Yak & Natter

Turing, the Enigma, the WWII code breaking efforts… these are all important parts of our geek heritage. So we were unable to resist a visit to Bletchley Park on a day when they’d invited back veterans who had worked the machinery there, and the team who had re-built and were demonstrating a working version of the Bombe: Photos are up with a bit more of an explanation.

There’s also some video, showing the Bombe working, the Colossus, and an un-watchable bit of geeking around an SGI’s file system:

I listened to the excellent IT Conversations: Steve Coast podcast on my way in to work this morning, which was all about OpenStreetMap. This is a project I already knew of from the dConstruct podcasts as there was a Brighton mapping workshop the day after dConstruct.

I don’t have a GPS unit, but my only exposure to one was excellent. Whilst in Colorado snowboarding in March we found out about the SlopeTracker service, and rented a unit at Copper Mountain. The end result of this was a piste map with our routes marked on it, along with statistics such as maximum speed, miles travelled, time spent boarding etc (sample map). A great service. So today I started investigating what other ski resorts you could get GPS based maps for, and I stumbled across Mountain Dynamics and the SnowRanger set of resort maps. There’s an Uplink tool as well so that you can share your routes and statistics online.

If we can find a similar service that supports the Mac, then my justification for buying a GPS unit will be in place, and then maybe I can start to contribute to OpenStreetMap as it sounds like a great project. I especially like the fact that they’ve proved the existence of errors and easter eggs in the traditional maps. I’m not sure why, but I’ve always found the use of fictional roads and landmarks as a way of protecting your copyright to be a bit wrong when your reputation relies on the, otherwise, amazing quality of your data.

Ahoy me hearty! Today be International Talk like a Pirate day. Yarrr!

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A weekend of food related stuff. Firstly, on Friday evening we revisited the Noir Caribbean takeaway, this time trying the goat curry and chicken curry which we both polished off in no time, all washed down with a bottle of local organic wine.

On Saturday we pottered around the A Taste of Sussex market, picking up some local food, drinking some local beer and generally chilling out enjoying the sunshine. We headed out to Hove for dinner, but with no real plans, and decided on Los Amigos for dinner, which was good, but as with our last visit, the bill seemed surprisingly high. Our last stop for the day was The Sussex for beers.

Today, Richard had to head off to London, so I decided to continue the food based weekend and, armed with my camera, I visited a few local food shops, both tried and tested and new to me, before returning to the food festival, to sample some of the hot food and also to watch a few of the shows on the live food show stage. Then home to cook some bagels.

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A new feature for iTunes 7 is the ability to transfer purchased music from an iPod to a desktop – as long as the purchaser of the music is authorised on your machine. I discovered this by accident when I plugged my shuffle into my PC at work to put some files on it before heading home for the weekend. When I plugged it in a dialog appeared offering me a new option to “Transfer Purchases”, I figured I’d give it a try and it copied all the purchased music on my shuffle onto my PC. Great. So, I headed off home and decided to plug our main iPod into my macbook and see what happened. No pop up dialog, but if I control click on the name of our iPod I get a menu which offers “Transfer Purchases”. Very cool! This will save me cutting CDs to transfer our purchases from one machine to another.

I’ve just uploaded another 2 sets of photos, the first set from our lovely weekend at La Casa del Olivar in Andalucia, Spain. The second set from this last weekend in Margate with our family.

I think the TV show Who Do You Think You Are? is a perfect example of the BBC meeting their charter to inform, educate and entertain all in one programme. You’ve got celebrity for the entrainment, information in terms of history, and education in terms of genealogy. And just to reinforce the BBC stamp on it, you’ve got Doctor Who turning up in it on 27th September.

We popped along to the Badger Music night at the Western Front again on Tuesday and had another fun evening. As we arrived Prince Rodger were just setting up, a 2 piece featuring a cello. The cello and the double bass are two of my favourite instruments, probably because one of the guys I shared a house with at Uni owned both, and the cello lived in our house and some Sunday mornings I’d wake up to the sound of a cello drifting up the stairs. Anyways, the second band were And His Voice Became, a great 2 piece act from London, featuring a drum kit, a guitar and a loop station used to excellent effect, and very good they were too. The final act were The Bobby McGee’s who were, quite simply, mad. But wonderful too, with a drum kit, a double bass and 2 singers armed with ukulele, banjo and a melodica. An excellent band to see live.

Some nice new goodies from Apple were announced on Tuesday, movies via iTunes 7, new look iPod nano, new look iPod shuffle (so small….) and the iTV unit (yet to be given a proper name). I didn’t watch all of the event broadcast (partially due to the poor audio quality of the presentation, which when combined with the poor speakers in the macbook made it almost impossible to hear over the rain hammering on the roof outside).

I downloaded the new iTunes yesterday and quite a few of the user interface features look nice, although as with all things will take some getting used to. I connected my, sadly out of date now, shuffle and looked at the settings tab and found the following at the bottom of the page.

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Cute!