James Turnbull

The Xmas Factor. The Christmas Videos from my brother's employer are a "X Factor" piss take. The "judges" intro nonsense is humorously repetitive (120%!) but the performances could have been trimmed down in length.

Posted on 16 December 2008

LEWIS Christmas Olympics. Second of the christmas videos, this time from my old job at LEWIS in Edinburgh. A collection of "event" videos, some with very odd video editing (such as double-speed soundtracks). Entertaining in parts (as I know half the cast) but could have benefited from editing down to fewer films.

Posted on 16 December 2008

Befriend A Geek. Digital agencies have all been very original this year, by making a "viral" video. The first, from White October, is a very well edited short piece on befriending a geek this christmas.

Posted on 16 December 2008

Is Marlo Stanfield the meanest man in Baltimore or just an efficient businessman?. Latest post from the Guardian's Wire blog. Why did nobody tell me about this blog? Lots of archives to read, and this latest post is a great start.

Posted on 2 December 2008

Goodbye Pownce, Hello Six Apart.. Another service gets the moronic "buy it and kill it" treatment, this time Six Apart on Pownce. Similar to "I Want Sandy" you have just 2 weeks to get all your data out before they rm -rf * you. That's so crap.

Posted on 1 December 2008

Fake tilt-shift using the 3d models and imagery of Google Earth.. Fantastic video of a miniature San Francisco flyover generated from Google Earth's 3D models. The producer even suggests that he's working on a stereoscopic version.

Posted on 1 December 2008

24 ways.. "The advent calendar for web geeks"

Posted on 1 December 2008

Screencast: Automatically tag a screenshot using Evernote. Using tarpipe to pass an image through evernote's automatic image term extraction to pipe to Flickr tags. Very clever!

Posted on 1 December 2008

Tarpipe.. Like Yahoo Pipes, but works with web apps and services. So for example you can email a photo with description and it gets posted to flickr and facebook, then the flickr url gets tinyurl'd and twittered about. The twitter page gets bookmarked on delicious. etc. etc.

Posted on 1 December 2008

I Want Sandy to close in 2 weeks.. Twitter has acquired the developer and IP of the very handy productivity web app "I Want Sandy". And to celebrate they'll be shutting it down in just under 2 weeks. Great, Thanks.

Tags: twitter | Posted on 25 November 2008

Amazon launches CloudFront CDN on S3.. We've been using this for a wee while on Google Sightseeing, and it's been great. Lightning quick media serving, very low cost.

Tags: amazon, s3 | Posted on 22 November 2008

SleepWatcher 2.0.5. Daemon watches the system for sleep or screen dim and executes a sheel script (like pausing / resuming downloads etc.)

Tags: osx | Posted on 22 November 2008

Spark 3b8.. Free daemon for running scripts on keypress.

Tags: osx | Posted on 22 November 2008

The WordPress Devs want your feedback on the proposed icon designs for the admin interface This survey is far too long winded and offers way to many choices, but if you mostly leave the answers blank, the second to last page is the obvious "which do you think we should use".

Tags: wordpress | Posted on 13 November 2008

How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You Uh-oh.

Tags: humour | Posted on 13 November 2008

Google are now hosting SWFObject on their Libraries API. Another handy bit of code that's used all over the place.

Tags: javascript | Posted on 12 November 2008

London Geo/Mobile Developers Meetup Group. November 27th, 6pm. Featuring a presentation from Yahoo Fire Eagle and lots of geo-discussion.

Tags: geo | Posted on 5 November 2008

Proxal Icon Set v2. Open source "silk-like" icon set for toolbars etc.

Posted on 4 November 2008

Charlie Brooker is very-much right about the Brand&Ross nonsense. "Or maybe, just maybe, it's time to establish 'Counter-Complaints': a method of registering your complaint about the number of knee-jerk complaints. And one should cancel out the other". That's exactly what I've been demanding this last week - a way to register my lack of complaint, and general annoyance at the Daily Mail's shit attempts at journalism. Where's my complain button?

Posted on 3 November 2008

E-mail error ends up on road sign. Welsh-translated road sign reads "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated". Genius.

Posted on 1 November 2008

Flocking

“Flocking” is the term used to describe the collective motion of a number of creatures, and is best known as something that birds do together. So much so that the collective noun for birds is of course “flock”. A group of birds are technically flocking even when they’re not flying. Here on Lewis and Clark Lake, [...]
Posted on 6 January 2009

Happy New Google Earth in the News

Yes, we’re finally back, and as to be expected, we missed some great Google Earth-related news while we were off. Firstly the story that seems to have sprung up everywhere is (of course) a Street View one. The garage419 site posted images from a high mountain road in Colorado, where the Google car supposedly took some [...]
Posted on 5 January 2009

Merry Christmas!

It’s that time of year again when the team at Google Sightseeing take a well deserved bit of time off! For the next two weeks we only have a couple of posts planned, but we may still update our twitter feed from time-to-time. We’ll be back to our regular schedule in early January. Thanks to everyone who [...]
Posted on 24 December 2008

Peeing in the Street

Well we’ve thought we’ve seen people relieving themselves in front of the Street View car before, but we’ve never had such definitive evidence. No, it’s not what you’re thinking - quite the opposite in fact. This time, while working in Madrid, the Google car has captured an image of a woman taking a pee in the [...]
Posted on 23 December 2008

Subverting Street View

Despite Google’s oh-so-clever “face-blurring” technology, sometimes people’s faces don’t get recognised by the system, and make it onto the Street View imagery unaltered. Here at the Colosseum in Rome, a couple found a perfect way to fool the camera… by engaging in a
Posted on 23 December 2008