London cycle hire adventures

Today I felt like coming home with a cycle hire (commonly known as "Boris Bikes", officially now "Santanders Cycles" after a rebrand).

I went to a nearest dock, which the app claimed to be in perfectly fine order, and tried to get a bike. Error. Tried a few more times just in case, still error. I thought that's just app error, so I tried to use the terminal instead - which is really painful as it involves clicking same stupid confirmation dialogs about 25 times before it lets you rent the damn bike - but it was just as broken as the app.

Could the app somehow mark the dock as not working? Right...

So I walked to the next dock, that somehow wasn't broken, so I got a bike, cycled to Aldgate, and from there to the end of pompously named "Cycle Superhighway 2" at Stratford.

Stratford is a traffic hell, with no docks near the "Cycle Superhighway 2" or the station. The app claimed the nearest two docks had zero spaces left.

There was one about 10 minutes away from the station which claimed to have 4 free spaces. I went there - wasting tons of time going in circles because direct route is not possible anywhere near Stratford - and there was only one space, which didn't take the bike in spite of repeated attempts, for whichever reason. First it flashed red, then it just gave up.

After a lot of loud cursing, I had to cycle to the next dock, which fortunately somehow had free spaces, probably because it was really damn far from the station.

The cycling itself was fine, just everything else about the experience was totally miserable, and of course they charged me extra for wasting my time due to broken docking stations.

Which is pretty much what I learned to expect from the TfL. Unionized 💩💩💩.

I really hope some competition with dockless bikes comes to London. Right now none of these new schemes allow realistic commuting between Central London and zones 2/3, but there's some hope for the future.

Let's Play Civilization 5 as Rome

It's been a long while since I last recorded any Let's Plays, so here's a new one!

It turns out not everybody switched to Civilization 6, and in fact new mods for Civilization 5 keep coming out. This campaign features one of them - 5th Unique Component. Other mods just as before.

As Rome, our unique abilities are:

• 25% faster production in other cities of every building which is already built in our capital
• Ballista - unique Catapult replacement - slightly stronger
• Legion - unique Swordsman replacement - slightly stronger, can build roads and forts
• Forum - unique Market replacement - +10% Great Person
• Thermae - unique Garden replacement - +1 Science, +1 Culture, +1 Food.
• Aedes - unique Temple replacement - +1 Global Happiness, cheaper to build, costs no maintenance, and doesn't require a Shrine.

Overall these feel like mid-tier or a bit below abilities. Faster production scales with number of cities, and Aedes gives us a bit of happiness breathing room, so together they support a bit of expansion. Unique units come too early and are of wrong kind to have much impact, early wars are dominated by Composite Bowmen supported by Horsemen.

I'd definitely love to hear feedback, especially technical feedback - I'm recording at higher resolution, and I'm not totally sure if I set OBS correctly for it.

One video a day, full playlist going to be here.

New Hash methods in Ruby 2.5 and hash-polyfill

Ruby 2.5 includes a bunch of new Hash methods:

• Hash#slice
• Hash#transform_keys
• Hash#transform_keys!

The first two do exactly what you'd expect them - and the same ActiveSupport's methods with the same names do. In case of key conflict Hash#transform_keys will quietly overwrite keys, which is somewhat questionable behaviour, but it's not like there's obvious better way.

Unfortunately Hash#transform_keys! took some shortcuts, resulting in rather questionable behaviour. I submitted it as a bug report, and hope they fix it soon, but to be honest track record of my Open Source bug submissions is rather poor.

I'm really surprised Hash#compact wasn't included.

If you want to use these new methods in older Ruby versions, or if you want to use methods from future rubies like Hash#compact, Hash#select_values, Hash#select_keys etc., I updated hash-polyfill gem too.

I did not include Hash#transform_keys! in the gem as its unclear if it will have corrected or current questionable behaviour long term.