tomtaylor.co.uk

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 [...]

I love those moments in cities when the normal rhythm of the daily grind is interrupted, and in the momentary disruption a different city shines through. As if someone paused the record, allowing a simple discussion to take the place of the loud drone. The lifting of Tower Bridge is one of those events, a [...]

As I write I’m on the train, flying through the Swiss-French border, with the snow topped mountains disappearing into the distance. LIFT 08 was fantastic fun, but now I’m off to Paris for the weekend to catch up on sleep, see some of the city and do very little.
In summary, I had a brilliant time [...]

At LIFT08. Just back from the fondue, full of interesting conversations, ranging from Kosovan Independence to podcasting in schools. Frankly, I’m massively relieved to have done my presentation, on using Social Software for Sustainable Behaviours, which I was relatively pleased with. My laptop locked up at the start, totally throwing me, but when I got [...]

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 [...]

In addendum to amusing story about my donation from BAE Systems to CAAT and the subsequent printing of it in Private Eye, they printed the name correction last week, and included little titbit of information (which was new to me at the time).
HIGH PRINCIPALS
THE Loughborough University graduate who is donating his BAE-sponsored award to the [...]

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 [...]

My email address seems to have been used as the FROM address for a wodge of spam. I’ve had about 300 returns so far, but I’m fully expecting to get completed deluged over the next couple of days. If you sent me something, please try again in a few days.

The quilt has progressed. If you weren’t in the last snapshot, you might be in this one!

I cryptically dropped my Private Eye mention on the site and then disappeared for a few days of music and cider. So let’s rewind a week and explain what happened…
I won a prize! Specifically, Most Improved Student. This meant that my exams results in the 1st and 2nd year were sufficiently low enough that by [...]