This just brought back almost 20yr old memories of the Rock and Roll Confidential Hall of Douchebags which is sadly no longer online but does exist in the archive:
I recollect the "brick-wallers" and the train track photos, yes. I always thought they were a little hard on the bands who had not a lot of money or inspiration, and "hired" photographers (or just cousins with cameras) for covers, but they did have some very, uh, interesting covers in the mix as well.
For the most part, city riding is pretty well served by Google maps IMO.
A few years ago, following Google maps cycling directions me and a couple of friends on road bikes were led through muddy forest trails, old rail road tracks and green lanes on a London -> Paris <24hr attempt (we took 26hrs).
The difficulty with cycling directions is that there's not a 1 size fits all solution, a roadie needs smooth road but would prefer it quiet and scenic, a mountain biker would rather those trails we found and a commuter/hybrid would be fine on those in short bursts but probably prefer the speeds of the roads.
If I'm doing something of an "epic" route these days I'll spend a bit of time trying to find a suitable GPX that I can sync to my watch for directions - usually that'll come from Movescount, OS maps, Garmin or just someone's blog of a route. For most other things, Google maps works fine.
> A few years ago, following Google maps cycling directions me and a couple of friends on road bikes were led through muddy forest trails, old rail road tracks and green lanes on a London -> Paris <24hr attempt (we took 26hrs).
Yep. It's clear that Google Maps optimises for city riding and that's cool, but it does fall down badly on longer tours. To a large degree this is inevitable - only OSM actually has the level of surface quality information required for this sort of planning.
With my site, cycle.travel, I've taken the opposite tack: generating quiet, safe routes for leisure and touring rides, while still being as fast to generate routes as Google Maps. Sure, I want it to be usable in cities but it's not the main focus.
People have used it successfully to plan month-long tours across Europe and the US. One of my favourite bits of feedback was https://www.cyclechat.net/threads/swindon-to-orkney-a-wet-we... , where someone just punched in a start and end point at opposite ends of the UK, and rode the route it suggested without any tweaking.
https://cycle.travel/map if you want to play - always happy to hear suggestions/feedback (and thanks to Jake for including it in the post!). Currently Europe/North America/Australia/NZ only.
> Yep. It's clear that Google Maps optimises for city riding and that's cool
I believe that even in the city it simply maps a path as suitable for cycling and that's the limit of the optimization. It then becomes a "shortest/fastest trip" calculation. They don't mark roads and paths for specific types of cycling and you're not asked to provide such info. So whether it's asphalt, cobblestone, or a dirt road even in the city it will make no difference as long as it's suitable for some bikes. Found out the hard way a couple of times...
This looks really great! I'm going on a cycling tour next week so I can directly compare this to my google maps route.
At first glance your site shows the local "cycle highways" which is really cool. However I accidentally clicked on the map twice while scrolling around, and then couldn't figure out how to clear the route so I had to reload the page.
On closer inspection I noticed a button called "close route" which seemed to do what I wanted, but I'm not sure if it has other side effects
I plugged in some routes I am familiar with here (Sydney) and it did a great job at picking the roads/paths I would personally choose!
I do agree with 'overlordalex' on the 'Close Route' button. I couldn't find it at first and 'close' seems like a weird verb to use for 'clearing' the current route. Unless I am misunderstanding what the button is supposed to do. I would personally have a 'Clear' button somewhere close to the 'Get route' buttons (but then again I am no UI/UX expert :)).
Nice. When I'm on vacation I always want a leisure rote, with the best views, not the fastest as the GPS usually gives me. Hope someone makes one of these for cars.
There's also a huge variation in what roads cyclists consider acceptable.
For example, one of our local highways has a speed limit of 55mph and a shoulder that is maybe 10 feet wide with a rumble strip near the cars. Is that a good road for bicycles or not? I'm OK with it but some of my riding friends are not. A bike path can be perfect for a family yet dangerous for practicing time trials.
I've also been surprised at how narrow some of my favorite roads are for driving. Just about any road is great if it doesn't have traffic. So a good road at lunch time is no good during rush hour.
So maybe the ultimate bicycle router would
a) Offer a bunch of preferences just like you see for cars, e.g. "avoid freeways", "avoid tolls".
b) Flag roads as "avoid", e.g. that four lane road with no shoulder next to the sidewalk.
c) Specify roads with gravel. (OSM data can have this; not sure about Google.)
> A few years ago, following Google maps cycling directions me and a couple of friends on road bikes were led through muddy forest trails, old rail road tracks and green lanes on a London -> Paris <24hr attempt (we took 26hrs).
Even in cities Google is similarly terrible, and it's actually gotten worse over the last few years as more unsuitable routes are listed as "cycle paths". I was trying to get home through London and Google sent me about a km in the wrong direction so that it could route me onto a muddy canal bank. I found myself wishing that I could simply put it in car navigation mode but avoiding routes that aren't legal for bicycles, but that's not an option either. E.g. from Great Dunmow to Bishops Stortford, all you need is to go straight down the old Roman Road, but there's no setting for Google Maps that will send you there: in bicycle mode it sends you down a muddy track, and in car mode it sends you down the A120 where bicycles are legally banned.
(Not to mention that here in Japan it simply refuses to provide cycling directions at all).
It's just not good enough, IME. It's well worth taking ten minutes to install OSMAnd and get decent directions instead.
I don’t know when the change happened, but a few years ago Google Maps suddenly got a lot worse for biking. It’s still pretty good, but there was a span of about 2 weeks where it noticeably got worse for me, going from nearly as good as can be expected, to ummm I’m gonna trust my own judgment about 25% of the time.
But generally what you want from these bikes apps is a recording of your run. So that you can see a speed/elevation graph, maybe overlaid on a power graph.
These apps should also let you export/import gps data, which Google does not do.
For simple directions around town I agree that Google Maps is good enough, but as soon as you're beyond riding just to get from point A to B, it's nice to have something more.
I feel like this effort is more for people who commute/ride from point A to point B as you said; another way to put it is, it is more for people who are _not_ actively training. If/when I'm training with power I don't much care about mapping, I know the routes I will take, lots of times in a park and/or around a natural feature of some sort (like a lake). It's only when trying to discover a new route that I would even consider using something like this -- but honestly, not even then. I usually plan a new route ahead of time, and can even preload it into my cycling computer. And do some exploring as well. I just did this yesterday, as a matter of fact, and it's awesome. Again, this is not when you're trying to get to your job on time, where routing based on traffic is what's needed.
Note: some bike computers also have built-in mapping, something I find useful on my Garmin Edge 530 is the breadcrumb feature which allows me to explore new territory to my heart's content and not worry about getting lost as I can just turn around at any point and follow the breadcrumbs on the map.
Note 2: I don't even have my phone out, it's always in my under-seat bag. Cycling computers are great, battery lasts forever (well in excess of 10 hours of riding with the computer on), visible in all lighting conditions, show a plethora of data at the same time (I have 8 live metrics shown at once), and are mounted in such a way that if you fall they likely won't get damaged, because a) they're unlikely to take a direct hit, and b) aren't big & heavy like a $1k iPhone 11 Pro Max with lots of glass that can shatter.
Probably really depends on location. In Czechia the local alternative mapy.cz is vastly superior to Google Maps. It includes roads and trails that are not even drawn on Google Maps and the maps contain much more information in overall.
When I was trying to do the EuroVelo 15 route just over two years ago, it was really obvious Google Maps thought I could maintain sprint speeds all day long.
It also didn’t understand the impact of hills, which is why I cut the attempt short (1080 km) after it redirected me up a Swiss hill instead of keeping me close to the Rhine.
I would’ve preferred a GPX to follow, but I couldn’t find any of that route.
Two years ago there were definitely GPXes for that route on RideWithGPS - I don't know if https://ridewithgps.com/routes/13794818 (2016) was the one I followed or not, but it looks like it would work.
(Also, it's well-signposted, and in any case the whole point of the route is to follow the biggest river in Europe, you don't need a lot of navigational aids).
Thanks, I’ll use that if I get a chance to do the reminder of the route.
I took a wrong turn in Eiken, which isn’t directly next to the river, and didn’t notice my mistake until I’d already exhausted myself. The nice scenery was a pleasant but unfortunate distraction.
That’s why https://en.routeplanner.fietsersbond.nl/ allows the user to pick from limited stops, racer, shortest, car restricted, scenic, etc. Unfortunately, it’s only for the Netherlands.
I disagree that commuting by car is a waste of time vs public transport (depending on the person).
I'm someone who cherishes a little piece of solitude every day. I'd be much happier self sufficiently making my way to my place of work in the nice private bubble of a car (even if that means crawling at 3mph in traffic), listening to whatever music or podcast I enjoy, or just being able to think without many distractions, than having to jostle my way on public transport with no privacy or personal space.
(disclaimer: I cycle to work, not drive, though I'd rather walk the 3hrs it would take me than the hour on tube and/or busses)
Until about a year ago I was working as a FE developer for a major intenrnational bank.
All the processes and knowledge were in place to make sure all considerations were taken with our software with regards to security. But... all that good work and intention goes out the window when the marketing and analysis teams could pretty much, on a whim dump any old JS onto a production page via GTM. During my 18 months there, there were numerous issues (thankfully not security issues - at least that we know of) indroduced via this method inc a full outage of the customer onboarding journey.
I see GTM being used (abused?) by marketing teams regularly, but I'm really surprised that a bank with its own development team would allow it.
It is really powerful and sometimes incredibly useful in some scenarios (e.g I once built a schema.org metadata system that scraped the pages on the fly for a site with a broken CMS). Simo Ahava does clever things with it.
But from what I can tell, it seems to be a way of avoiding communication between teams, or a political power grab inside bigger companies - a parallel CMS. And the silly bit is that it's normally not doing much more than could be achieved by copy and pasting a few lines of code into a template.
I was once investigating "partner reporting that our embed loads slowly". The investigation result was something like: their HTML injects JS, which injects another JS, which injects GTM, which injects an SDK, which injects the embed.
Of course it all loads only when the user does not have any adblocking or tracking protections enabled.
It's a Google backdoor for your team to add more tracking etc.
The important point is that it's a backdoor for marketing (and adtech) teams to get around developer/security requirements. At some point, someone on those teams gets frustrated that their one-line code requests (just load this script! add a gif banner here!) keep falling behind in the backlog. That happens in part because the product team often doesn't care about marketing, and sometimes because developers know that "just one more script!" paves the road to hell. At some point the third-party that's trying to get their business going through your business convinces the marketing team to add GTM, the marketing team says to the dev team "Hey we need GTM to implement THIS script". This time, because the other side has promised them $$$ in terms ROI, the marketing team pushes really hard for it, and eventually a product manager approves the request to get them off their back. The rest, as they say, is history (at retro time, multiple times down the road).
Well the clue's in the name. But I'd argue that Google analysing metadata about who's loading what/when through GTM is a lesser evil, when compared to normalising everyone sticking megabytes of mystery scripts on their sites with the tool.
I'd say 'frontdoor' given that the standard first tag to implement is Google Analytics. But I am sure they also generate some data for their own use about the number and types of tags that each site is adding via GTM.
You can tell by the URL path (it's under /content/dam) that it's served by Adobe Experience Manager (Adobe's CMS, dam stands for digital asset manager, where you store static assets like images and js). The script itself is "target.js", which is Adobe Target - their A/B framework - which "supports custom code insertion"[1] similar to a tag manager.
It's not GTM, but this is like loading the GTM script itself from archive.org.
It's worth noting that AEM is often very badly set up, following requirements from managers who have no idea or concern about web development, and later maintained by low cost content editors who barely know some HTML. Moreover, this CMS seems to be a standard for big sites even though the licenses are costly, development is slow and complicated, and it adds a lot of human hours to the site maintenance.
> All the processes and knowledge were in place to make sure all considerations were taken with our software with regards to security. But... all that good work and intention goes out the window when the marketing and analysis teams could pretty much, on a whim dump any old JS onto a production page via GTM.
That's what's great about content security policies: put a CSP on the page, and when people try to add scripts without going through proper processes it just won't run.
Yes, but it won't allow GTM to load scripts off OTHER domains. It basically re-adds the requirement of engineering gating off 300 different adtech trackers.
I work for a large media comp and this is exactly the reason we don't give editors access to GTM (or even all developers), nor do we allow tools such as Optimizely intended for A/B testing, and we went away from letting them paste HTML into articles to include custom elements.
Unfortunately, we still have lots of 3rd party stuff in GTM, and technically any ad can run random js on our sites. Thats where most problems come from these days.
Editors still technically have the power to brick a given site through our old inhouse CMS which has no proper access control levels, hopefully not for long...
> technically any ad can run random js on our sites
If you configure your ad network to run all ads cross-domain, then they are very limited. For example, in GPT (which I work on) you call "googletag.pubads().setForceSafeFrame(true)".
"customer onboarding journey" sounds altogether twee for a major international bank. Banks are mattresses with insurance policies. Why is there even a journey to be broken?
Because they have to know who you are in a fair bit of detail both to comply with the law and to know who they should let take money out of the account. Because they need you to agree to a bunch of contacts. Because they need to get you things like a bank card. Because they need to decide if they want to lend you money (most often in the form of a credit card). And so on and so forth.
More love for TrailRouter here. Especially love that you can export a GPX for a watch. I get stuck running the same unimaginative routes so even the ability to be able to have it plan a round trip from my house is amazing. Even more so that it finds out green space. Thanks for this!
I'm a FE developer (Mainly React/Node/React Native Development) and I'm still using a 2012 13" Macbook air (8Gb) as my daily driver at home. There's a noticable difference between it and my work (granted still relatively old) 2017 MBP 17". Running builds and an entire test suite maybe take twice as long but it's overall very usable and I see no reason yet to upgrade.
Maybe if you bet on Burnley to win the premier League next season you will win a fortune. All signs, experience and educated opinions, however point to this being a losing bet
RE protein. We need far less than we're led to believe. Unless you're an elite athlete then you probably don't need to worry.
I'm no elite athlete but I've been vegan 3 years. In those 3 years I've completed 2 Ironmans with no meat/eggs/dairy, no protein supplementation and no issues whatsoever.
