tomtaylor.co.uk

ATMs are now back up and running in iamnear using the Multimap API. It’s not quite as comprehensive as the LINK Locator, but it’s better than nothing.

I’ve just finished putting up my talk, Delighting with Data, from Oxford Geek Night 7. Those of you who attended and are sharp will notice that this is not a verbatim transcription of what I said, thank god. That would be terrible. This is instead my notes, written up properly to make more sense.

I cycle across Tower Bridge every day. This is a snippet of my route back. The camera ran out of battery - I’ll get my full route tomorrow.

You may have noticed that ATMs and Post Offices no longer work in iamnear. The LINK Locator somehow managed to jumble up its AJAX hell even more - making the loophole I outlined previously impossible.

However, they shall return! ATMs coming from Multimap’s new API, and Post Offices from a FOI request (I hope). Until then, sorry.

Just a quick heads up. I’m speaking in Oxford tomorrow night at Geek Night 7. I’ll be waffling about Delighting with Data - making beautiful things through munging data. A quick tour through interesting projects, how they work and why I think they’re beautiful.

The rest of the line up looks great, so get yourself along if you’re in the area. Upstairs in the Jericho Tavern from 7pm.

I’ll stick the talk up here when it’s done.

It seems that a lot of people have never seen Tower Bridge open and close. So here it is, sped up so you don’t get bored.

Here’s a small video from this afternoon’s messing around with timelapse photography. It’s quite fun - I’ll do some more sometime, but with better clouds. It looks better on the Vimeo site - the embedded videos aren’t HD.

I got rid of i am near’s dependency on Fire Eagle, so now anyone can use it. Hopefully this satisfies two concerns. 1) I don’t have a Fire Eagle account. 2) I want to search for stuff near where I’m going, not where I am.

You’ll notice the interface has got a touch busier, with the ability to switch between Fire Eagle and normal search. I hope it’s not too clumsy now, but I’d appreciate feedback.

A while ago, we did some cycling in Spain.

There are also some photos.

If you live in London or New York, and been down to either of their most recognisable bridges recently, you’ll have noticed a strange sight bursting out of the ground. The Telectroscope connects the Tower and Brooklyn bridges together through a tube of light, allowing people at both ends to see each other.

Hardly anyone knows that a secret tunnel runs deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean. In May 2008, more than a century after it was begun, the tunnel has finally been completed. An extraordinary optical device called a Telectroscope has been installed at both ends which miraculously allows people to see right through the Earth from London to New York and vice versa.

Of course, the story is great, and along with the fantastic design of the actual devices, helps to add to the magic of the whole experience. In fact, the story isn’t far from the truth - there are tunnels that run between the two cities, and they have been there for over 100 years. The most recent one is called TAT-14 and it carries up to 64×10Gbps of internet traffic over fibre optic cabling.

Obviously, the story has capture people’s imagination, and keeping it alive has been core to the media interest generated by the artist. However, for me, this is the least interesting part of the whole thing. The beauty of the telectroscope lies in the nature of the whole experiment.

The telectroscope sets up a permanent link between two points on Earth, thousands of miles apart, in a manner that is persistent and seamless. There’s no gadgetry to understand - one simply stands in front of the telectroscope and waves. It’s a window into another world, and other lives.

The importance of this clicked when a colleague spotted two people, one at each end of the tunnel, having a conversation over mobile phones. I loved this idea, and I began to imagine how you could expand upon it.

I envisioned a telectroscopic network spread throughout the world, connecting all manner of cities, not just London and New York. I imagined simple devices, without the steampunk-esque glamour, perhaps the size of a bus stop advertising horde. They would stand upright, dotted around parks and public spaces, each one forming a permanent connection to its partner thousands of miles away.

Like all interesting things the technology is simple - a large, relatively low resolution screen, a webcam and an internet connection, built strong to withstand the inevitable onslaught of public life.

They would form a shared public space, enabling people to do anything from casual meetings (”I’ll meet you at the telectroscope in 20 mins”), to lazily lying on the grass watching another world go past.

Maybe they’d give us a finger on the pulse of a distant land, or maybe they’d just be cool for a while and get burned by yobs. Maybe someone should build a few and see.