Smart Printing October 5, 2008
Posted by Drew in : Cool, Technology , add a commentNow in these days of environmentally friendly goodness we all try and refrain from producing printed output when we can. But every now and then there is something that we absolutely have to print and so the aim is keep it as brief and concise as possible. The problem of course is that web pages generally aren’t designed for printing and so we get a whole load of crap we don’t want. Well now help is at hand. Print What You Like is a website that takes the URL of a site you want to print and allows you to remove any elements that you don’t want on that paper output. Genius. They even supply a handy bookmarklet that pops the page you are currently viewing straight into the site.
Memes R Us August 15, 2008
Posted by Drew in : Cool, Miscellany, Technology , add a commentAh, internet memes. Where would we be without them. They come along, make us all laugh for a few days and then disappear.
Who can forget Dramatic Chipmunk, Diet Coke+Mentos, Numa Numa, Star Wars Kid or All Your Base Are Belong To Us. Not to forget 2 girls, 1 cup.
Mapping Local Crime August 3, 2008
Posted by Drew in : Cool, Miscellany , add a commentRecently there was a news story that the UK government was considering the introduction of monthly crime maps showing the nature of crimes in a local area in an attempt to close the gap between the actual recorded crime figures and the general perceptions of the level of crime. It was mentioned that there were already examples of this in other areas of the world.
Totally unrelated to this I came across this site that does exactly what has been proposed for dozens of cities in the US. It categorises crimes and allows all or a selection of these categories to be mapped over a 3, 7, 14 or 30 day period. It makes interesting reading. Different cities provide differing amounts of information but the level of detail is still quite interesting. As an example of a real case I chose Palo Alto, CA. From this example it is clear that the placement of the crimes is down to a fairly precise level on the map.
One thing that I did find interesting was that in some of the smaller cities there appears at first glance to be a fairly large amount of crime and it is only when you start to read through the categories and details that you realise that the large number of crime icons on the map may be due to an aggressive targeting of a particular offence, for example youngsters with alcohol. This shows that as with all information designed for the “public” there needs to be a clear explanation as to what the data shows. It isn’t too big a leap to imagine a situation where an area gets a bad reputation simply because there are a large number of icons on the crime map whereas a closer inspection shows that in fact the opposite is true and there is relatively little actual serious crime due to a “zero tolerance” approach by local police.
The Crime Reports site relies on local police departments volunteering the information and obviously any UK service needs to be a nation wide operation if it is to be meaningful but I think it could be a useful addition to the debate on crime.
Finally a good use for CCTV May 19, 2008
Posted by Drew in : Cool, Miscellany , add a commentThere are now something over 13 million CCTV cameras in the UK making us the most spied on nation on Earth. It’s a full on 1984 scenario but as was recently reported they aren’t stopping crime. ArsGeek has a piece on an unsigned band called Get Out Clause who finally found a use for some of them. In the absence of a budget to make a video they used CCTV cameras to shoot various clips and then used the Data Protection Act to get the footage that they were able to stitch together to make a video. Genius!
URL Shinker++ May 16, 2008
Posted by Drew in : Cool, Technology , add a commentI’ve been a big fan, and user, of TinyURL for years. In case you haven’t come across this or similar sites yet the concept is simple. These days URLs can be huge, the one I’m using to type this is 184 characters long! These are a pain, especially when emailing them as they can often be wrapped and lose half the URL when the person clicks. TinyURL takes a URL and creates one that takes the form http://www.tinyurl.com/xxxx. A much more manageable situation.
There is an issue though. This is one URL at a time. Now for most situations this may be OK but there are times when I need to send a whole bunch of URLs to someone. To date I have simply TinyURL’d them and sent the group off. Now though someone has come up with an alternative. LinkBunch
takes the concept that stage further, instead of one URL you can enter a whole bunch (did you see what they did there?) and what is created is a simple small URL. When clicked this takes you to a page on the LinkBunch site that allows you to click one at a time or open all together.
An example is http://linkbun.ch/cma which is a link to some of my sites.
retrievr May 3, 2008
Posted by Drew in : Cool, Technology , add a commentRetrievr is a cool idea. It allows you to search for Flickr photos by simply drawing them. Now I’m the world’s worst artist and even I can find photo’s that look like what I’m drawing. This is clearly at an early research stage but it is nontheless interesting.
Big Dog March 28, 2008
Posted by Drew in : Cool, Technology , add a commentThis is cool. A robotic “animal” capable of recovering from a side swipe, walking on ice and jumping. It is being part funded by DARPA and they brought us the Internet so be warned! Bow down before your future overlord.