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.
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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.
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I’ve added Post Offices to I Am Near. Umm… that’s about it. You can find it at postoffices.iamnear.net.
Still waiting to hear back from Royal Mail about every post box.
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I just launched ATMs I Am Near, which does exactly what it says on the tin. I know ATMs is American English, but cashmachines is longer to type on a mobile.
The data is pulled out of the LINK ATM Locator, which is one of those javascript powered bit of web weirdness that can only come out of Enterprise Software. A quick poke at the code reveals how it works. Firstly, in one request, it converts the search query (postcode, town name, etc.) into a longitude and latitude. Secondly, in another request, it performs an AJAX request with the co-ordinates and options, and returns JSON. It’s easy to stick the longitude and latitude returned from Fire Eagle in that request, and parse the results.
However, to return the results, a number of HTTP headers are needed (Referer: http://locator.link.co.uk/, X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest). The bounding box it expects seems to be required, but can be ignored (set both the longitude and latitude to zero). It looks something like:
JSON.parse(`curl -H "Referer: http://locator.link.co.uk/" -H "X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest" -d "q=list&ne=0%2C0&sw=0%2C0&ll="#{lon}"%2C#{lat}&st=atm&mptu=N&pms=N&wc=N&ta=N&height=A&_=" "http://locator.link.co.uk/ATMWebLocator/LocatorDataServlet" -s`)
Unfortunately, I have no control over the data, and I know it’s not perfect. There are some duplicates, and some strange capitalisation. But, dammit, it works!
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Today I filed a Freedom Of Information request from the Royal Mail Group, for the location of every post box in the UK, with a grid reference. I’m told there are 114,000 of them. Why? I want to build postboxes.iamnear.net.
I suspect that iamnear.net works best with the things that are common, often required when out and about, and easily spottable. Pubs obviously fit the bill; megaliths probably not, but they’re fun, so that’s exempt.
The difficult bit is getting decent sources of data. I wanted to build hospitals.iamnear.net, but it seems that there’s no single source of data for these, apart from OSM, which is probably not complete.
So, what should I be building next? And perhaps more importantly, can you help me get the data to do it?
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For some unknown reason my Nokia N73 refuses to connect over Bluetooth or have anything to do with OS X 10.5 since updating it to the latest firmware. This is pretty rubbish. Apple blame Nokia, Nokia blame Apple, and neither of them cares very much, which is unsurprising.
iSync works with the cable out of the box, but it’s a bit trickier to use it as a modem over USB. Here’s how you do it.
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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 no less. Every second, rocks, mostly very small, whizz past, some frazzling in the atmosphere, and some missing by millions of kilometers.
Those fine folk at NASA run the Near Earth Object database keeping track of the relatively large ones, including a special section for those that actually, possibly, might hit us.
Of course, this celestial activity is regular and mostly harmless, but completely invisible and as a bit of a space geek, I find it fascinating. So, a couple of weeks ago, I knocked together a Twitter bot called Low Flying Rocks, that scrapes data out of the NASA NEO database, twittering whenever a rock passes within 0.2 AU of the Earth. It seems to speak a few times a week, so don’t expect a constant stream of impending doom.
For me, it’s a simple way of reminding me of the fragility of life here and keeping a finger on the pulse of the universe.
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Yeah, so I finally got around to making something prettier (your mileage may vary).
I love working on trains, and spent Monday and Wednesday travelling to and from Geneva, courtesy of the fantastic French train system (apart from the minor hiccup in Paris - arriving in Gare du Nord to find every train cancelled due to a fire). There’s nothing like being forced to sit in a seat for hours on end to concentrate the mind.
More posts shortly.
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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 its KML file and parsing it into the database. Hpricot seems to splutter on KML, so I had to use REXML.
I also stuck a Google Map link in for each location, so for those of you lucky enough to own an iPhone it will take you straight through to the Google Map application. For the rest of us, it’s probably only useful on a desktop machine.
And I had my first report of usage in the wild! Tim worked his way to the Blue Posts the other night thanks pubs.iamnear.net.
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