LostCarPark's Journal

Flickr has a nice feature that you can drag photos onto a map to mark where they were taken. I'm not sure if it's a new feature, but I've only just discovered it, and it can be quite addictive, especially when hi-res arial photography is available, to try and place each photograph as accurately as possible.

How long can it be before digital cameras will have GPS included so the coordinates will automatically have geographic information encoded in their metadata, and every photo will have precise coordinates attached. This may already be possible to a lower degree of accuracy with cell mast data on cameraphones.

Of course, like all technologies, I'm sure someone will come up with a way to abuse it.

Isn't technology wonderful?

I'll be doing a bit of travelling this weekend...

I fly into London, arriving 17:05, then getting the train into London Bridge for flickgc's and drplokta's wedding reception.

I'm meeting some people over the weekend, but I'm not quite sure who yet as I'm my usual lazy self about organising these things. If you'd like to meet up over the course of the weekend send me a text (you'll get my mobile number here).

On Monday I'm meeting some Lego fans in Gatwick, and we're flying on to Billund in Denmark where we will be treated to a tour of the Lego factory.

On Tuesday, we'll be meeting one of the Lego designers, then spending a few hours in the Danish LegoLand park. We'll then catch a flight back to Gatwick, and from there I'll get my flight back to Dublin.

I can't wait!

Just saw an ad on TV for a silent ring tone that claims it can't be heard by parents and teachers (it does so by using a frequency of 17kHz - last I tested I could hear at least to 20kHz, thank you very much).

It seems to be aimed at kids and teenagers, but at the bottom of the screen it clearly states "must be 18+".

Go figure.

Today I took my sister-in-law to do her charity parachute jump, about an hour and a half away from where we live. It was a good day out, even if there was a lot of waiting around for gaps in the cloud cover, Sandra thought the jump was fantastic. She was doing a tandem jump, and her instructor promised her "air orgasms", so that could be something to do with it.

I would love to do a few parachute jumps, and ultimately learn to skydive. I don't think I could bring myself to do it as a charity event. It's one thing asking people to sponsor me for something that will be hard work when all of the money will go to the cause, but I can't help feeling there's something a little bit dodgy about asking people to give me money so I can spend half of it on a fun event for me.

Just my opinion.

Microwave popcorn has grown in popularity over the years, but it is easy to get wrong. There are a few tricks that can guarantee perfect results every time. The ideal result is for all the kernels to be popped, with none of them burned or overcooked. You need a microwave with a rotary plate - fortunately very few don't these days. If yours doesn't, I'm afraid you're stuck with a pot and some oil, or you could buy one of the hot air poppers. Or a new microwave.

1. Preheat the microwave. Put a glass of water in on maximum for 2-3 mins until it starts bubbling. Be careful taking it out as it will be hot.

2. Fold the corners of the bag towards the center before putting it in the microwave. This is to stop it from catching as it turns around. If you have a really big microwave, this can probably be skipped/

3. Set the microwave for about five minutes, Watch the bag as it turns to make sure a corner doesn't get caught or you will get hot spots and burned popcorn. You need to keep an eye on it as the bag will change shape and may unexpectedly get stuck.

4. Once the popcorn starts popping, listen carefully. At first there will only be a few pops, then rapid bursts, gradually slowing down towards the end. Once is slows to a few seconds between pops, it's time to stop. Better to have a few unpopped kernels that the whole lot burned.

5. Shake out into a bowl and a add butter if such takes your fancy.

I discovered the preheating secret when I was making several batches and the second came out better than the first. I'm not entirely sure why it works, but it does.

The perfect complement to a good movie.

Former James White Award winner comes good!

First of all, I have five Vox invites if anyone's looking for one.

I expect I'm late to the game, and everyone who wants one probably has one by now. I had applied for one directly, then dougs gave me one (thanks), and today I got an email with the invite I'd originally applied for (so that probably makes six).

The site has some nice features, but all the Web 2.0 interactivity and funkiness isn't quite as smooth as I would have hoped. There's quite a places where more clicks than seem necessary are required. On the main profile editing page, you can see some details like country and gender, but you have to go to another page to actually edit them.

The thing that really bugs me, though, is the fixed width layout. The page is a certain number of pixels wide, and that's it. If your browser window is wider than that, you get grey bars down the sides (like a widescreen telly in 4:3 mode). If it's too narrow, too bad, you have to keep scrolling left and right to read it. Ugh.

I haven't got as far as customising the layout, but it seems a lot less flexible than LJ. LJ let's you take almost total control of the look of your journal. I built my own S2 style, and there's very little you can't do (except for putting dodgy things like Javascript on the page). For that matter, if you wanted to, you could make a fixed width S2 style and annoy your users the way Vox do.

The other thing I find a bit annoying is the "Neighborhood" (they really should have thought about that one - there must be lots of words that mean the same thing but have a spelling that doesn't annoy every English speaker outside the US). But apart from the word itself, I find it really difficult to find people I know who have Vox accounts. In LJ, it was real easy when I started to just look at my friends' friends lists and pick out people I knew. But when I look at peoples' profiles in Vox, it only seems to show a couple of their friends, so it's difficult to find people. I can type in email addresses, but most people I know have several, so how do I know which one they used?

A really neat feature would be to have a field where I could type in my LJ name (replicate for other popular community sites), and it would store it in my profile. I could then go to a page where it would look up my LJ profile, and find anyone from my FL who has registered an LJ name in Vox. That wouldn't be too hard, would it?

Anyway, I don't want to only focus on the bad points. There are some nice things about it, and most of the problems are fixable. There are quite a few things I'd love to see LJ copy too. We don't need LJ to go totally Web 2.0 (a stupid term - it's just a website with some flashy bits), but a few little bits here and there could work wonders. My first suggestion is to add a Google-style auto-suggeston drop-down to the tags box when posting.

Nicked from 66steve...

( My Interests Collage! )

I'm not entirely sure what some of those represent (probably should check and prune a few).

THe desktop hasn't changed very much since the 1980s. Sure there have been a few new widgets and "productivity aids", but if a user of an early version of MacOS or Windows was transported twenty years into the future, I think the response to the latest developments would be "Is that all you've done?"

That could be about to change with some of the new ideas that may be coming our way. There's an interesting collection of video demos that show some pretty funky ideas.

Posted mainly so I don't lose them, but well worth a browse.

I should be in bed. I was knackered earlier and fell asleep on the couch, and now I can't sleep.

Instead I've been thinking about the terrorist plot the UK Government claims to have discovered during the week.

From what I've read, a plot was uncovered whereby terrorists would smuggle liquid explosives onto planes and detonate them with batteries and paperclips. The police claim they knew who was involved, and that a "dry run" would have taken place within days, and would have been followed soon after by an actual attack that would simultaneously take down up to ten transatlantic flights.

Now if their intelligence is as good as they say it is, why not keep monitoring the suspects for a few days, and nab them as they board flights for the "dry run"? Then there would be solid evidence of an actual attack, not vague, and frankly somewhat fanciful, mutterings of a potential threat. Doesn't it sound just a little like the mobile bomb factories on backs of lorries that we were assured would be all over Iraq?

Nitroglycerin is quite difficult to manufacture. In purer forms it is quite difficult to transport. It may be desensitized, but then it becomes quite difficult to detonate. I'm not suggesting that an attack along these lines isn't possible, but there would seem to be lots of "soft targets" that a resourceful terrorist could inflict comparable amounts of death and destruction without going to nearly as much trouble. I haven't been able to figure out how much nitroglycerin you'd need to take down a plane. I suspect you'd need quite a bit to take down a plane, which is what you'd need to do to cause "mass murder on an unimaginable scale". Even an explosive decompression would be survivable by the majority of passengers.

Of course, if the terrorist aim was to cause widespread disruption to air services, then they have been largely successful.

I can accept a certain amount of erosion of my civil liberties in the name of protecting me from lunatics, but it had better be for good reason, and there had better be solid evidence of a real threat. Too many people have fought and died to win those liberties to give them up for anything less.

I can't help feeling that these restrictions are totally our of proportion with the threat as it is presented to us. Perhaps we will be shown the hard evidence in due course, but it's going to take some pretty compelling evidence to convince me that it's reasonable to force people to fly for ten hours or more without so much as a book or magazine to read.

I think the very least we must demand is a dramatic improvement in the quality of in flight magazines.