With the trick or treating hour close at hand on the east cost of North America I thought it was an appropriate time to share with you the Halloween candy code. Similar to the codes used by Hobo’s riding the rails across America during the depression kids can leave codes to other kids to let them know what a particular house is like with regards to candy.
Archive for October, 2008
MeetWays is an interesting website that takes advantage of the reverse geocoding available in Google Maps lets you give the address of you and someone you want to meet, and it will find a place for you to meet that is halfway between your starting positions. Sounds useful.
I’m pretty sure I read this entire series during my school days and throughly enjoyed it. For a wonderful walk down memory lane check out the Gizmodo interview with the author of the series Bruce Coville.
The sleeve roll is never easy. At times I find I get an ideal sleeve roll, but then it slips off. I guess a good sleeve roll is hard to come by.
PDF’s are great and all, but at times you’ll want to edit them but unfortunately that’s not always easy. A free online service will take that PDF and convert it into a Word document that you can modify as you wish. Useful.
It’s always been easy to get the location on a map based on an address, but it was never very simple to get an address from placing a pin on a map — until now. A handful of new services are taking advantage of some Google API’s that will let you place a pin on a map and Google will tell you what the address is there.
An interesting article about how Apple accounts for the iPhone to protect consumers, and how this method makes it a challenge compare true revenue, units sold, and profits. Steve recently announced that the iPhone is outselling RIM’s Blackberry. That’s pretty impressive.
I use iPhoto on my Mac to manage my photos, and I also use Flickr to store and share my photos online. I’ve presently been using FlickrExport to manually upload my images from iPhoto to Flickr, but today ran across a new product called PhotoCopy which advertises that the application will automatically keep my albums on iPhoto in perfect sync with my albums on Flickr — including tags, titles, privacy and any changes made to an iPhoto album after it has been sync’d with Flickr. It seems like a great idea for someone starting their photo collection from scratch, but I wonder how it will deal with users who already have albums in place — they may not be perfect mirrors of each other.
Update: Having tried the demo I can report that unfortunately the program only syncs albums from iPhoto, and not events (events were introduced in iPhoto 7). I do not create albums in iPhoto, as I like to separate my ‘albums’ around ‘events’ and the automatically created ‘event’ groupings suite me perfectly well. It can also not currently let the user to set the privacy on individual images. You must set your default privacy for new images on Flickr, and then this setting is used for PhotoCopy. If PhotoCopy could sync my events with Flickr then this product would be a lot more useful.
Update (12/10/2008): Sorry for the delay in this update. I received an email from the developers on November 25th letting me know that the new version of their software now syncs events. I haven’t given it a try yet as I’m still pretty satisfied with previously mentioned FlickrExport.
All maps are not created equal. With the purchase of a new vehicle I decided I needed a map on Ontario. Maps are the things people used to use to find directions to a selected destination before GPS became all the rage. Sure GPS is great and all, but I still love flipping through a map and finding my own route, and looking for interesting names. You can’t go skimming through a GPS device that easily.
To turn a long story into a short one I picked up a MapArt map book of Ontario from Chapters because it was all they had. It had great maps of Ontario on the whole but did not include any detailed maps of major cities. When I slipped over to WalMart to pick up some new wiper blades I spotted a Rand McNally and flipped through it. It was head and shoulders better then the MapArt version, and this is mostly because it has downtown maps of many Ontario cities medium and large. With 100 more pages of detailed information (and what appears to be labelled school locations) for only a few extra dollars I picked it up and returned the MapArt copy to Chapters. I see online that MapArt has a deluxe version, but it is $30 and I did not see it in the store.
In closing, can anyone hear the name ‘Rand McNally’ and not think of The Simpson’s episode where Bart spins the globe and his finger lands on some country ‘Rand McNally’?
A British adventurer and his three-man crew set sail for Australia in an 11-metre wooden boat that he built himself, in a bid to re-create a 150-year-old voyage of the ship Mystery. The trip will be tracked on the web site of Peter Goss a former royal marine. They will navigate only by the stars, but will still have all the gadgets on board because I’m pretty sure it’s the law — and how else are you going to blog from the ocean?
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