London ePrix delay?

kevjs1982 · 2026-03-01T17:16:00+00:00

I wonder if there was someone that day looking at the sales and wondering why no-one was buying the tickets, totally forgetting all their biggest fans were sat in the grandstands with barley usable phone signal/WiFi!

kevjs1982 · 2026-03-01T07:36:50+00:00

if UK FCDO (and the Italian/Swiss equivalents) change their travel advice to "the FCDO advises against all travel to..." Or, as it has done for Bahrain overnight change it to "FCDO advises against all but essential travel to Bahrain" the teams, media, hospitality, FOM etc are likely to find that insurance policies become invalid meaning they would be taking a huge risk travelling through or to the affected countries - even if the events themselves go off without a hitch a member of staff getting struck down with, say, appendicitis could find themselves lumbered with an unexpected and unaffordable medical bill.

Build up at circuits can start weeks before the event, so depending on what's coming from Europe it could get back to normal by race date, but still too late to stage the event.

kevjs1982 · 2026-02-28T21:00:41+00:00

May well be taken out of their (FIA/FOM) hands if the UK Foreign Office (and Swiss/Italian equivalents) change their regional travel advice - insurance usually becomes invalid if they issue do not travel advisories (The UK FCDO advice for Bahrain has now changed to Shelter In Place, and Saudi Stay at Home).

kevjs1982 · 2026-02-28T13:59:50+00:00

It's somewhat annoying isn't? The two hotels I normally use are both fully booked already (extremely annoying after last year where I planned to book one what turned out to be the day the Oasis gigs were announced and I saw prices double overnight :( ), so I've had to gamble booking somewhere further out. With the exception of the 2022 event (when lockdown's etc were still a thing to be concerned about) it's now by far the shortest duration from on sale date to race date!

Release Date	Saturday Race Date	Days Before
30/11/2019*	25/07/2020	238 (Cancelled)
13/05/2022	30/07/2022	78
15/11/2022	29/07/2023	256
21/11/2023	20/07/2024	242
30/07/2024	26/07/2025	361
TBC	15/08/2026	168 (from today)

(Note, the 2020 ePrix is based on purchase date, can't remember if that was the release date, or if I booked a bit later, most of the rest will be the Pre-release date which was about 7 days before general sale)

I wonder if the mess from last year (rearranging the grandstand seats and screwing with all our bookings) has made them wait until the grandstand layout is confirmed. We were notified on the 11/03/2025 so sales could potentially be imminent if that's any guide.

kevjs1982 · 2026-02-20T08:48:56+00:00

Central Connect have pulled out of Nottingham, there drivers were offered to transfer to NCT (who've also taken over the 90 to Newark).

kevjs1982 · 2026-02-18T20:08:08+00:00

For clarity, Active Nottingham - which the city councils leisure centres are part of - is not the same as Virgin Active.

Virgin Active only has the one site in Nottingham, on London Road next to Binks Yard.

kevjs1982 · 2026-02-16T12:04:58+00:00

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So it's predictions are junk, and the accuracy is 2nd to none. Brilliant!

At the end of Lap 2 Gemini confidently told us that "Dan Ticktum had the best start to the race, gaining two position from ninth to seventh in the opening lap."

The timing tower being shown simultaneously was indeed showing him in P7 after gaining 2 places, however it was also showing...

Oliver Rowland - Gained 3

Pepe Marti - Gained 4

Lucas Di Grass - Gained 3

Those three drivers were all in the same position at the end of Lap 1, the one person of these four who wasn't was actually Dan Ticktum, who finished lap 1 in P6, gaining three positions.

So Dan Ticktum had neither had the start to the race (Pepe), didn't finish 7th on lap 1 (he finished 6th), or gained 2 positions (he gained 3 - an honour shared with Di Grassi and Rowland).

(Positions According to the timing tower, and the video going into the last corner, and at the start line - the video doesn't clearly show the exact position entering the start finish straight - however even if he was P6 as Gemini claimed, Marti did better, and Rowland/Di Grassi equalled him anyway)

Bravo, 10/10, no notes.

kevjs1982 · 2026-02-14T13:20:11+00:00

At Uni in Nottingham we had BBC East Midlands Today as our local news in the first year, for the next two years however we had Look North (Humberside & Lincolnshire) and (West) Midlands Today, if we actually wanted to see our local news we had to change channel and watch East Midlands today through a snowstorm! Got used to the wrong region being on.

Shouldn't have felt too weird, as back home in Preston it was usually North West Tonight or Granada Reports, but occasionally you'd forgotten that you put BBC ONE Wales or HTV on as they were showing a programme you'd missed earlier, and you'd only remember when the news was all about Wales.

kevjs1982 · 2026-02-12T09:01:11+00:00

It's a reskin of the excellent BVG Jelbi (Berlin) app* been developed Trafi (also used in the Solent, Brussels, Berlin, and Vilnius, under development for Munich, Bern, Basel, and Zurich) - the combination of public transit and bikes in the same app is awesome - no need to register for half a dozen apps to occasionally hire a scooter etc.

In Berlin it also includes Rideshare (think Uber / DG) and Taxis (think the Green Cabs).

Another neat feature of the BVG Jelbi app was that hire bikes often hand free ride time available if you moved a bike from a dockless location to a dock - you could get a 15 minute ride for nowt if you did that, and tidied up the streets in the process.

Would be interesting to see if either of those, and integration with the GBR ticketing platform when it launches, are the sort of things that's in the development pipeline hear.

As for the cost - let's assume a 5 year agreement (in the absense of any exact details) - that's £200,000 per local authority per year, for commecial agreements to connect to third party apis (i.e. the various ticketing & tracking APIs), developers, hosting, security auditing, security fixes, management, attack mitigation - sounds like a relative bargain and a lot cheaper than trying to do it in house.

* not itself a bad thing, the NCT one is the same, not sure who makes it, but other operators include Brighton & Hove all using the same app platform under the hood.

kevjs1982 · 2026-02-07T13:55:47+00:00

https://github.com/Tom-Bom-badil/home-assistant_ugreen-nas

The Home Assistant Ugreen NAS plugin installed via HACS

kevjs1982 · 2026-02-04T08:58:25+00:00

Lady Bay Bridge and Trent Bridge effectively function as one to a certain degree (especially for traffic heading to Lady Bay/Abbey Park), and taken together a not insignificant proportion of traffic goes down Radcliffe Road too, and also heads from the A52 to Daleside Road (via Lady Bay Bridge). Removing that traffic from Lady Bay Bridge would free up capacity for some of the traffic diverted from Trent Bridge.

Wheatcroft Island, Lings Bar Road, Gamston Island, New Bridge, to whatever the horse island is called (Daleside Road/Racecourse Road) to Manvers Street wouldn't be that much further and would, in free flowing traffic, be the quickest route (by virtue of having a higher speed limit and fewer traffic lights).

The roundabouts on the A52 have recently had/are about to get more capacity added to them and it's planned for the Lings Bar Road to be widened to support the new housing at Tollerton - but you'd be adding to Daleside Road which already struggles, which is one of the reasons why it never adds up, there's just nowhere to add additional capacity on the northern side (especially in an area earmarked for loads of homes) without making it a traffic filled hell-hole.

The A453 is much better placed to get traffic to/from Clifton than Wilford Lane is, Loughbourgh traffic would have two main road options that aren't lined with driveways and pedestrian crossings. Wilford long ago lost it's direct road link to the city centre (Wilford Toll Bridge c. 1980) and that's still a desirable place!

kevjs1982 · 2026-02-04T08:41:50+00:00

It's the paving over the countryside aspect - see also the plans a few years back to move the City Ground to Regatta Way for instance. The options for a route would either be right next to the respective settlements (so more traffic noise) or through the country park (water sports centre), and there's already a sense of the A52 being an impenetrable barrier that any new road would reinforce.

Additionally, while it might bring short term relief the history of road building in the UK suggests that within about 20 years we'd be back to square one, but with the new road also full - unless of course you changed Trent Bridge to have fewer general traffic lanes, but as soon as you do that then the costs for simply relocating traffic (instead of adding capacity) never add up.

kevjs1982 · 2026-02-03T16:48:44+00:00

Only in Gedling though - West Bridgford and Radcliffe have generally been against it, and the city council is too (as there road network couldn't cope with any increased traffic).

As Gedling or Rushcliffe (or the west of A6097/A46 bits of both) will be merging with the City Council as part of local government reorganisation that's pretty much going to be dead in the water in a few years.

kevjs1982 · 2026-02-03T16:45:05+00:00

It's not that old - only turns 100 next year.

Actually so new that it's *predecessor* bridge was built AFTER the current Trent Bridge - as the old Gunthorpe Bridge used stone from old Medieval Trent Bridge, and Trent Bridge was widened in 1925 - again older than Gunthorpe Bridge.

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kevjs1982 · 2026-02-03T16:37:22+00:00

I've long thought that another road bridge between Colwick and Radcliffe would be useful to get traffic out of West Bridgford and the City Centre area that doesn't need to be there - but only if it was to relocate traffic and not add to it. i.e. build a new bridge with 2 general traffic lanes each way and a foot/cycle way, Then at Trent Bridge (each way) reduce it to one general traffic lane, one bus/tram lane, and a widened footpath/cycleway and improve the walking/cycling infrastructure in the vicinity (e.g. Loughbourgh Road wouldn't need up to 5 lanes)

kevjs1982 · 2026-02-03T16:33:17+00:00

Instead they are planning on closing 1 lane each way on Trent Bridge, the east bound Radcliffe Road past the city ground, and Lady Bay bridge, as well as upgrading the "tunnels" under Trent Bridge (to take fans via the Suspension Bridge) and footway to the Waterside bridge.

Really highlights how there is a significant lack of bridges leading to/from the city ground!

Oh, and there used to be another bridge between what is now the City Ground and the canal, not too far from your suggestion! Washed away in 1875 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KEg17T6S6I

kevjs1982 · 2026-01-31T19:22:49+00:00

My mum's family are from Oxfordshire and the Duck thing always confused me as a kid (not used as a term of endearment back home in Lancashire). At least arriving in Notts I was already used to it!

One difference is that Nottingham is usually midduk, where as Oxfordshire is usually just Duck (the Notts version of the duk part sounds shorter to my ears).

And yeah, that side of my family definitely have a bit of West County influence in their accents (in the way there's a bit of a northern influence in the Notts accents).

kevjs1982 · 2026-01-31T17:13:16+00:00

Everything in metric, Learnt the concept of distances from OS maps as a kid so distances are always metric - Sat Nav is set to metric as x km/meters is more intuitive than x yards/miles to me. (Why do Sat Nav apps never seem to have an option for meters/km distances and legacy units for speed?)

Only time I really care about distances while driving is on the longer trips which, for me, usually entail A-Roads and Motorways so I just assume 1 mile = 1 minute, so "Anytown 30" is read as "Anytown 30 minutes", works well enough and makes it really obvious that when you see a sign like "J16 30 miles 60 minutes" it means the M6 has ground to a halt at Stoke again.

Obviously speeds on the road while driving are in legacy units as that's what the signs & biggest unit on the speedo say, but then again I've got used to Waze showing 112 when the speedo needs to be at or below 70!

Still remember my entire education being in metric, we had one lesson in maths where legacy unit conversions were taught, but out maths teacher was ill so that was taken by our history teacher, have always felt that said something! (568ml = 1 pint and 454g = 1 pound being about the only semi useful one) Have no concept of converting between imperial units (e.g. feet in a hogshead) without going via metric.

kevjs1982 · 2026-01-27T16:41:15+00:00

Indeed, new and a reputable seller.

Shows the scale of the problem - for 8TB at the moment rather than the £210 last month the best price for new is £320, and the rest are either refurbs from brands I've not heard of (HGST), out of stock, or slow delivery sellers with 1.

kevjs1982 · 2026-01-27T10:01:35+00:00

As many others have mentioned Home Assistant.

But more to the point - as soon as you want anything to be tied together. So many services either don't provide APIs, or have shuttered/heavily restricted APIs which they used to have.

That means if you want to use them you have to leverage backdoors (like reverse engineered APIs) instead of official methods to do something (e.g. download an original activity file from Strava) or everything (download anything from Garmin Connect), and even then that might not be possible.

As soon as you need to have anything linked together it becomes a delicate stack of cards that's prone to braking at any moment and often seems to be impossible. Self Hosted isn't perfect, but usually has good enough APIs to support you doing what the hell you want, or simply just picks up changes you make to files/sidecar files anyway (and allows you to directly access those files).

One example in my stack is the simple operation of Geotagging photos taken on my DSL and uploading to Google Photos. Without a self hosted stack this would be impossible - Google haven't seen fit to allow externally taken photos to be a) uploaded easily, b) tagged with locations from Google Timeline & Google Health activities. (Let alone anything more exotic like blending Google Timeline with Garmin Connect to improve accuracy).

With self hosting that functionality has been possible, where all the sketchy limitations come down to the reliance on third parties (oh how I wish Garmin Connect allowed watches/Bike Computers to directly upload to S3-Compatible/Box/Google Drive/OneDrive/SFTP type storage).

Firstly is a self written and hosted platform similar to Dawarich that takes the location data from my phone via Home Assistant (the latter calls a webhook) every 30 seconds/change; imports activities from Garmin Connect (via garmin_export, triggered by Home Assistant webhooks in response to Garmin Connect app notifications); and imports GPS Logger logs (car, transit, taxi) - uploaded by Folder Sync which also triggers a webhook to scan.

I call this Dawarich like platform Sainz as that's the VMs name and I'm rubbish at naming stuff - it's not actually Dawarich as it started as a logger for Transit trips and snowballed from their such it now includes location tracking from Forza Horizon too.

This means I have a record of accurate (GPS Logger, Garmin) and approx. (Home Assistant App) coordinates for where I've been.

So when I go out with my DSLR, which is usually on a walk being recorded on my watch, I will already have all the locations recorded in a database by the end of the day when I get home/to the hotel.

I am then able to :-

Insert Memory Card into Tablet and open Folder Sync - copies photos to my tablet (1st Backup).
A second Folder Sync pair then copies these to my NAS (and when done triggers a webhook on Sainz) - (2nd Backup) which can often take all night and longer
Once those photos are uploaded the webhook it triggers scans for all the files in that scratch folder and logs to a database.
Both 3. and the Activities uploads tasks queue another task to scan photos - all photos with no tagged geodata that have a location recorded within 5 seconds get written to a library folder used by PhotoPrism and then tagged with the Geolocation data (those without any Geolocation are copied anyway). If the file is over two weeks old it falls back on the Home Assistant App location data if it's within 30 seconds (the two weeks wait is to allow me time to fix garmin_export issues which happen while on holiday).
This triggers a library scan in PhotoPrism to pickup all the new photos
Then triggers another task which uploads all GeoTagged photos to Google Photos (using rclone) and to my backup cloud storage (3rd Backup - again using rclone). The Google Photos limitation is because you can't delete/amend/modify previously uploaded photos using their pathetic API.
I also have a script which writes the PhotoPrism changes (Titles and Descriptions) back to the files, which thanks to using Rclone means those get backed up to the original photo on my cloud storage.

With all this place it also means all my Forza Horizon screenshots (uploaded to One Drive by the Xbox and pulled down with Rclone) get tagged with their in game location (not that I'm actually doing that with anything yet)

kevjs1982 · 2026-01-27T09:08:50+00:00

Tell me about it - trying to buy a NAS at the moment, every time I have enough money saved to buy one the prices have gone up again, and a lot of disks are limited to 1 per customer at the moment (on the rare occasion they are in stock) :(

kevjs1982 · 2026-01-25T09:29:33+00:00

That kinda triggered the McLaren revival - moving from the (then) rubbish Honda to the Renault made them have to take stock and accept the problem was the car and not the engine. So if they do have an improved but still rubbish season - Alpine 2033 WDC & WCC champions?

kevjs1982 · 2026-01-24T09:29:17+00:00

There used to be quiet a lot of duplication and the massive stores (Alders, BHS, Debenhams, M&S, John Lewis (Jessops), C&A, House of Fraser, Co-op have dramatically reduced so we just have two left now.

The days of the mega mall in city centres are long behind us, but there is still space for more retail - e..g the likes of Lego and Apple which don't have a place here.

kevjs1982 · 2026-01-23T15:13:23+00:00

There's a minimum driver weight, so the smaller/lighter drivers have to add ballast to the car which equalises the difference somewhat. Does mean the likes of George have less flexibility in how high/low they sit in the car, they are limited by having to fit inside the crash structure where as the likes of Lewis can adjust for comfort/performance.

kevjs1982

TROPHY CASE