- The Big Map Blog — awesome old maps, for the afficionado. (via Sacha Judd)
- sshuttle — poor man’s VPN built over ssh. (via Hacker News)
- Remembering LineDrive — I, too, am bummed that LineDrive never became standard. And Maneesh, one of its cocreators. Check out his publications list!
- Websockets Pacman — multiplayer Pacman, where players take the role of ghosts. All implemented with WebSockets in HTML5. (via Pete Warden)
"geo" entries
Four short links: 5 April 2011
Big Maps, ssh VPN, Line Maps, and HTML5 Multiplayer Pacman
Four short links: 16 December 2010
Compressing Graphs, Authentication Usability, Extreme Design, and Rails Geo
- On Compressing Social Networks (PDF) — paper looking at the theory and practice of compressing social network graphs. Our main innovation here is to come up with a quick and useful method for generating an ordering on the social network nodes so that nodes with lots of common neighbors are near each other in the ordering, a property which is useful for compression (via My Biased Coin, via Matt Biddulph on Delicious)
- Requiring Email and Passwords for New Accounts (Instapaper blog) — a list of reasons why the simple signup method of “pick a username, passwords are optional” turned out to be trouble in the long run. (via Courtney Johnston’s Instapaper feed)
- Extreme Design — building the amazing spacelog.org in an equally-amazing fashion. I want a fort.
- rgeo — a new geo library for Rails. (via Daniel Azuma via Glen Barnes on Twitter)
Four short links: 25 November 2010
Twitter Mapped, Bibliographic Data Released, Babies Engadgeted, and Nat's Christmas Present Sorted
- A Day in the Life of Twitter (Chris McDowall) — all geo-tagged tweets from 24h of the Twitter firehose, displayed. Interesting things can be seen, such as Jakarta glowing as brightly as San Francisco. (via Chris’s sciblogs post)
- British Library Release 3M Open Bibliographic Records) (OKFN) — This dataset consists of the entire British National Bibliography, describing new books published in the UK since 1950; this represents about 20% of the total BL catalogue, and we are working to add further releases.
- Gadgets for Babies (NY Times) — cry decoders, algorithmically enhanced rocking chairs, and (my favourite) “voice-activated crib light with womb sounds”. I can’t wait until babies can make womb sound playlists and share them on Twitter.
- GP2X Caanoo MAME/Console Emulator (ThinkGeek) — perfect Christmas present for, well, me. Emulates classic arcade machines and microcomputers, including my nostalgia fetish object, the Commodore 64. (via BoingBoing’s Gift Guide)
Four short links: 24 November 2010
Android, Cellphone Photos, Long-Exposure iPhone Apps, and Open Street Map
- What Android Is (Tim Bray) — a good explanation of the different bits and their relationship.
- Cell Phone Photo Helped in Oil Spill (LA Times) — a lone scientist working from a cell phone photo who saved the day by convincing the government that a cap it considered removing was actually working as designed. (via BoingBoing)
- Penki — iPhone app that lets you paint 3D messages which are revealed in long-exposure photographs. (via Aaron Straup Cope on Delicious)
- I’m Working at Microsoft and We’re Donating Imagery to OpenStreetMap! (Steve Coast) — MSFT hired the creator of OSM and he says Microsoft is donating access to its global orthorectified aerial imagery to help OpenStreetMappers make the map even better than it already is.
Four short links: 23 November 2010
AppEngine Gripes, LIDAR Hacking, Web Stripping, and Map Storytelling
- Goodbye App Engine — clear explanation of the reasons why Google AppEngine isn’t the right thing to build your startup on. Don’t read the comments unless you want to lose faith in humanity. (via Michael Koziarski on Twitter)
- Neato Robotics XV-11 Tear-down — the start of hackable LIDAR, which would enable cheap and easy 3D mapping, via a Roomba-like robovacuum with a LIDAR module in it. (via Chris Anderson on Twitter)
- Boilerpipe — code to remove boilerplate wrappers from a webpage, returning just the text you care about. (via Andy Baio)
- Visual Eyes — web-based authoring tool developed at the University of Virginia to weave images, maps, charts, video and data into highly interactive and compelling dynamic visualizations. (via Courtney Johnston’s Instapaper feed)
Four short links: 28 October 2010
Computational Thinking, Timelines in Javascript, Info as Magazine, and Necessity Shortages
- Exploring Computational Thinking (Google) — educational materials to help teachers get students thinking about recognizing patterns, decomposing problems, and so on.
- TimeMap — Javascript library to display time series datasets on a map.
- Feedly — RSS feeds + twitter + other sites into a single magazine format.
- Attention and Information — what appears to us as “too much information” could just be the freedom from necessity. The biggest change ebooks have made in my life is that now book reading is as stressful and frenetic as RSS reading, because there’s as much of an oversupply of books-I’d-like-to-read as there is of web-pages-I’d-like-to-read. My problem isn’t over-supply of material, it’s a shortage of urgency that would otherwise force me to make the hard decisions about “no, don’t add this to the pile, it’s not important enough to waste my time with”. Instead, I have 1990s books on management that looked like maybe I might learn something …. (via Clay Shirky on Twitter)
Four short links: 22 October 2010
Image Remapping, Internet Futures, Ebook Reader, and Open Cloud Computing
- Historical Images Remapped — Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum released historical images from their collections, and a historical photo site Sepiatown geolocated and oriented them so they can be viewed side-by-side with current Google Street View images of the same place. And then contributed the refined metadata back to the museum. A great example of your users helping to improve your data.
- Future Internet Scenarios — results of scenario planning by the Internet Society, some possible futures from open and competitive to anticompetitive centralised walled-gardens.
- OpenLibrary Bookreader — the Internet Archive’s book reader is (naturally) open source for you to reuse and improve. (via Kevin Marks on Twitter)
- OpenStack Austin Release — code to compute controller and object storage released. Competition and interoperability require exactly this kind of open cloud environment.
Welcome Laurel Ruma to Where 2.0
Where 2.0 2011 welcomes a new co-chair.
Laurel Ruma and Brady Forest will co-chair Where 2.0 2011, running April 19-21, 2011 in Santa Clara, Calif.
Where 2.0 2011 call for proposals is open
A look at the topics, sessions and workshops planned for the next Where 2.0 conference.
Google and other companies are jockeying for position in the location space, which makes the next Where 2.0 particularly intriguing. Here's a look at the planned topics, sessions and workshops — and a reminder to get your proposals in before the Oct. 25 deadline.
Toward a local syzygy: aligning deals, check-ins and places
Check-ins are only the beginning. Here's what lies ahead for local.
The check-in is hardly the apogee of the local consumer experience. It works, for now, but it won't be the long-term solution for customer/business relationships and physical point of presence. So what will replace it? Here's a look at the local sector's near-term future.