tomtaylor.co.uk

Mankind’s impending mass extinction from a heavenly fireball used to be a regular story in the media, with newspapers jumping over each other to inform us that “experts believe” that there is a “possibility” that “something may hit us in 20xx”.
Thankfully, the media seems to have tired of this story, but the supposed threat remains [...]

In a fit of madness, having been pointed at the data set by Ben, I added megaliths to iamnear.net. Because you never know when you’re going to need to find your nearest ancient stone circle to perform a pagan ritual and the like.
The data set is comes from The Modern Antiquarian, taking an export of [...]

I finally got around to writing and launching ‘i am near‘, a very simple application to show you ’stuff’ that you are near, in a format designed for mobile users. At the moment it’s only got pubs and megaliths in it.
Inspired by Simon Willison’s wikinear, it uses Fire Eagle to grab your location, storing your [...]

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an incredibly cheap way of making backups that will survive theft, fire or just a broken hard disk. You pay about $0.15/GB/month for the storage, $0.10/GB for data transfer and a few more cents depending on how many requests you make. I’m storing about 4Gb and I pay about [...]

I got a new toy recently - a NaviGPS device. It’s a GPS logger with Bluetooth and a bike mount. Partly for messing with, partly for navigation and partly for contribute to OpenStreetMap.
Of course, the device needs programming with waypoints before you set off, but allows for manual input of longitude and latitudes. It’s fine [...]

I’ve been saving this post for a couple of days, until the bug fixes to the LocalSearchMaps geocoder that I’d submitted had made it into the latest release. 0.2.4 is now ready to download.
Graticule is a Ruby (and Rails) based geocoding API for looking up address coordinates and performing distance calculations. It supports a number [...]