Oli Allen's blog
I promise this isn’t one of those “what deep sea diving taught me about B2B sales” type LinkedIn posts. I help run a team of marshals at the Isle of Man TT races. I also lead a remote engineering team. These sound like very different jobs, but they have a similar concern: how do you…
I built a tiny live train departure board for my desk. It shows real departures from any station, updates every minute, and looks like a miniature version of the dot matrix boards you see on platforms across the UK. Just about space for a couple of departures, delay information, platform number and the time. I…
When you “vibe-code” a signup form, what does the AI produce? It learned from the internet. And the internet is full of manipulative UX and “dark patterns”. This isn’t hypothetical. AI coding tools suggest button copy, form layouts, modal dialogs. They’ve been trained on millions of websites, many of which use dark patterns. The model…
I’ve put together a working semaphore signal for my garden railway. The arm raises when a train passes and resets once it’s gone. It’s not prototypical to any real signal, but it works, it looks the part, and it was a satisfying little project. The Basic Idea The system is simple: When the train clears…
The South West Peninsula Spring Rally is a one day scatter rally taking place in the South West of England. Participants are challenged to visit between 10 and 19 locations during the day riding anything between 150 to 400+ miles. 2024 was it’s 15th year. A few weeks before the rally, you’re sent a map…
This is the setup I’ve been using for an Android GPS Sat-Nav setup. In use on my bike but would work just as well in a car. Device – Samsung Galaxy S7 An older model but still very functional and now available used on eBay for £30ish now, cosmetic condition not important as it’ll be…
The National Road Rally is a “navigational scatter rally” for motorcyclists around England – a sort of two wheeled treasure hunt, with riders being given a map of locations around the country, challenged to plan a route between them and visit them on the rally weekend – scoring points depending on distances between each location…
The Santa trains at Groudle Glen on the Isle of Man are a great family day out. I took advantage of some cold but clear and still weather to get some photos from the air.
The Welsh National Rally is an annual event organised by Clive MCC challenging motorcyclists to explore towns and villages all over Wales in a single day with awards given out depending on number of locations visited. The 2019 ride took place on Saturday May 4th. The entry cost was £25 which covers your map of…
If you’re after photos of the racing itself, there are others who have done it much better than I would (my pictures are all taken on my phone and racing bikes are fast! In fact, looking back over these photos, the only ones I seemed to capture were sidecars!). This should hopefully give more an idea of the experience of enjoying being on the island for two weeks, which was a great trip in it’s own right, even aside from the racing.