Posts from Rotacoo
UK Street View is Given the Go-ahead
The Guardian today reports that Google Street View has been cleared as safe to launch in the UK.
Sightings of the conspicuous cars began last month, prompting the country’s crappest newspaper to devote the front page to scare-mongering of what they called a “burglar’s charter” of photographing EVERY door in Britain. The horror!
The Street View car [...]
Posted on 31 July 2008
Less clicking to inspect with Firebug
If, like me, you spend a lot of time inspecting websites with Firebug you’ll have got into the habit of clicking the little bug in your status bar, clicking “HTML” and then clicking “Inspect”.
But, in the most recent versions you can get there with just one click, all you have to do is add the [...]
Posted on 24 June 2008
Microsoft adds great new features to Live Maps, blocks UK visitors.
Yesterday Microsoft’s Virtual Earth blog announced a whole host of new features for their Live Maps service (that’s their version of Google Maps) and Virtual Earth 3D (that’s their Google Earth competitor).
For me, the key feature of the announcement is “Neighbourhood Subscribe via GeoRSS” which provides an RSS feed of your area, aggregating geo-located content [...]
Posted on 11 April 2008
Minimap Sidebar for Firefox
Tony Farndon’s fantastic Minimap sidebar has quite rightly won a grand prize in the Extend Firefox 2 contest.
Tony presented the plugin (originally as a Flock extension) during last year’s Refresh Edinburgh event, and we were very honoured to see that he’d even built in support for Google Sightseeing sights to be easily loaded into the [...]
Posted on 20 February 2008
RSS Fatigue
I’ve just managed, for the very first time, to get my Google Reader unread count down to zero. And I’m very proud of this achievement.
I’m not the best at keeping on top of my 257 feeds, and having recently moved house I’ve been without the internet for a week or two. So the unread count [...]
Posted on 10 January 2008
Posts from Google Sightseeing
The Perfect Liberty Peace Tower
This bizarre tower is the Perfect Liberty Peace Tower in Tondabayashi, Japan, and from up here it looks like it might be constructed entirely from cotton-wool.
Completed in 1970 this incredibly oddly-shaped tower stands at 180 m, and was actually made by spraying concrete at a wire mesh. The irregular shape looks like a disaster waiting [...]
Posted on 19 August 2008
Shock News: Man Sleeps in Street
In an utterly shocking turn of events, a very-probably homeless/alcoholic/drug addicted1 man has quite clearly passed-out in a doorway here in Philadelphia!
This piece of shocking privacy-invasion follows the discovery of a similar image last week in which a young man was pictured passed out on a grass verge2. Despite the fact the man’s face wasn’t [...]
Posted on 18 August 2008
Road Train
When Google recently added street view for vast stretches of empty road across the middle of Australia, most people didn’t expect to find much of interest out there.
To be fair, those people were mostly right. However, every now and again the street view car did indeed pass something at least. In the deserts of South [...]
Posted on 15 August 2008
The Shwedagon Pagoda
This incredibly shiny building is the Shwedagon Pagoda, also known as the “Golden Pagoda” (for obvious reasons) and it is the most frequented religious site in Burma (officially the Union of Myanmar), as Buddhists believe it contains relics of the past four Buddhas.
The original stupa (a mound-like structure containing Buddhist relics) was built sometime around [...]
Posted on 14 August 2008
The Demise of Bennie the Smoking Dinosaur
Long-time GSS readers may recall the story of Bennie the Dinosaur, who we originally spotted way back in February 2006.
Bennie was originally employed as the mascot for a now-defunct chain of cigarette shops and in his lifetime had moved around a bit, even changing sex along the way.
The last we’d heard of Bennie was that [...]
Posted on 13 August 2008
Recent Del.icio.us Links
BBEdit 9.0 Release Notes. I used to adore BBEDit, before TextMate came along. I've read most of the release notes, and there doesn't seem to be much to bring me back (except "Ponies" of course). Barebones even get a dig in: "…the (badly chosen, IMO) 'txmt:' URL scheme"
jParallax. jQuery plugin for parallax scrolling images within a div. Not sure what I'd ever use it for, but still very cool.
Tags: jquery | Posted on 27 August 2008
Google offers Gears for Safari beta. Beta version of (Google) Gears for Safari.
Oxford Geek Night 8. Tomorrow night (27 August 2008) in Oxford. Featuring all sorts of music-related geekery and a quick 5 minute talk from me introducing the Django Web Framework.
Wii Fit Street View. Take Google Street View, rig up a Wii fit board and then "walk" down the street. Genius and completely useless.
Tags: googlemaps, streetview, wii | Posted on 22 August 2008
Recent Flickr Photos
