally.
But how do you calculate "rainiest"? Washington DC gets more rainfall… Pretty much anywhere on the west side of the British Isles gets a lot of rain.
My brother once counted that there were only 42 days in a year when it didn't rain, which is I guess what most people notice. And, having also lived in Glasgow, I can say there isn't much between them in this respect. But I can imagine people in Barrow, Greenock or Oban raising their eyebrows at such arid conditions! ;-)
The scallies will happily vandalise anything they can't steal: for a while there was a craze about setting fire to wheelie bins and dropping them down manhole covers – took out a couple of important cable systems because I guess the engineers didn't expect this kind of event…
Those e-bikes are really dangerous: last time I was home saw one idiot doing a wheelie on one along the middle of Palatine Road! Practising for the Darwin Awards, obviously.
Yes, but before it gets to the dip between Didsbury and Northern Moor. Before the Ship Canal was built, lots of Manchester (and surrounding boroughs) used to flood, er, a lot, as might be expected for the confluence of 3 to 4 rivers… Since then it has proved much more resilient to floods than many other towns built on more recently drained flood plains.
I would suggest "there's an app for that" but for the fact I'd need to reach into my bag for my reading glasses.
So, local ruffians not withstanding, I think a little bit of digital signage is not a bad thing. No idea why it has to run Windows though...
Ignoring the pros and cons of any particular OS, in such an environment you'll want long-term support contracts from suppliers.
Of course, this is perfectly possible for any Linux system and, once you've had a couple of fights about the GUI toolkit, you should be good to go.
Jay here.
They seem to be fitting them to "timing stops" only, which makes sense but most of the bus shelters are wired for power with lighting (safety on dark nights I guess) and many have an illuminated ad board too.
I'm pretty sure the boards are using the now non public TFGM API or the national one, but I'm also really quite curious how the boards communicate.
Post-LTE turned mobile networks into packet-pushing stacks making interoperabilty a lot easier, just like more recent versions of WiFi get management functions to reduce some of their inherent problems with contention. It's also why much of the recent kit is networking kit with the software doing nearly all the radio stuff. This is one of the reasons why modern phones will happily use your WiFi network for voice calls.
I assume they wanted to include the picture that they've used as the thumbnail
(that link is to a larger version, should anyone actually want to read what's been referred to in the article)
As I have written before, the latest (sic) buses in the fleet running in one of the outer suburbs of Brisbane (AU) have an in·bus display of the route and upcoming stops except when the realtime updates or gps fail — then it falls back to showing the London bus route 174 from Dagenam Heathway to King George Hospital (presumably the demo mode.)
Certainly confused one French couple visiting BNE returning to their host's from their first outing in the city.
A neighbour worked for one of the bus companies in London when testing live tracking. On the first day of trying to follow one round a route, they found they'd fitted the kit to a bus whose route went straight to a depot for a day of maintenance.
The other fun one is when the GPS has a bit of a brain fart moment and yeets the bus halfway across the planet for 10 seconds or so before the tracker updates again.
My winner so far was seeing the bus track a few streets away, then 20 seconds later report that it was just off the coast of Japan before the next update corrected it.
I was looking at going to a small city zoo the other day. My plan was to take the train and then catch a bus from the station to the zoo/park. There is no bus that visits the zoo/park or nearby. What I would expect is a source of pride for the city isn't on a bus route. Odd that.
Try Stratford-on-Avon. Basically their bus system closes at 7pm. No point in using your car 'cos the park'n'ride buses stop too. It's not as if it isn't a tourist town with a big shack by the river where they do Tudor stuff into the late evening. I suppose they didn't have buses then either.
It's not just you. someone else posted the same 6 hours before you
and I replied to them with a link to the picture that should have been included.
That explains a lot.
We have the same system in our town, and at night they must turn the server off to save money or something, cos around midnight, the signs start just displaying "Refer to".... and nothing else.
If they're going to do that, they might as well turn the signs themselves off as well <sigh>
We have much Vix in the hood. Before the heatwave the Vix immediately opposite the hamiltone.co.uk global HQ was visited often by hi-viz Vix men with a stepladder and kit to fix the Vix. Around the corner the Vix there often displayed the version of Vix OS and nothing else. Many of them just display the the arrival time and not how many minutes wait time. Often a bus is due but doesn't arrive. Often a bus is many minutes away on the Vix and it arrives in seconds. The bus company's app is much more reliable but obviously there are some people don't have that.
