The Otter's Study
Ela's blog about Life, The Universe and Everything.
Short form and in progress projects can be found on my Mastodon page.
1th May 2026
You may have noticed that the design of the blog posts has significantly changed. This is due to a change in the underlying technology of the blog. I’m now using the Jekyll engine to build and maintain this site, rather than hand rolling it like I used to.
20th June 2025
Around mid-May 2025, I found myself getting into a bad habit of “doomscrolling” on Instagram. I quit the service for a over a month. Here’s a summary of the experience.
20th February 2025
We now know what Level Boarding is and why it’s important. Let’s now go out into the world and work out just how bad the situation is, as well as investigate why railway accessability is in such a mess.
1th December 2024
With the recent launch of the new Overground line names, the Tube Map and associated miscellanea have been updated with new elements to reflect these changes. This article isn’t going to go into debates around the line names themselves; they’re good and as I would argue the existing tube line names hold little meaning in the 21st Century beyond the historical, I’m not going to comment further.
14th November 2024
In his debut book rail engineer, writer and broadcaster Gareth Dennis makes a convincing case for rail being the primary mode of transport to meet the needs and demands of an increasingly complicated human world. As humanity faces increased threats from a changing climate and the increasing atomisation and isolation of society, it is only natural for one to ask the question of how we are going to move about in the future. Dennis does so, taking us on a whirlwind tour of rail history, the current existing global system of railways and proposes a framework for a rail focused future of mobility for people and goods alike.
1th October 2024
This is a short (and outdated) guide to using Zotero with Scrivener.
18th June 2024
The passenger experience on the railways of the United Kingdom is an inaccessible one. Despite the existence of infrastructure standards dictating how and where platforms should be built, both the fixed infrastructure (platforms, the permanent way, etc.) and rolling stock (the trains) fail to provide a safe and equitable experience for passengers boarding and alighting trains. Large steps, wide gaps and the risk of falls are all hazards faced by passengers on a daily basis, sometimes with fatal consequences.
11th June 2024
This is a quick post to say that I’ve put my Tesseract automation scripts up to make PDF OCR’ing easier.
5th March 2024
Before the UK POTS network swaps to VOIP based solution, I wanted to attempt to send an e-mail via a Dial Up internet connection. This is the story of how I attempted to do so, and why you can no longer send an e-mail via Dial Up (at least in the UK).
28th December 2023
I was on RailNatter last month! There isn’t going to be much to this post beyond telling you to go and have a look at the episode. For those that don’t know, RailNatter is a weekly live podcast(?) produced by my friend Gareth Dennis, covering rail related topics and issues. I was on to discuss my dissertation on Jersey’s old railway system and a full verison of the dissertation will appear on the Rails to Nowhere podcast. You can find that, along with RailNatter in all good podcast apps.