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.

Learning Ladders Nursery Battersea

Learning Ladders Children’s Centre

Learning Ladders operates from the old Battersea Children’s Home situated on the Doddington Estate in the London borough of Wandsworth. The group operate presently from three main rooms on the ground floor and use a separate dining area. They also use a soft play room on the first floor. All children have access to secure enclosed outdoor play areas.

In the November 2009 Ofsted Inspection report, the Childrens Centre was rated GOOD in all areas. A full copy of the Ofsted report is available online.

The staff work exceptionally well as a team to support the children and make sure everyone enjoys their time in the nursery

KL trip

Sleepy Head
Sleepy Head

With travel chaos in Britain and north Europe, it was always going to be touch and go. Late leaving Heathrow, we caught the connecting flight in Amsterdam with minutes to spare. Our luggage was not so lucky and took a couple of days to join us.

We flew KLM and it was a night flight. An interesting touch was the hot noodles and ice-cream served at about 3am.

1984 BAC

thanks to lovely Stephen Moorhouse, Jeannette and I had a night out at the theatre this week. we went to see 1984 at the local Battersea arts centre, and very good it was too. it was a mix of live action and puppetry, which never got in the way of the fast pace of the story.

the play runs: December 02 – January 09, 2010

tickets cost: £10 – £16

Thunderbird 3

I’ve used Thunderbird for a couple of years and recently moved to TB3. It’s not been without pain though, and here a couple of the issues and my workarounds

Indexing – lots of talk about this on the web. Despite leaving it going for over 24 hours, Thunderbird 3 had not finished indexing all my folders. I discovered the location of the index file. Mine is currently over 2GB in size. Not good for Windows! I’ve therefore disabled indexing.  However ideally, I’m happy to have the index in place for my main folders, so I’m using the GlodaQuilla extension to selectively index folders. Update 01/2010. Given up on indexing altogether.

Calendering. No built in support, but nightly builds are available for Lightning (and the Google provider).

Activity Manager. At last I thought, a way of seeing what Thunderbird is doing at any given time. But no, it only reports after the activity is finished.

Update 01/2010. Chief gripe now is that search box doesn’t have any kind of pause/delay built in, so as soon as you type the first letter of your search term, Thunderbird grinds to a halt while it list every single email with that letter in it. Having to cut/paste search terms as a workaround.

Lambeth Motorbike Parking

Motorbike Parking
Motorbike Parking

Near where I work, Lambeth have added a rail to the motorbike parking, which allows us to lock our bikes more securely. Great – but why does the locking bar have a full height railing attached to it?

The result is, the only access to bikes is from the road, not the pavement. How safe is that? Not to mention when the bikes are parked closely together (there are never enough motorbike parking spaces in any given area), it can be very hard to reach inner bikes.

You wouldn’t put a railing along the pavement where cars are parked, forcing the drivers to enter their cars from the road, so why do it to bikers?

The Animation Studio opens

Just published my first test video onto Youtube. First try was with blue material but the video camera I’m using didn’t pick up the colour at all. Not sure if this is a common problem with consumer video cameras or not, but I did read that green is preferred for digital video.

Star Wars Lego flying through the flat.
Star Wars Lego flying through the flat.

Coming back from lunch I walked past a textile shop in Clapham, the fabulously named “Jeanette Fashions”. As luck would have it they had some lovely green felt, with a very saturated appearance at under a tenner a metre. On the video camera screen this looked a lot better. The results can be seen in the YouTube clip – what was missing was some decent lighting of the green backdrop. In fact it was just a 60W ceiling light.

On the next test I aim to use a 500W worklight, which having angle-grinded (ground?) the padlocks off my shed, I can now get access to!

Not dead after all

Just in case the last post made you feel depressed, think of the case of the twice-buried monk.

Oran, a sixth-century monk on Iona: having presumably been declared dead, he was buried, but was dug up again the following day and found to be alive. He is said to have subsequently been re-buried for heresy when he claimed that after his first burial he had seen heaven and hell.