Gary's Bloggage » deliciousness

Deliciousness: hairy landings, Twitter (mis)identity, escaped cat, the United States of Facebook and mapme.at

Gary — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:05:49 +0000

The latest batch of social bookmarks from my Delicious stream:

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)

Deliciousness: ringing phones, suicide linux, Flickr plugins, editing, zoomable maps and upsidedownness

Gary — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:43:38 +0000

Today’s social bookmarking deliciousness, from down the back of the internet.

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

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Deliciousness: typography, bad days, Victoria & Albert geo, inappropriateness for children and Dave

Gary — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:34:08 +0000

I have been remiss; it’s been over 3 months since my last Deliciousness. This needs to be remedied.

I don’t usually take note of typography and font related stuff that much (leaving that to Tom Coates who oozes typography enthusiasm and love) but this post, on revisiting the font stack your blog or web site is essential reading.
I didn’t have a good day earlier this week. Someone else felt the same way.
The Victoria & Albert Museum in London released an “Finding Places” API which allows you to discover places in their collections database.
Difficult to tell whether this is real or not, but Inappropriate Stuff for Kids is possessed of a heavy mix of LOL/OMG/WTF-ness.
Dave is popular; 9/10 real women prefer him. Lucky Dave.
“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame“. In all the furore surrounding the iPad, it’s easy to overlook the less than stellar reception the first iPod had.

We should do this again. Soon.

Written and posted from the Yahoo! campus, Sunnyvale, California (51.5143913, -0.1287317)

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Deliciousness: Sherlock Holmes, Car Desks, Macs, GeoVation, Crocodiles and Total Carp

Gary — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:59:33 +0000

Yet again it’s been a while. But there’s stuff out there on the Internet you know.

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.

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Deliciousness: megalomania, logos, Tube map, paper abstracts, location, Freud and tech mistakes

Gary — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:29:16 +0000

It’s been a while but odd, weird and even occasionally interesting stuff continues to fall down the back of the internet and gets captured in Delicious along the way. Here’s the pick of the last few weeks.

Today I was caught red handed trying to blow up the world … mwah hah hah hah.
A well known Irish budget airline found that its blue and yellow “harp” logo had suffered an, unasked for, logo makeover.
The London Underground Tube map regains the River Thames and gets a version for tourists.
Are you the sort of person who shouts at the screen “that’s not right” when watching a film? You’re not alone.
Looking for a nearby wifi hotspot? A low tech approach can help.
Microsoft’s new Windows 7 OS has inbuilt location services; but are they up to the challenge of managing location safely, securely and with sufficient flexibility?
Submitting a paper abstract for a conference? This might help.
You’ve probably heard of a Freudian Slip; now you can wear suitable slippers.
If Jack The Ripper was alive today, would he use Twitter?

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Deliciousness: bacon, Protect and Survive, outing the paleotards, Fake Carol and crop circles

Gary — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 12:03:04 +0000

It’s been almost two weeks since one of these posts; I’ve been pretty much conferenced out, with FOWA London taking up a sizeable chunk of last week and the AGI’s GeoCommunity mopping up any spare time the week before that.

The hallmark of any successful tech conference is appallingly bad wifi which, despite the best protestations of the conference organisers, always buckles under the strain around 30 minutes into the opening keynote. All of which has meant that my Delicious account has been on a bit of a diet recently, but here’s what did make it through the wifi …

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.

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Deliciousness: themes gained, avatars lost, accents found, London and the end of the world, scrobbling and Streetview

Gary — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:17:33 +0000

Look at all of this stuff that fell down the back of the internet and got lodged in my Delicious bookmarks …

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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Delicousness: iPhones, boarding passes, Cult of Mac, nerd subclasses, Snow Leopard and weird ads

Gary — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:16:46 +0000

The end of the week, semi regular, hand selected, carefully edited snapshot of what made it into my Delicious bookmarks this week.

Last week I blogged about my experiences with an electronic boarding pass, hosted on my iPhone, while travelling home from Amsterdam’s Schipol airport. Cult of Mac came across it, liked it, and used it as a basis for an article. Which was nice.
Remember those Venn Diagrams you did in maths class? Now you can use one to work out which of the subclasses of nerddom you belong to. Naturally I place myself in the geek with a life subclass, which is strangely absent from the diagram.
At the weekend I upgraded my work MacBook Pro to Snow Leopard, Apple’s latest version of the OS X operating system. And then 4 days later I downgraded it back to Leopard.
Want to buy used toilet paper, a used tombstone or a rottweiler called Mr Giggles? Some people think you do.

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Deliciousness: Mac OS X 15.6, gallons of chilli sauce, globes and Virgin Media

Gary — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:13:27 +0000

This week’s trawl through my Delicous bookmarks. Actually this is last week’s trawl but real life got in the way of posting and I beg your indulgence.

Last week, Snow Leopard, AKA Mac OS X 10.6 was released though some places seem to now be selling an even more advanced version, Mac OS X 15.6.
I like chilli sauce, I have a fine and wide range of the stuff in the larder at home; but some people must really really like the stuff to buy it a gallon at a time.
In my day job I do geo stuff but I wasn’t aware that a globe, an inflatable one come to that, has sharp corners and isn’t suitable for children.
While we’re on the subject of geo, Virgin Media found out the hard way that place names aren’t unique and sometimes there’s more than one place sharing a name; Whitchurch in this particular case.

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Deliciousness: more bacon, UK geek location, your PIN number, birds tweeting, Ohio as a piano, OMG and WTF and UNIX turns 40.

Gary — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:08:42 +0000

A semi regular, almost weekly, trawl through the latest stuff on the interwebs bookmarked on Delicious.

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.