… the thing moves with the speed and grace of an angry bee, while accompanied by the perfectly menacing whine of its little engine.
Wow!
(via Engaget)
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 View along the botttom boundary of our plot - after involuntary re-landscaping We have been in Xàtiva for a couple of weeks to have a series of meetings with our architect to discuss and finalize the plans for our house. The meetings went very well, and we only have some small details where we still have some homework which we will handle by e-mail from home – mainly the location of power points and the layout of the garden. (More about the house in a later post) And we visited our lawyer in Valencia and gave him power of attorney to handle our tax affairs and the application for planning permission. We also visited our plot and were surprised to discover that the neighbour building on the plot of land behind ours has been busy re-landscaping our plot and the adjoining one along the boundary to his land. He has reduced the slope of the land along the boundary to his land with a bulldozer, undermining the boundary fence between us and a plot next to us:  The undermined fence With all but one seat now counted, the results of the British elections look like this (ignoring the smaller parties):  British election results after 649 seats have been counted Although I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting – the British don’t like coalition governments, as you might guess: the British expression for a (British) coalition government is a “hung Parliament”. … according to the Economist, who have redrawn the map of Europe, putting similar countries together. In the case of the UK, its components have been placed down by Portugal and Spain as the UK’s finances are in a similar state to those of its southern European compatriots. In place of Britain, the Economist would like to see Poland towed across adjacent to Ireland, while the Czech Republic needs to swap with Belgium, and Switzerland should be integrated with the Nordic Countries. Using a Snow Leopard Server, (OS X 10.6.x) it seems that administrators have a problem if they have used Apple’s Managed Client for OS X (MCX) to provide software updates to their clients from their local server and then want to switch back to having the clients get the updates from Apple’s servers. The problem seems to lie with Apple’s Managed Preferences, which is part of MCX. Here is what I understand happens, and a solution: Continue reading Resetting Software Update to use Apple’s servers
I don’t think one needs to say more. The guy is overweight, but sadly you see people like him regularly on TV or in the flesh these days. Here’s the link to the picture. We went to the Nacht der Museen (Museum Night) in Frankfurt yesterday. This annual event is always well visited, and is a good way to see inside the 47 participating locations in Frankfurt. The tickets cost 12 Euro for unlimited visits to any of the museums last night. As well as being able to visit the regular exhibitions in the museums, the organisers also lay on special events for children and a wide range of musical performances for the adults. You can get an idea of what was on offer here (zipped PDF file, 3.3 MB). It’s impossible to visit everything in the time (19:00 hrs to 02:00 hrs), but we enjoyed visiting the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, the Museum der Weltkulturen and the Museum für Kommunikation.  Using the waze desktop maps There is a new social mobile application on the block – waze.com. You can download the application onto your smartphone (Apple, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian at the moment, Blackberry is coming shortly) and use the free software as an on-board turn-by-turn navigation system. The maps are produced and updated by the waze community – it simply involves driving around with waze running on your mobile phone – and the more people doing that, the better the quality of the maps becomes.  The waze turn-by-turn navigation screen on an iPhone You can add information such as where the speed traps in your area are. See the user manual here for more information. You can even show temporary blockages, such as accidents. These and the location of other waze users who are driving around are shown on the navigation screen. Waze started in Israel and only arrived in Germany and France via the USA on 11th March 2010, so there is still quite a bit to do. Waze has set up an initial country-wide map of Germany based on data from Intermap, and at the moment users are confirming the Intermap street data by driving over the roads. There are not many waze users in Germany so you can help by joining in, confirming and correcting roads (there is one error on the little area of Schmitten shown in the top screen shot above that I need to correct) and also adding PIOs and house numbers to make the maps more useful. there is a small German language waze user-forum active here. If you are the first to confirm a piece of road, the symbol for your vehicle changes to become a little pac-man gobbling up the virgin road! (If you see a user called “sqeze” moving on the maps, that’s me  RadarVirtuel following the volcanic dust cloud over Europe You can follow the track of the volcanic dust cloud over Europe, and the flight tracks and details of the few flights that are still taking place despite the cloud, over at RadarVirtuel.com. I can’t see the point in some of the more modern internet trends – I tried FaceBook and gave up after a couple of weeks, and have never felt the slightest urge to share my life using Twitter. However I know quite a few people who do use Twitter. They may want to consider that their tweets are being recorded for posterity. The US Library of Congress has just announced that they are going to archive every public tweet ever made since Twitter started it’s service in 2006. Appropriately, the news was announced by the Library of Congress on Twitter: |
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Copyright © 2000 - 2010 John & Ruth Keys, all rights reserved |
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– see you on waze soon?) 
