Category: random thoughts

Summer project thoughts

Click pic to get one
Click pic to get one

Alan gave me a nifty little submarine engine and it turned my thoughts to a summer project. I’m looking again at the home 3D printer.

There are now a few competing/complimentary home 3D printers around, these include Fab@Home, The RepRap, and hobby CNC

If anyone has any recommendations, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Reprap was the one i’d heard of a few years ago, but Fab@Home looks quite sophisticated.

I think the only criteria I have is that it must fit in my shed 🙂

Goatastic

My sister is becoming a farmer – a goat farmer to be precise. she and Ian now have approx 50 female and 1 billy goats on rented land near their place in Bradford upon Avon. The plan is to increase the herd (billy has been busy) and buy some farmland to establish themselves. After that it’s on to Smoothie production…

As you can see from the photo the goats were happily penned in, but my childhood experience reminds me that for goats the grass is always greener the other side of the fence, and they’ll do just about anything to get there.

Good luck Sarah, hope you don’t mind getting out of bed in the middle of the night to recapture your straying herd 🙂

Real Life SimCity

Waze
Waze

Recently I’ve been playing with a mapping app on the iPhone called Waze. This allows you to do free turn by turn routing on a smartphone (at time of writing Android and iPhone’s supported), with the added bonus of up to date traffic reporting by fellow users of the service.

Waze started in Israel, and they’ve pretty much got the whole country mapped now. The UK however is sparse – most roads are not mapped yet, but this is the bit I’m enjoying most. When you drive down a road that’s not on Waze, you actually create it. The phone uploads the GPS data to the web, and you go along later and add the street name.

This bit feels like SimCity – creating your own roads! However it does feel like wasted effort, as a project called OpenStreetMap has already created free maps of the entire UK, which Waze or other projects like it could be using. Waze are taking a bit of a gamble on UK users wanting to create a map of the UK before the routing and traffic functions will start to take off. Smartphone Apps that use OpenStreetMap are plentiful – but I’ve yet to find a free one for the iPhone.

For SimCity fans it’s great though – you find yourself deliberately taking new routes to and from work just to add new roads to the map.