tomtaylor.co.uk

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]