[gerjomarty]

Aston100 wrote:

By the way, when does colour become useful?
The books I read don’t have pictures or maps etc – so only the front cover art would look better in colour.

I have some colour manga/comics in my library, so I thought the colour would be a good addition for those. In reality it’s very washed out looking, but certainly better than nothing.

If you’re not that bothered I don’t think the colour version is worth the extra €30.

[gerjomarty]

Aston100 wrote:

Anyone got experience of ebook readers (not Kindle).
Suitable for travelling abroad with, readable in bright sunshine on a lounger and able to handle epub format.

I think one of the Kobo branded ones might be an option?

I’m a fan of the Boox e-readers, if you’re not bothered about it being a Chinese brand. Main selling point is that is just runs Android and allows access to the Google Play store, so you can install the Kindle app, or any other app, or use the built-in app to read epubs as well. I’ve had a Go Color 7 in my bag for about a year and a half.

[gerjomarty]

I’ve seen a message from both Reddit and Rail UK Forums that there are ticket machines available at Luton Airport, and indeed a recent thread from this year includes an image of them: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/luton-airport-changes-travel-desk-dart-gateline.280107/

So it should be possible to collect a ticket from one of the ticket machines at the airport.

With regards to whether this inclues the fare on the DART from Luton Airport to Luton Airport Parkway: if your rail ticket has an origin of “Luton Airport”, it includes the fare on the DART from Luton Airport Parkway to your destination. If your rail ticket has an origin of “Luton Airport Parkway”, it does not include the fare on the DART, and you should use contactless to get from Luton Airport to Luton Airport Parkway.

[gerjomarty]

I’ve been looking for a good replacement for the semi-regular Financial Times discount from Amex offers now that I’m in a fallow period, and all I can find are Revolut Metal and Monument Bank, neither of which really appeal to me. If anyone has any other offers I’d be all ears.

[gerjomarty]

My first thought was to go to the literal authority on these things – the mailing list for the Eggert TZ database that holds the records of all timezones for every computer, because I thought something as big as this would be news there.

They have an entry from March 2025 that states this is false: https://lists.iana.org/hyperkitty/list/tz@iana.org/message/XQBNL4IZB42OE7YWB46QJRB3VMJO74B4/

Quite worrying that something so fundamentally wrong made it through to so many publications.

[gerjomarty]

I know the terms say that anyone who has ever received a switching bonus is barred from receiving another one. Are there any concrete reports that this is definitely the case?

[gerjomarty]

Travelperk has been updated in the past year to be very explicit about which hotel rates are direct and earn points and respect status, and which come from sites like Expedia and don’t. If you enter your loyalty numbers in your profile it’ll even let you filter searches by loyalty programme.

[gerjomarty]

TS77 wrote:

Thanks for this, looks ideal – do you know if this is something I could buy from Liverpool Street station or similar? I can see it marketed on the West Midlands Railways website (£220) but I can’t see how to buy.

Yes, theoretically any National Rail ticket office in the Gold Card area can sell you this season ticket. They should have gold-coloured ticket stock that they can print a “Gold Record Card” on alongside your season ticket. However, in the true spirit of HUACA, there are some ticket offices that are better at knowing the rules and offering niche tickets than others.

Here’s a recent thread on railforums.co.uk with some extra information: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/annual-gold-card-where-to-buy.277371/

[gerjomarty]

Apple are generally the best in the business for keeping old phones in software support for a long time. While it might be galling that everything still works, take some solace that other manufacturers have been very much worse at this. Only relatively recently have Google’s own-brand phones advertised extended software support, specifically to compete with Apple.

According to https://endoflife.date/iphone the iPhone 8 was released 8 years ago and was manufactured up until 5 years ago. Software support ended 6 months ago, and I guess the app developers are just catching up to that now.

[gerjomarty]

The Hatton – Lapworth season Gold Card is a great trick that certainly can work for some people. The less expensive, more restrictive, and probably more well known version of this is the Network Railcard, which is the standard price of £35 per year, but can occasionally be had for a discount from various apps like The Trainline, Trainpal, and some others.

It’s usable in Greater London and the surrounding areas, but do check the map, as it’s based on the old Network SouthEast area.

As long as your journey begins after 10:00am, you get 33% off tickets, though Monday to Friday there is a minimum fare of £13.

Unlike the Gold Card you can’t apply the discount to an Oyster card, but if you live in a station outside London the discount does apply to the entire cost of Day Travelcard fares that include travel in Zone 1-6 and a return journey to and from your station. Depending on your journeys this could pay for itself if you were making three or more Tube journeys in a day, two or more National Rail journeys within the zones in a day, or most notably, in one journey if you’re taking the Elizabeth line to Heathrow.

For example, travelling from Cambridge to Heathrow on a Saturday:

– Cambridge to London Kings Cross: £16.75 Super Off-peak Single with a Network Railcard
– London Kings Cross – Heathrow on Tube/Elizabeth line: £13.90 Oyster/Contactless

Or with a Day travelcard:

– Cambridge to London Zone 1-6: £23.75 with a Network Railcard, saving £6.90

You would never see this if you were searching for single tickets, because it’s cheaper to buy a Day Return then just not use the Return portion.

[gerjomarty]

As a data point, I was charged fees on a Euro transaction onboard Swiss railways, though in my defence I thought it would be fine as it was in Euros, and the train wasn’t quite in Switzerland yet. Lesson learned.

[gerjomarty]

I got my card two weeks ago and was in exactly the same position. An old registration existed and I had long since deleted the app previously. I had to HUACA a few times, but eventually the magic word was telling them the error code the app showed. I’m guessing they have a knowledge base of the error codes and the steps needed to fix them, if they exist.

In what is probably a bug, I did manage to get my PIN number the day I got the card, despite the PIN number only arriving in the post yesterday(!)

I still had my old customer ID stored in my password manager from the last time I had a Barclaycard, so I tried to go through the automated phone banking. Funnily enough, inputting my old customer number together with my old 6 digit phone banking password was enough to get access to my new card services, which had a facility to read out the PIN number.

I did do this before calling to get my card registered for the app, so I don’t know if this is just because I was in that in-between state, but if you can find your old customer ID, give the automated phone banking a try.

[gerjomarty]

Flighty seems to think that BA49 LHR-SEA on 15th August 2023 was a Boeing 787-10 (G-ZBLF), and BA286 SFO-LHR on 27th August 2023 was an Airbus A380 (G-XLED). I’m not sure if Flighty and Flightradar24 have different sources for this.

[gerjomarty]

I’m not surprised to hear this – the AI crawlers are absolutely the worst. Many don’t respect the rules set in a site’s robots.txt file, and often they masquerade themselves as regular users so small sites have to take drastic measures to prove a browser is a human being.

Here’s a recent article from The Register about it, but it’s been going on for ages. https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/29/ai_web_crawlers_are_destroying/

[gerjomarty]

Makes sense, thanks Rob.

[gerjomarty]

Was there any indication that the cut-off date for current mycitizenM+ members to receive Gold Elite was the same date as the price rise, or will it just be an ongoing thing? Even if Gold Elite doesn’t have many benefits, I’d probably still be interested in a mycitizenM+ and Marriott Gold package.

[gerjomarty]

Some of these in-app payments use the Open Banking system to facilitate payments. The system has a mechanism where banks can declare themselves offline for planned or unplanned downtime if things go wrong. It could be that the Amex app is trying to hide how the sausage is made a little bit, just coming up with a generic message to explain why a bank can’t currently be used. This is just supposition on my part though! I can see that Nationwide’s OB had some maintenance planned overnight this evening, but it wasn’t a “drop everything on the floor” kind of maintenance.

[gerjomarty]

I’ve been stockpiling the QR codes from the supermarket pizzas, as they used to have flash periods where they were worth triple when entering them into the app. Sadly I haven’t seen this come up in a long time now.

[gerjomarty]

Not as a viable option, but purely out of interest, I had a quick look to see if Flexi Seasons on the trains would work. They provide discounted travel between two stations on 8 days within a 28 day period. They do seem mostly geared towards users taking the train there and back on the designated days, rather than going one way for one day, then returning on another day (though this is permitted).

It looks like there aren’t any regular season tickets from Glasgow to London at all. I guess they don’t expect anyone to spend half their life on an Avanti train five days a week, unless you happen to work for Avanti.

There are a few full season tickets that end a little further north of London. You can get a season ticket to Milton Keynes.

The closest place I could find to get a Flexi Season ticket to on the line to London was Preston, which would end up costing £85.83 a day, plus the extra expense of needing to get from Preston to London. Checking a few weeks out there do seem to be some decent Advance tickets for the morning trains (I saw some at £35), but I think you’d need to be fairly on the ball to get these fares. Also, that only leaves you at Euston.

[gerjomarty]

If anyone was wondering how they were going to update existing Clan Points to Avios – it appears like they’ve gone back and revalued existing flights taken, rather than apply a multiplier to the Clan Point balance as of the end of 30th March.

I would have liked to double check how the conversion happened, but history has been re-written. For example, the transaction page is telling me I earned 410 Avios for a flight in September 2019.

[gerjomarty]

For those wondering about the reason for the fire at the substation, this evening’s Politico Playbook has some gossip:

A person familiar with the investigations told Playbook PM the conclusion appears to be that an electrical engineer made a mistake which caused the fire. Previous questions about whether criminal damage or terrorism could have been the cause have now been dismissed. “It’s always cockup rather than conspiracy,” the person said.

[gerjomarty]

My MPC anecdata:

First used it in Dublin Airport when realising the regular queue would take about 40 minutes, so my photos were hastily taken in the queue. Thankfully (!) there was a bug with the app that required some finagling to select Dublin Airport that day, so the MPC queue was empty, and thus very quick for us!

The other two times I’ve used it, the regular queue with more booths was shorter than the MPC queue with a single booth, so it didn’t make sense to use the MPC queue anyway.

I believe it’s still worth using it, as you speed up your experience at a regular booth by pre-answering the exam questions before reaching the officer.

[gerjomarty]

Andrew. wrote:

BenKent6 wrote:

are we ever likely to get one here in the UK?

We sort of do. There’s a “Gold” scheme for annual Season ticket holders in the South.

https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/railcards/annual-gold-card/

The Gold card is also one of the railcards you can have added to an Oyster card to provide 1/3 off from off-peak fares in London. I believe the cheapest season ticket that provides access to a Gold card or Gold Record card is Hatton to Lapworth, which is currently £204. I’m willing to bet there are many holders of this season ticket who don’t even know where Lapworth is!

[gerjomarty]

@Skywalker If you need a SIM with a working Japanese phone number in advance of actually being there, I hear it’s basically impossible now. Once you’re actually in the country it should be fine. I’ve similarly heard good things about Mobal or Hanacell (they are the same company). Other providers are available, but most are aimed at residents and require proof of residence to buy. It sounds like Mobal offer eSIMs too. The coverage uses NTT Docomo, and does seem to cover even small islands, so Shikoku should be absolutely fine.

[gerjomarty]

My Nectar card was previously associated with an old Amex card, and I also had an issue where it refused my Nectar card number when trying to add it to a new one.

I wish I had better news for you, but after two rounds of going between Amex support and Nectar support, both referred me to the other and in the end I gave up. I believe it’s on Nectar support to remove the link between your Amex and Nectar accounts, but I have never been able to explain it well enough or find someone who understood my request.