Mar/101
Dating Google Street View images
You may have mixed results with this, as it won’t work everywhere. It’s worked in 3 of 4 places I tried.
Step 1) Download and open up Google Earth, making sure to turn on Street View layer
Step 2) Find one of the cool-looking Street View bubbles
Step 3) Turn on the timeline view to see aerial photo dates (the clock icon)
Step 4) Double click the street view bubble to enter the panoramic photo and see the new date appear:
Looks like Google had a busy Summer in the UK last year!
Jul/080
UK government data for mashups
BBC News had an article on the UK government opening up a bunch of data for developers to play with the other day. I think it’s a real flaw in what’s most likely their article/linking policy that the actual link to the data is hidden on the right under the “Related Internet Links” section: Show Us a Better Way.
I’ve not had a chance to look at all of the available data, but it’s an interesting competition.
Jul/080
Here be dragons
I’ve been playing Rohan quite a bit lately. I started the year by playing RF Online quite a lot, but switched (with many others) in order to avoid the unstable servers at the time. Waking up to test the game at it’s exact release time of 4am in the UK was a bit much, but vaguely worth it by the fact that I got first dibs on my name of choice for a healing class: Faith. Inspiration of the name was actually Faith from the game Alien Swarm, which was the main game I played last year. All three are highly recommended.
I’m enjoying Rohan, especially since a lot of the people I play with are the same one’s I played RF Online with. I’m a healing Elf woman, fairly well valued in the game to keep parties alive in times of crisis – or more typically, to take on big monsters for an hour or so. However, even a healer has limits with great big fiery dragons…
Watch as the two strongest players run away in fear, which turned out to be the right choice as they were able to come back and revive me so I could heal the whole group and get us back in action.
Jun/080
Discussed today 23rd June 2008
- A 728-ton stabilising ball
- The Phoenix lander has “convinced” scientists of ice on Mars – still not actually confirmed.
- A film about a guy that always responds “yes”, with Jim Carrey: Yes Man
- Pityriasis rosea – an oval shaped rash
- 401? 301? 501? – HTTP status codes
- Real time shadows in Blender
- Site Identification Button in Firefox on various SSL sites
- Skype phones. Especially the dual mode Netgear one.
- HTML vs XHTML
- 9 day weeks
Nov/071
Intercepting SMS messages for Jaiku
New SMS notification: “nicholasclarke: A crazy week of work coming up! Never a good thing.”
Combine that with ability to intercept text messages into my own application on my phone, this basically means I can write a Jaiku application which keeps track of everyone’s Jaikus but doesn’t interfere in my day by beeping and flashing at me 24/7.
In theory, this means I could write a Windows Mobile Jaiku client that stays off GPRS.