• Stamford Brook, Parr’s Ditch, Counter’s Creek … all part of the network of lost rivers beneath the streets of London. I grew up next to and played in one of them, Beverley Brook, as a (very muddy) child.
• Some maps are works of art but Jason LaFerrera makes works of art from maps. No, really.
• OpenStreetMap, waze and Map Maker announce the formation of the Closed Street Map alliance, but check out the date of the post and the registrant’s details from the WHOIS record as well.
• A search for estate agents in Islington on Mountain View’s favourite search engine seems to say that prisons and estate agents are one and the same.
• Forget dogs that look like their owners. Forget owners that look like their dogs. Fonts that look like dogs, that’s the thing.
• While I’m on the subject of fonts; best alphabet. Ever.
• While I’m on the subject of best (ever); best beer name. Ever.
• The last time I mentioned bacon deliciousness was October 2009 so here’s a double helping. Still cooking your bacon the old fashioned way, you know, in a frying pan or under the grill? Try wrapping it around your machine gun for a change. You’re going to be thirsty after all that cooking (and possibly that shooting) so slake your thirst with a beer, bacon flavoured of course.
• I want this tee shirt, part one. Some days you make the coffee, some days the coffee makes you.
• I want this tee shirt, part two. Nerd is the new cool you know.
• I want this tee shirt, part three. Bacon makes everything better.
• Not much in the grand scheme of things but two of my Flickr photos made it into the 2010 London Schmap guide. This pleased me.
• Still drinking your coffee, the old fashioned way, by mouth? That’s so passe. Inhaling is the new drinking.
• Not one KitKat. Oh no. Nineteen of them. In Japan only, sadly.

• Hamburg airport + Lufthansa plane + storm = a flight I’d really prefer not to be on.
• Dennys publicise their Twitter stream only to discover that it’s not actually theirs and Dennys Hsieh in Taiwan gets a lot more attention than he bargained for.
• Geek Joke of the Week: My cat is escaped.
• Pacifica, Stayathomia, Socalistan … Facebook social network connections mapped.
• John McKerrell‘s rather wonderful mapme.at gets place based locating.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

• Got a colleague who keeps wandering away from their desk and leaving their mobile phone behind, which then keeps on ringing? Maybe they need one of these signs left on their desk. Maybe.
• Fancy a challenge? How many times a day do you type the incorrect command at the shell? Once, twice, three times a day? More? Maybe you should give Suicide Linux a try; it helpfully turns any mistyped command into rm -rf / thus helpfully erasing your root file system. Concentrate now.
• The WordPress Flickr Manager is a wonderful plugin which integrates your Flickr photostream into blog posts. Alas it doesn’t work with WordPress 2.9. Until now.
• Posting the same article to multiple blogs severely impacts your search engine ranking results. How did I not know this? It’s stopped at least one person from using the Posterous autopost function.
• Sometimes, just sometimes, sub-editors trim just a little bit too much from an article prior to publishing.
• We’re used to online slippy maps being able to zoom in and out; but zooming in and out of paper maps? That’s something else indeed.
• What’s happens in Vegas stays in Vegas; but sometimes it stays on FourSquare as well.
• Photo of the year so far; the Space Shuttle Endeavour, caught in silhouette from the International Space Station. That phrase alone sounds like it’s been lifted wholesale from an Arthur. C. Clarke novel.
• ˙uʍop ǝpısdn ǝdʎʇ oʇ pǝǝu noʎ ‘sǝɯıʇǝɯos ʇsnɾ ‘sǝɯıʇǝɯos

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• Considering he was a fictitious character set in 1880′s London, Arthur Conan Doyle certainly made sure that Sherlock Holmes got about; someone’s even displayed all of this on a map of London.
• Want an instant ergonomic desk? Let me rephrase that. Want an instant ergonomic desk that clips to your car’s steering wheel? What more could you need? “This has been a total lifesaver. It allows me to prop my sheet music against the wheel, allowing me to play the guitar with both hands while driving.”
• Recently DropBox stopped synching my files from my local DropBox to my remote one in the cloud. Deleting ~/.dropbox helped get things synching properly again.
• I can never remember the key combinations needed to start my Intel Macs into single user mode, or to boot from the DVD. The Apple KnowledgeBase has it all documented.
• The GeoVation Challenge made into the BBC. Disclosure; I’m on the judging panel.
• Want to travel from Newquay in Cornwall to Kyle of Lochalsh in Scotland? Want to do it by train? You better have a grand to spare; £1002.00 to be precise.
• In Schipol and seeing a crocodile in a suitcase? This may help explain.
• Best. Magazine. Name. Ever. Part 2.
• I never made it to the Social Media ’09 conference in London this year; but I was there in Tweet if not in body.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

• Yet more bacon products make it to market. Most of them are novelty value only but surely there’s scope for bacon flavoured mayo, for those moments when the perfect BLT is just out of reach?
• Twickenham Fire Station tested its’ air raid siren last week and memories of the Protect and Survive public service announcements on British TV at the height of the Cold War came flooding back.
• My talk’s at the AGI GeoCommunity conference seemed to get people talking; both seriously and somewhat tongue in cheek and I also managed to out the (neogeographer) Geoweb chair as an old school paleogeographer.
• The CEO of the company I work for finally managed to achieve the accolade of being faked on Twitter.
• And the source of all the crop circles was finally found in a town in the US with a strangely familiar name.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

• Posterous recently gained themes and Twitter lost the background and avatar settings for lots of accounts, mine included. 
• Need to write München, Côte or Café with proper accents while on a Mac? Easy when you know how.
• If you live in London, apparently you’re either very rich or a loser. It also rained a lot and the world ended, at least in Old Street.
• Spotify can scrobble to Last.fm … why did I not know this?
• Want to know how Google Streetview is put together? Google Japan have a explanation.
• I reached an inspiration dead-end while preparing for this week’s AGI conference; turns out I’m not alone.

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• The march towards all things bacon flavoured continues unabated; now you can get bacon (and mint) flavoured, err, mints and that get-you-going-in-the-morning first cup of coffee can now be bacon flavoured as well. Where’s this going to end?
• Mac OS X 10.6, AKA Snow Leopard, got officially released today. Some people rushed out, bought it and installed it. But as ever, there’s some compatibility problems, not the least of which (for me at least) is that the Cisco VPN client may (or may not) work properly. It’s also for Intel based Macs only so a lot of PowerPC based Mac owners are going to be sad.
• First reviews of the new Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy book, not written by Douglas Adams on account of him being dead, find it “not really funny” and “less a case of So Long And Thanks For All The Fish and more a case of So Long And Thanks For All The Money“.
• #wherecamp, the geogeeks (un)conference of choice, is coming to Europe in the form of the aptly named #WhereCampEU. Naturally, I’ll be there.
• While walking into Soho, I found one of London’s lost streets right under my feet. Literally.
• And finally, real men don’t rock their child to sleep, they write a shell script to do it for them.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

• This fad for all things bacon flavoured is getting out of hand; a few weeks back it was bacon flavoured vodka and now you can get bacon flavoured lip balm.
• There’s lots of geeks in the United Kingdom; now you can know where they are. I might be there as well.
• Someone posted the PIN number from your credit or debit card onto the interwebs.
• Twitter’s popular these days; even the birds in the trees are RT’ing.
• If Ohio was a piano, ever wondered how it’d sound? Possibly the weirdest geo and mapping visualization. Ever.
• There’s a spectrum from OMG to WTF, pasing through”I get it”, “that’s strange” and “I don’t get it” along the way.
• And finally, UNIX turned 40. It’s still younger than me though.

• Illustrating just how broken the mobile operator’s customer support is, Rummble’s CEO Andrew Scott details his 9 month battle with O2 after they refused to honour an agreed deal and MoanLog’s Gaurav Patel details the extraordinary length that 3 went to so they didn’t have to give out a PAC code to a customer.
• Twitter was brought down by a distributed denial of service attack; but some people survived thanks to a PostIt note.
• Chiswick Business Park knows how to speak to humans and to dogs.
• The world didn’t end at 12:34:56 on 07/08/09; probably because it had already happened in July to the US.
• The Londoner and the geo geek in me took a trip down memory lane with a collection of London Underground Tube maps.
• And finally, thanks to MobilePress, vicchi.org went mobile.