Thingomy.co.uk

I am currently undertaking a mapping project for the Open Streetmap project.

Cloudmade who do a great deal of work with the OSM community have given me a grant to get a GPS set for this purpose.

The device has been shipped off to Shetland where it is being driven around by a friend of mine. I received the first batch of data a few days ago, and save for a few small issues, the data is good, clean and ready for proper processing.

On completion this project will allow the addition of very accurate mapping of central Shetland in OSM maps.

I have gotten a temp job doing exactly what I was doing 2 years ago, for disability services — sitting in a dungeon at uni installing software onto computers, it should last a couple of weeks, and will be reasonably fun in the process.

This last weekend I went to London to visit my good friend Heliomass (and a few others in the process) many interesting things were seen including Kew Gardens (all 300 acres there of) and the main point of the trip: Station X.

Station X, AKA Bletchly park is an extremely interesting place, known for it’s WW2 code breaking efforts. It held some of the foremost mathematical geniuses of it’s time, and was so significant it housed some operations only declassified in 2002. Many believe the efforts there turned the war, or at the least shortened it by up to 18 months.

It was the birth (and death) place of Colossus, the worlds first electronic programable computer, which was (depending on who you ask) either 1 or 4 decades or more ahead of it’s time, and has been rebuilt from photos over the last 15 years, I have seen it running in full working order.

project homepage

Photos:

For consultation:

I am going to be adding stuff to my blog in the near future. You may not like the quantity of stuff there, but there will be a way to non-destructivly opt out of most of the new bits.

It’s a little difficult to tell how this stuff will come out before I actually impliment it — such is the nature of this technology, you can’t really test changes without making them, or arsing about with it for way too long.

However if all goes to plan I intend on including a whole bunch of web links to interesting stuff I’ve found, this will lead to information overload in the case of some of the readers here.

I have considered the virtues of reducing content to keep viewers interested in everything, but I believe that is bad practice, and reduces creativity. Instead I beieve in alowing users to filter out the noise that is of no interest to them.

If you want a hastle free way of doing this, email me, or comment on this post, and I’ll specifically tell you what you need to do in your case.

At the change over there is a posibility there will be a swamp of anything up to 10ish posts that will come through at once, I will try to avoid this, but if it happens I appologise in advance.

Ideas? sugestions? requests?

If you want some more technical details, or you are on LJ, please read on…

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The stuff that I plan on adding is an import of my del.icio.us links, and my google reader shared items, these consist of mainly interesting news items/ humourous websites that I’ve found online, a more apt description of the content would be “random crap”. My username on both services is thingomy if you want to go for a preemptive poke around, but the character of the feeds will change once I am awear that somone other than me is actually reading them.

Provided (already) is:

Overal RSS feed — all posts;

RSS feed per catagory — these are an arse to find, email me;

RSS feed of comments on each post seperatly;

Email updates of selected catagories on a per user basis — cusomisable here: http://www.thingomy.co.uk/blog/wp-admin/users.php?page=subscribe2/subscribe2.php ;

An option to be emailed of any new comments on a post you have commented on — I think this one works…;

A feed of everything to LJ, (including all of the new stuff when it comes) — this is likelly to be the most problematic issue, as it cannot be tuned per user at my end. If I judge the LJ thing right, It could do with an injection of as much interesting stuff as it can get, so I intend on feeding through everything. I can however see merit in the attitude that it’s a blogging environment, and should not be filled up with other stuff. If I get a significant number of comments, I will look into alternatives. Such solutions as users using filters based on tags may be feesable after further investigation. Opinions?

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I’ve managed to get myself roped into doing lighting for a film making project — it’s a competition to make a film entirely in 48 hours — and involves people taking shifts and work 48 hours straight.

We had a long (13 hours long) day of filming that only ended soon after the light died (then we moved onto car headlights…)

We have someone in our midsts that is a masters student at Edinburgh uni, so managed to gain access to some of their studios — mac G5s with lots toys — few of which work …

This is going to be a long weekend

Having been doing a considerable amount of web browsing recently, I thought I would share some of the good bits:

Cream of tiger soup (lolcats):
http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/03/28/funny-pictures-stir-carefully/

Wiring nightmares — round up of some of the most interesting wiring form around the world, this really is an education:
http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/03/really-bad-wiring-jobs_20.html

Garfield minus garfield — some bloke takes Garfield cartoons and photoshops out the garfield in them — the results are variable, but they are very random:
Garfield minus garfield

Timelapse photography with a DSLR — the results really are worth watching, even although it’s a little clumbsy to download:
http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/how-i-made-a-time-lapse-movie-with-my-dslr/

I’m getting a little behind on things with the Blog as i have much do do currently.

I took a quick trip to Germany to see CeBit 2008 this is a large electronics Expo, handling everything from hardware, software, photocopiers, software, security systems, online services, basic components etc.

I spent 2 and a half days there.

the intel stand was insane — it was a building to it’s self, and they had some really impressive lights, mac2000s to be precise

TMobile wasn’t much better, it’s difficult to see just how big this really is, the puprple screens are full colour, ever changing visualisations of music from a live singer who is behind me. the screens loop al the way round the front part of the stand.

The following is a very odd contraption that seemed to be linked to an exercise bike with utterings of oxygen flow control and olfactory sense triggering. the contraption it’s self was more interesting — it was a pair of projectors, an arbitrarily curved screen, a bunch of software to seamlessly connect the images from the projectors, and a Canon 350d being used to automatically calibrate them:

Some really sodding scary survielence kit — with the stuff below (and a few added extras) it’s possible to wire a buildings cctv, a map of the building, and a bunch of computers together to give a location and biometric face recognition of every person in the building in real time, open doors automatically, detect mood from expressions, etc. The other wibbly toy is a scanning laser range finder, which is an idea I had years ago.

A company that had developed some safety equipment for use in mechanical systems, designed ot provide interlocks/warnings if straying outside a set of parameters had spent a huge deal of time developing a demo that involved a real (presumably off the shelf) model digger, with a joypad controling it. The joypad had 2 2d analog sticks, but the complete muppets had gotten the control system wrong. They had gone to all the trouble of developing the system, but were using a nonstandard control layout, I was most disappointed.

The photography hall was good — sigma was there in force, with one of every lens currenlty in production form them, including the slightly obscene 200-500 f2.8 (with 2x tc) that’s a 400d mounted on it. I had a go on that one.

There was also a bloke taking portrates with an almost as obscene medium format job, and the largest umbrella i’ve ever seen. I took the opportunity to practice my flash stealing techniques.

some other random stuff seen there — the last one is of to billboards, they have wheels, and move around randomly, I’m sure someone abducted R2D2.

A slight excursion was had to Hamburg for a day, this was the results. it was a good chance to practice using my new 16-80 lens:

Please note that until I return to the big smoke, my mobile will be very unreliable due to poor coverage, and other network issues up here. Feel free to contact me with it, but don’t be surprised if it fails. Email works, and so does my home landline.

Some people really do have way too much time on their hands:

http://www.recedinghairline.co.uk/files/c1c3be2fda2b218e858029a4bde7e96c-397.html

Aside from amazement that anyone has the time to even learn that stuff, it all looks reasonably sound except for a couple of points:

1) Interpuncts — the point (no pun intended) in principle may be fine, but I don’t see any issue with using a decimal instead, as you are literally saying “17 and 99/100″ this can be correctly represented as 17.99 — preceding it with a £-sign gives it a unit. This allows the rules of SI units to be used with currency. Now what really irritates me is people putting the pound sign after the value. I just shot myself in the foot.

2) More fundamentally, these rules that are being discussed came from somewhere, and in most cases (as with most of the modern English dictionary) it was extracted from common use and formalised. If everyone makes these mistakes, maybe it’s the rules, not everyone, that’s wrong.

In general however, this is an impressively set together post.

I now have a flat — there are some issues that have not yet been sorted out — like the minor detail of furniture … and heating… but I’m working on that.

On other matters — does anyone want a brand new netgear b/g wifi adsl modem router, it’s going for £30, I need to know before Saturday though. the model is DG834G v3.

Oh, and i’m going to germany this weekend to CeBit, more details when i get back.

Please be advised that if you are attempting to use any of the links in the “thingomy’s feeds” section of my site, it’s broken.

The links for some reason have random crap added to the end. To fix it, you need to manually trunkate the url just before the second “http”; this should fix it.

I don’t know exactly what’s causing the issue, but I’ll take a look at it when I have a spare day and my own computer. (this should read: sometime next decade)

Question to all computer users on here (that I actually want answers to):

Has anyone ever knowingly experianced a tangable benifit from surround sound speakers? (or heard of anyone else that has)

Dispite having spent wholy too much money on creative 6.1 and 7.1 speakers, I have never actually experianced sound coming from a direction that I could actually pinpoint during either a game or film.

And before any smart arse pipes up — yes they do work and were plugged in properly.

At this point i am considering ditching them, and selling them in favour of a half decent amp and sterio speakers, given that I normally end up using them to play music anyway…