A new version of TrainTimes (2.09) has been released by Kevin Wells, featuring the ability to link to a second online encyclopaedia to look up information about railway stations, as well as a small fix for using the first.
TrainTimes is an application that makes use of Wget to allow people using RISC OS to look up railway timetables and related information from online resources, without using a web browser (which on RISC OS might not entirely work, and may mean resorting to another platform). In this case those resources are RealTime Trains, and National Rail.
The online encyclopaedia already used by TrainTimes is Wikipedia, with the software able to generate links to pages on the site about railway stations and launching them in your web browser. However, when doing so ampersands weren’t being correctly encoded, which meant that the URL referencing a station on the site wasn’t quite right if there was an ‘&’ in the station’s name, and thence the address of its page on the site.
The newly added encyclopaedia is Grokipedia, which is still very new and in which much of the content is generated by Grok, a large language model-based AI developed by xAI with a name derived from a word coined by Robert A Heinlein.
TrainTimes uses Grokipedia in the same way as Wikipedia, giving the user the opportunity to visit a page on the site about a particular station. Kevin notes, however, that the site is still in flux, with (for example) consistency issues in how page addresses are set out, so there will need to be updates to TrainTimes as all of this settles down.
If you find any of Kevin’s software useful, why not consider rewarding him for it by buying some merchandise or with a small contribution.
