Twitter

Again I haven’t been updating this as often as I would like as a result of constantly being kept busy (and an all-consuming obsession with Twitter), but I just thought I’d let you know that I am working on some new posts and they should be online soon!

Indywiki

Been checking out Indywiki today, following on from my discussion of Wikipedia for Schools yesterday, it’s a really cool novel way of working with Wikipedia. Basically it acts as a visual frontend to Wikipedia, and the emphasis is on quick browsing of the online behemoth.

From the Indywiki site:

Some times browsing over the plethora of information available through wikipedia pages becomes a boring activity.
Indywiki is an open source project that aims to explore different ways of visually browsing wikipedia pages.  This might be very helpful, especially in cases we are only interested to get an idea on the term we are searching for. In other words, browsing through images, while the text is still available to read!

Indywiki also discovers and displays images that are contained on links to our search keyword. Images are displayed in tenths. So if we are searching for a city as an example, after we get all images displayed on the wikipedia page about this city, we’ll start getting links about related items (that might be other cities in this country, personalities and culture of this city and practically everything related, the more we keep on getting images.

Check it out, it’s pretty cool.

Wikipedia for Schools

Downloaded and been using Wikipedia For Schools for the last few days, it’s a really excellent service provided (free of charge) by SOS Children and is tied to the English national curriculum. I would say it’s useful for anyone at school though, regardless of where they are based. Plus, it’s useful to have as an offline reference for adults too, as we may not always have internet access and need to quickly look up something (Uzbekistan, for example!).

I think the fact that the encyclopaedia has been hand-checked and edited for accuracy is a huge benefit as well, and this is definitely one worth checking out. I will be continuing to seed the torrent to help with bandwidth, and I reckon if you decide to download and use it, you could also consider doing the same.

Updates

Gonna start using this properly again… Stay tuned.

OSM

A long long time since I last posted, but I though I’d send this in the hope that some people read it and take some interest.

An alternative to Google Maps, OpenStreetMap is a community-driven wiki-style mapping site. Unfortunately, as it is community driven it relies on contributions of everyday folk like you and me to create the maps etc. So if you have any spare time nip over to the site and feel free to contribute to anywhere you know well enough (Glasgow, Lisbon, Torun etc etc).

It’s like a Wikipedia for maps, which I only bring up because I wanted to also remind everyone of Citizendium, a peer-reviewed alternative to Wikipedia!

PS

I’ve submitted my thesis (woohoo!) and there is a link to CHDK at the side of the page in my del.icio.us bookmarks

Power!

I’m a happy chappy today; reading the discussions on one of the Powershot S3 IS groups on Flickr brought me to CHDK, a firmware add-on for Canon cameras which affords many extra features to the camera. The reason I’m so happy is that one of these extra features, and one which should delight most people, is the ability to shoot in RAW format! So that’s me chuffed to bits now, I can shoot RAW whenever I want, without having to buy an expensive new camera, and as it doesn’t interfere with your camera’s firmware in any way shape or form, I can turn off the extra features (incl. RAW shooting) provided by CHDK at any time. It may seem trivial to many people, but trust me when I say, it makes me very pleased!

Belated

Not really belated, just a delayed post. It’s been quite a while since I last posted here, I’ve been very busy writing my thesis, and the last post I sent was just a wee video I saw online, so didn’t require any sort of thought.

I’m initially going to moan tonight, since I just found out from Last.fm that Ballboy are playing the Oran Mor in Glasgow on December 15th. That would normally be a good thing, especially as tickets are only £9, but unfortunately I am in Berlin until the 16th; gutted. I hope they are going to play again sometime soon, as I really do want to see them perform live. For those of you who have never listened to them, I really recommend downloading I Hate Scotland, it’s a fantastic song, although I think my favourite is still A Europewide Search For Love.

Anyway, I just want to also post and say that those of you who don’t have Last.fm accounts really should join up, especially if you like hearing music that you are likely to enjoy and don’t want to sully your eardrums with a load of crap, and let’s be honest, who doesn’t want that!? So join up and add me to your friends list (assuming I know you). I think I’ve been quite late in realising how amazing this could be (I’ve used it on-and-off for a while), but now I can’t stop listening; it builds up such a fantastic set of recommendations based on your listening and you can ban songs you never want to have to put up with! So go and register!

Don’t Copy That Floppy

An amazing video I saw referenced on Mike’s Planet

Lazy

What to do instead of graphs…