Scotland, actually.
I love Flickr, and have it set as the homepage in my browser. But the mapping is terrible. I've always wanted Flickr with a more Google Maps-ish looking map. And since some-one, probably on Twitter, linked to this how-to I've been having a look.
I think it works really well, and is a definite improvement on Flickr's implementation.
Oh, and there are more photos from Scotland to come.
View Larger Map
Showing posts with label nerdery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nerdery. Show all posts
Monday, 15 August 2011
Tuesday, 7 June 2011
Apple computers: are they good value?
I've just replaced the battery in my MacBook. Not with an official Apple battery, which costs £101, but with this one from Play.com which was £36.90
The Apple battery clearly costs a lot more, but if it holds a charge for longer and endures more charge cycles would that make it better value for money?
That's the balance we're striking when we talk about value; it's not just what an item costs, but how well it does the job you need it to do.
Which brings me back to my MacBook. There are loads of articles all over the web where people have found similarly specced Windows and Mac OS running computers and seen what the price difference is. I'm not going to do that.
What I will say is that my MacBook is over four years old (it came in may 2007 after a blackcurrant related incident I don't like to talk about), it sees daily use and runs the latest version of OS X with ease. Software on OS X is, with noteable exceptions, really good and this is one of the main reasons why I still prefer Macs. But I reckon the cost of running the MacBook has been fairly cheap.
Hardware wise I've added 1GB of RAM from Crucial.com/UK/ which cost me £28 and upgraded the hard drive from 80 to 320GB which cost £73, but I've kept the old drive in a USB enclosure and use it daily for work. (I should probably start backing that up).
As for software upgrades go I've paid for upgrades to OS 10.5 and 10.6, which is going to be a bit more than £100 (I know I'll be tempted with Lion, but my MacBook will be one of the lowest spec machines capable of running it and I don't want to take a big performance hit).
So, sound off and let me know what you think about the value of spending more.
The Apple battery clearly costs a lot more, but if it holds a charge for longer and endures more charge cycles would that make it better value for money?
That's the balance we're striking when we talk about value; it's not just what an item costs, but how well it does the job you need it to do.
Which brings me back to my MacBook. There are loads of articles all over the web where people have found similarly specced Windows and Mac OS running computers and seen what the price difference is. I'm not going to do that.
What I will say is that my MacBook is over four years old (it came in may 2007 after a blackcurrant related incident I don't like to talk about), it sees daily use and runs the latest version of OS X with ease. Software on OS X is, with noteable exceptions, really good and this is one of the main reasons why I still prefer Macs. But I reckon the cost of running the MacBook has been fairly cheap.
Hardware wise I've added 1GB of RAM from Crucial.com/UK/ which cost me £28 and upgraded the hard drive from 80 to 320GB which cost £73, but I've kept the old drive in a USB enclosure and use it daily for work. (I should probably start backing that up).
As for software upgrades go I've paid for upgrades to OS 10.5 and 10.6, which is going to be a bit more than £100 (I know I'll be tempted with Lion, but my MacBook will be one of the lowest spec machines capable of running it and I don't want to take a big performance hit).
So, sound off and let me know what you think about the value of spending more.
Sunday, 15 May 2011
Podcast round up
I do like a good podcast. I subscribe to several that are a mix of UK radio shows I can't listen to live, US public radio that's been recommended to me, and podcasts that aren't made by traditional broadcasters. I usually listen to these in the car during my 40ish minute trip to work.
First up is Answer Me This which is having a spring break while Helen and Martin the sound man get married. Answer Me This is a simple idea, done well. Sometimes a bit smugly, but well. Listeners send in questions, asking Helen Zaltzman and Ollie Man to "Answer me this..." Helen and Ollie use all the knowledge available on Wikipedia to provide answers and gently mock the questioner. I've been subscribing for about a year and it's the podcast that makes me shout at the radio the most. Which is probably not the interaction they're aiming for with their audience, but it makes me happy. When the podcast comes back Helen and Ollie are going to be smugger than ever as they've just won a Gold for Best Internet Programme at the Sony Awards.
Desert Island Discs is brilliant as a podcast. With shorter musical inserts (for contractual reasons) the castaway's story suffers from less interruption. Kirsty Young is very, very good interviewer able to move easily between chapters in the castaway's life and clearly enjoying every minute of it. The castaways themselves aren't always well known public figures, but are always interesting. Recent favourites have been Johnny Vegas, Lawrence Dallaglio and Alice Cooper.
I'm sure that Steve Martin won't mind me describing the Earshot Creative Review as being a podcast for radio anoraks only. It's a review of creative content made for radio: jingles, promos and adverts. Steve knows his stuff and brings in a range of contributors each month from commercial radio and the BBC to play stuff they've made and been inspired by and talk about why it works. It's often recorded on location somewhere, is always well made and is much more fun than it sounds.
Radio 4's Friday Night Comedy Podcast allows you to catch up with the Now Show or The News Quiz, depending on which show is having a current run. The News Quiz is the radio precursor to Have I Got News For You, presented by Sandi Toksvig and The Now Show is a Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis vehicle with an eclectic roster of extras and guests. Whichever show is running you'll get half an hour of satire based on the previous week's news. It should be essential listening for news junkies and comedy fans alike.
I'm going to bundle the next two together. Media Talk and Tech Weekly both come from The Guardian's impressive stable of podcasts. They take advantage of The Guardian's expert journalists in these fields so Media Talk's regular presenter Matt Wells will be joined by the likes of Maggie Brown and John Plunkett as they round up what's going on in the media. Tech Weekly sees Jemima Kiss, Charles Arthur and other Guardian tech heads in the studio with Aleks Krotoski.
Karl at work suggested I try WNYC's Radiolab. It's a fantastic, but sometimes frustrating listen. Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich present each hour long episode which will feature three stories loosely linked by the edition's theme. It's sort of science based - because it's a Radio Lab - but the storytelling is more important than the science. The programme has a distinctive style which is where I sometimes fall out with it. It's higly edited, and sometimes the presenters will talk over a contributor to precis what they've said and move the story along. To me this is an example of form triumphing over content and it causes more shouting at the radio. That said it is something different to anything I've heard on radio in the UK and does feature some brilliant stories. The fortnightly episodes are an hour long, but the podcast feed also includes "Radiolab Shorts" which are bitesized extras where you can hear material that didn't make the cut, pieces inspired by the longer episode and sometimes responses to earlier programmes.
99% Invisible is another programme from US public radio. It's presented and produced by Roman Mars, the man with the best name ever. It describes itself as "a tiny radio show about design"and recent editions have included Soviet design classics, concrete furniture and Nikko the Concrete Commando who scratched his name across a city. Roman is a droll host and each five minute episode is made with as much love and care as each hour of Radiolab.
So that's what's in my Podcast library in iTunes. What do you think of my selections, and what do you regularly download. Let me know in the comments.
First up is Answer Me This which is having a spring break while Helen and Martin the sound man get married. Answer Me This is a simple idea, done well. Sometimes a bit smugly, but well. Listeners send in questions, asking Helen Zaltzman and Ollie Man to "Answer me this..." Helen and Ollie use all the knowledge available on Wikipedia to provide answers and gently mock the questioner. I've been subscribing for about a year and it's the podcast that makes me shout at the radio the most. Which is probably not the interaction they're aiming for with their audience, but it makes me happy. When the podcast comes back Helen and Ollie are going to be smugger than ever as they've just won a Gold for Best Internet Programme at the Sony Awards.
Desert Island Discs is brilliant as a podcast. With shorter musical inserts (for contractual reasons) the castaway's story suffers from less interruption. Kirsty Young is very, very good interviewer able to move easily between chapters in the castaway's life and clearly enjoying every minute of it. The castaways themselves aren't always well known public figures, but are always interesting. Recent favourites have been Johnny Vegas, Lawrence Dallaglio and Alice Cooper.
I'm sure that Steve Martin won't mind me describing the Earshot Creative Review as being a podcast for radio anoraks only. It's a review of creative content made for radio: jingles, promos and adverts. Steve knows his stuff and brings in a range of contributors each month from commercial radio and the BBC to play stuff they've made and been inspired by and talk about why it works. It's often recorded on location somewhere, is always well made and is much more fun than it sounds.
Radio 4's Friday Night Comedy Podcast allows you to catch up with the Now Show or The News Quiz, depending on which show is having a current run. The News Quiz is the radio precursor to Have I Got News For You, presented by Sandi Toksvig and The Now Show is a Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis vehicle with an eclectic roster of extras and guests. Whichever show is running you'll get half an hour of satire based on the previous week's news. It should be essential listening for news junkies and comedy fans alike.
I'm going to bundle the next two together. Media Talk and Tech Weekly both come from The Guardian's impressive stable of podcasts. They take advantage of The Guardian's expert journalists in these fields so Media Talk's regular presenter Matt Wells will be joined by the likes of Maggie Brown and John Plunkett as they round up what's going on in the media. Tech Weekly sees Jemima Kiss, Charles Arthur and other Guardian tech heads in the studio with Aleks Krotoski.
Karl at work suggested I try WNYC's Radiolab. It's a fantastic, but sometimes frustrating listen. Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich present each hour long episode which will feature three stories loosely linked by the edition's theme. It's sort of science based - because it's a Radio Lab - but the storytelling is more important than the science. The programme has a distinctive style which is where I sometimes fall out with it. It's higly edited, and sometimes the presenters will talk over a contributor to precis what they've said and move the story along. To me this is an example of form triumphing over content and it causes more shouting at the radio. That said it is something different to anything I've heard on radio in the UK and does feature some brilliant stories. The fortnightly episodes are an hour long, but the podcast feed also includes "Radiolab Shorts" which are bitesized extras where you can hear material that didn't make the cut, pieces inspired by the longer episode and sometimes responses to earlier programmes.
99% Invisible is another programme from US public radio. It's presented and produced by Roman Mars, the man with the best name ever. It describes itself as "a tiny radio show about design"and recent editions have included Soviet design classics, concrete furniture and Nikko the Concrete Commando who scratched his name across a city. Roman is a droll host and each five minute episode is made with as much love and care as each hour of Radiolab.
So that's what's in my Podcast library in iTunes. What do you think of my selections, and what do you regularly download. Let me know in the comments.
Sunday, 8 May 2011
Shiny like Chrome
I've stuck with Safari since it was a beta, and have been happy enough with it - we're only talking about a web browser after all, and it's the content that really counts, not the conduit.
I've had Firefox installed for the odd website that didn't play well with Safari, but in contradiction to what I've just said, I never really liked it much and don't fancy using it all of the time. So I've installed Chrome and I have to say I'm quite happy with it. Rather than trying to import settings and bookmarks from my sick version of Safari I started at scratch.
The first thing I set up was the Save to Delicious bookmarklet, because I store most of my bookmarks there and just use what I can fit in the bookmarks bar locally. (Delicious is great, and seems to have a better future now that Yahoo! have sold it. If you've never looked into Delicious, you should). Then I added extensions for bit.ly and Evernote. I don't like the default setting of new tabs opening next to the current one, instead I want to open at the end of the tab bar, like Safari, and there's an extension for that too.
I subscribe to one or two RSS feeds, and although they're all in Google Reader I don't like that interface and prefer to read them in NetNewsWire. Chrome doesn't seem to have native support for sniffing out feeds and subscribing to them, but a bit of Googling brought me to these instructions and the RSS subscription extension.
And I think that's all the tweaking I've done. What have I missed? What are the extensions you like and use the most?
Wednesday, 2 February 2011
That Fox News map of the Middle East
All over my twitter stream for the last few days have been people tweeting and re-tweeting this screen-grab of a map of the Middle East from Fox News.
Egypt is in the wrong place, it's where Iraq was when I last looked.
Everyone's getting hot and bothered about the channel's ignorance and the poor grasp of geography shown by American as the crisis in Egypt unfolds.
But it's not a new image. Do a little Googling and it soon becomes clear that the map dates back to July 2009, as these sites explain.
And just look at the picture. If it was anything to do with the current story wouldn't Egypt be one of the highlighted countries rather than Syria, Iran, Jordan and Israel?
And who's to say that it hasn't been Photoshopped? If it was a photo of a telly with the map actually on-screen I'd be much less dubious, but a clean graphic like that could easily have been tinkered with and who'd know it?
Last week I read this excellent blog post from Paul Bradshaw about verifying online content.
With some justification we're told not believe all that we read in the papers, but we should also remember that things are even easier to spoof online. As well as reading Paul's post it's worth being aware of snopes.com which is a great site for dispelling urban and internet myths, and a good way to waste hours of your time.
Monday, 15 November 2010
Twist Our Words
Twist Our Words from Channel 4 is a lovely little toy that let's you drag words in a fridge magnet poetry kind of way and get then turned into a video featuring a host of C4 celebrities.
There's a gallery of recently made and best Twists, and Channel 4 say they'll be putting the best ones on the telly.
What a nice way of sending a message to the one you love.
Monday, 4 October 2010
In case of emergency...
This is a boiler plate blog post intended for use in case of emergency only. In the event of your followers on Twitter all disappearing then please refer to the notes below.
1) Don't panic. Twitter is flaky. It's a lot better at the moment than it has been, but now and then odd things happen. If your followers and following counts all drop to zero just shrug it off.
2) Check your timeline. Are you still seeing tweets from people you follow? Yes? Then they're still there, even if Twitter says they're not. And they can still see your tweets. The value in Twitter comes from the people you follow. Your followers are only there for your ego. As long as you can see incoming Tweets normal service will carry on.
3) Don't tweet about the Twittergeddon. The world isn't coming to an end. The back ups will kick into life and everything will soon be returned to normal.
Saturday, 18 September 2010
Spooky tweets
Someone is running a black op on the internet.
Write a tweet mentioning "Spooks" or including hashtags like #BBCSpooks and one or more of the regular main characters from the series will follow you and may well reply to your tweets.
From the boss, Harry, to agents like Ros, Lucas and Dimitri and Ruth who rarely gets away from the Grid your favourite Spook is now just a tweet away.
Given the content of some of the tweets I doubt the BBC are running the campaign.
I suspect this also rules out Kudos who produce the series.
Whoever's doing this it's fun and creating a bit of online buzz around the start of the new series on Monday.
Write a tweet mentioning "Spooks" or including hashtags like #BBCSpooks and one or more of the regular main characters from the series will follow you and may well reply to your tweets.
From the boss, Harry, to agents like Ros, Lucas and Dimitri and Ruth who rarely gets away from the Grid your favourite Spook is now just a tweet away.
Given the content of some of the tweets I doubt the BBC are running the campaign.
@Lucas_North You're a little shite, Lucas. Have I ever told you that? #Spooks
SirHJPearce
I suspect this also rules out Kudos who produce the series.
Whoever's doing this it's fun and creating a bit of online buzz around the start of the new series on Monday.
Sunday, 12 September 2010
GridPoint GB
Maps are cool. Being able to read a map is even cooler.
We're lucky in the UK to have the Ordnance Survey making beautiful, useful maps. Compared with maps elsewhere, such as the yellow covered Michelin maps available in France, OS maps are elegant and easy to interpret. Having a local map can make a day out so much more interesting, and you have the added bonus of being able to use the map to actually help you find your way around.
Being able to find places on a map, or tell someone else where a location is on a map requires you to understand and be able to use six figure grid referencing (link to pdf file). This isn't too tricky, and most of the time when you're outside you can use landmarks around you to work out where on the map you are and so get a grid reference. But when the weather's bad or it's dark or there aren't many useful landmarks it can be tricker. This is where GridPoint GB comes in.
GridPoint GB is a free app for the iPhone that takes GPS data and converts it into an OS grid reference. It's simple and easy to use. Yesterday we were walking on the coast between Whitby and Robin Hood's Bay, and I wanted to know where we were. I narrowed it down to two places a few hundred meters apart, and GridPoint GB confirmed which of the two spots we were at.
It's a good little app that simply does its job without trying to be too clever. Out and about with a map it's a useful extra tool to have in your pocket. Obviously, given that it uses OS data, it's only useful in the UK.
GridPoint GB (iTunes Store link)
We're lucky in the UK to have the Ordnance Survey making beautiful, useful maps. Compared with maps elsewhere, such as the yellow covered Michelin maps available in France, OS maps are elegant and easy to interpret. Having a local map can make a day out so much more interesting, and you have the added bonus of being able to use the map to actually help you find your way around.
Being able to find places on a map, or tell someone else where a location is on a map requires you to understand and be able to use six figure grid referencing (link to pdf file). This isn't too tricky, and most of the time when you're outside you can use landmarks around you to work out where on the map you are and so get a grid reference. But when the weather's bad or it's dark or there aren't many useful landmarks it can be tricker. This is where GridPoint GB comes in.
GridPoint GB is a free app for the iPhone that takes GPS data and converts it into an OS grid reference. It's simple and easy to use. Yesterday we were walking on the coast between Whitby and Robin Hood's Bay, and I wanted to know where we were. I narrowed it down to two places a few hundred meters apart, and GridPoint GB confirmed which of the two spots we were at.
It's a good little app that simply does its job without trying to be too clever. Out and about with a map it's a useful extra tool to have in your pocket. Obviously, given that it uses OS data, it's only useful in the UK.
GridPoint GB (iTunes Store link)
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