Earlier this evening we were discussing visiting Oxford again. Both of us have fond memories of a nice roast lunch in a pub we accidentally found up near there on a previous visit. Hmm, what was the pub called? No idea. Hmm, where exactly was it? No idea. Bugger..

I had a vague memory of taking a picture of the enormous Yorkshire pudding served with the roast, hmm what are the chances I took it with my iPhone, and what are the chances of it being geotagged. Loading up the photo gallery app on my phone I switched it to the ‘places’ view of the camera album and started to zoom in around Oxford. Bingo, there was the picture of the Yorkshire, precisely geotagged. A quick google with the name of road and The Fishes turns up. It’s nice when technology helps.

Just in case you were wondering, the Yorkshire looked like this:

[]({{ “/uploads/2010/09/Sun-console-cable.jpg” | prepend: site.baseurl }})Whilst tidying up the other day, sorting through 3 boxes of general IT related crap; including more USB and Firewire cables than I care to think about, I came across this old Sun console cable. I have memories of carrying this around everywhere with me, from Telehouse in docklands to the old Exodus Communications datacentre in Park Royal. I was never without it, because I never knew when I’d have to serial into some Sun server to fix it or get a newly purchased one built and installed. It was made for me by a nice chap in the Exodus NOC, I had clearly popped into to ask to borrow theirs just one too many times when he set about soldering one up for me.

I threw all the old USB and Firewire cables, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw this away, so I’m keeping it. Of course the only PC I have doesn’t have a 9 pin serial connector on it and neither do either of my Macs, and I expect new Suns don’t use the old 25 pin serial anymore either, so it will almost certainly never get used again.

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Next time I stumble across a E450 needing some TLC tho, I’ll be prepared!

Phil Gyford recently had a lovely idea of collating all the things geo tagged each day into a map for that day. It didnt take me long before I thought I’d have a go at doing this myself, it also gave me another reason to finally sit down and arrange some sort of backup of my Tweets and my FourSquare checkins.

This is all written in PHP, because well, that is what I know best. I write code very rarely, probably no more than once every year or two so I wasn’t up for learning a new language at the same time. The underpinnings of it all are a couple of scripts which get run every day and pull all of my tweets and checkins and store them locally. So most of what drives this map is actually just reading local files, rather than making API calls to the various services.

The first map below is from 2010-08-31 which is when I was down on the Isle of Wight.

Improvements I’d like to make

• The marker icons ought to differentiate between checkins and tweets
• More info shown in the boxes which appear when you click the markers, date/text maybe a thumb of an image if I included one in a tweet
• This uses the Google maps API V2, which is deprecated,  I need to update it to use V3 at some point.
• Possibly have something automatically add a post to WordPress everyday. Although that might be a bit much for the front page. I’ll have to investigate options there I think.

I’d like to be able to add these enhancements soonish, free time permitting.

I have always loved the Vulcan since I was a kid, I have fond memories of seeing it fly at air shows my father took me too years ago, before it lost the airworthiness certificate. Thanks to the magnificent work of the people at Vulcan to the Sky XH558 is flying again, and for her fiftieth birthday too! I attempted to see a display last year at the Bournemouth air show, but sadly the flight had to be cancelled. This year my luck was in however, and at Farnborough Air show I once again got to see her fly. Amazing stuff!

This is one of my all time favorite shots from any airshow I’ve been too. Chuffed with this, although the mofo lens (Broken link http://www.nikonusa.com/Find-Your-Nikon/Product/Camera-Lenses/2154/AF-S-VR-II-NIKKOR-300mm-f%252F2.8G-IF-ED.html) I rented did most of the work.

I’ve been trying to get some closeups of Edwards hands and feet while he is still small. The problem is, he waves them around so much that getting the shot framed and in focus before the limb is flung around into a another position is non trivial!