There’ll Be Some Changes Made
It’s nearly time for some website redevelopment. The ten blogs I’ve set up under this domain are going to get combined, which means that various links will stop working. Half of those blogs were set up for experimental purposes, so their disappearance may not have any effect. The main three: Something I said, Bag and the annex are a slightly different story, and I am wondering how I might set up redirects for any trackbacks and incoming links.
I set these up in 2008 after my Drupal installation was attacked by spambots, and had intended to develop a multiblog covering 3-5 different areas of interest. The interim solution was to set up 4 separate blogs and see how they fared. I didn’t have the knowledge to set up one blog with multiple posting divisions. But that seems to have been addressed - in Wordpress at least - by multiblog adaptations like WPMU , WP Hive , Virtual Multiblog and Multiply . The idea is to have one interface, and one administrator account, but multiple ‘main’ sections, like a newspaper or magazine with internal divisions for News, Society, Science, and so on.
I believe that an easy alternative is to use posting categories, but this doesn’t produce a graphic layout like the one below.
So sometime this year - sooner or later - the existing sites will come down, then be replaced with something more manageable, more effective.
Sphere: Related ContentTagged design, format, management, website
Blog All Open Tabs
With all the talk about internet blocking, malware, censorship and the like, I thought I’d look around for some alternative internets. But in doing so I found that the mis-spelled alterntative brought up a different - and more interesting - set of links.
I also found out about Open DNS.
- OpenDNS service is an alternative to major Internet providers
- OpenDNS | Providing A Safer And Faster Internet
- DNS-O-Matic | Distribute dynamic IP changes to multiple services (dnsomatic.com)
Then, in wanting to compile a list of all the pages I read, I decided to look for something that would blog all tabs. I reckoned there’s a browser, an extension, or a desktop tool that would do it - but maybe not on my setup.
The first things I found had several instances of ‘blog all open tabs’, so I searched on that too.
- “blog all open tabs” - Google Search
- randomWalks: all open tabs
- randomWalks: My New Blog All Open Tabs Technique is Unstoppable
- Wanted: convert Firefox tabs to links
- Bin-Blog
Having accomplished all that, a link to this story caught my eye.
And with it, this, this, and this comment by Eurojohn.
OSRC | SuperRoot Consortium?
There is no technical requirement that the Internet’s only root server be the A server in Virginia.
To use a different root server, an ISP merely edits a couple of lines of in-house computer code. This change allows the ISP’s subscribers to browse all of ORSC’s Web locations, including “.cars,” “.family” and others. Yet the same browsers will still work with all of ICANN’s TLDs, such as “.com,” “.net” and “.org.”
The switch can even be made by individuals on their personal computers, regardless of the ISP they use. The process is described in a document by the SuperRoot Consortium, a group that supports the ORSC.
ICANN is in a self-imposed “quiet period” while it evaluates the proposals it received for new TLDs and won’t comment on those proposals or ORSC’s.
A switch to an alternative Internet? - CNET News
Xnview uploader
1. How can I use XnView to upload photos to a directory on my website (e.g. FTP) and to one of my hosted photo services (e.g. 23, EasyCaptures, Panoramio, Picasa, TinyPic)?
+email +client
Bus Journey Planning
In travelling around Birmingham, when I want to get somewhere I haven’t been before, I mostly go by bus. So I need a reliable, easy method of identifying routes and timetables.
Let’s say I want to go from Moseley to Merritt’s Brook in Northfield. The first thing I’ve got to do is identify the local roads, then find the buses that travel them.
Fortunately, Google Maps do a good job of locating bus stops, so I can look round an area til I find a stop that looks close enough. I’m choosing the stops at the junction of Merritt’s Brook Lane and Holloway, one northbound, one southbound. Let’s see which buses get me there. Using the pop-up ‘Get Directions to here’ option, I add “St Mary’s Row, Moseley, Birmingham, West Midlands B13, UK” as the starting point.
That brings up St Mary’s Row, Moseley, Birmingham, West Midlands B13, UK to NE-bound. But that’s not showing bus routes. So I go back to the map and choose the Transport Direct link. Which presumes I want to leave from that stop rather than arrive at it. So I need to move over to Moseley and pick my start point, then add the address of the end point.
When the Transport Direct options page comes up, I add “Ley Hill, Holloway” to the destination, and select the “All stops (e.g. Bus, Tube, Tram)” option as well.
That brings up a list of 59 places around the country, 17 of which are in Birmingham.
- 0: Ley Hill (Birmingham), Holloway, Opposite Ley Hill Farm Road (SMS:nwmatgad)
- 1: Ley Hill (Birmingham), Holloway, Ley Hill Farm Road, Adjacent (SMS:nwmatgag)
- 4: Ley Hill (Birmingham), Merritt’s Brook Lane, Holloway (SMS:nwmdmtgm)
- 5: Ley Hill (Birmingham), Holloway, Merritt`S Brook Lane, Bef (SMS:nwmatgaj)
- 17: Northfield (Birmingham), Bell Hill, Bell Holloway, Adjacent (SMS:nwmatpgp)
- 21: Ley Hill (Birmingham), Meadow Brook Road, Merritts Hill (SMS:nwmgjtpd)
- 22: Ley Hill (Birmingham), Meadow Brook Road, Merritts Hill (SMS:nwmgjtpg)
- 24: Ley Hill (Birmingham), Trescott Road, Opposite Basil Road (SMS:nwmatwaw)
- 25: Ley Hill (Birmingham), Trescott Road, Basil Road, Adjacent (SMS:nwmatwda)
- 34: Ley Hill (Birmingham), Merritt’s Brook Lane, Vineyard Lane, Adjacent (SMS:nwmgjtjw)
- 35: Ley Hill (Birmingham), Merritt’s Brook Lane, School Playing Fields, Adjacent (SMS:nwmgjtjt)
- 37: Ley Hill (Birmingham), Elmdale Crescent, Opposite Colworth Road (SMS:nwmgjtwt)
- 38: Ley Hill (Birmingham), Elmdale Crescent, Colworth Road, Adjacent (SMS:nwmgjwad)
- 42: Ley Hill (Birmingham), Hoggs Lane, Barnsdale Crescent, Bef (SMS:nwmatwam)
- 43: Ley Hill (Birmingham), Hoggs Lane, Barnsdale Crescent, Bef (SMS:nwmatwap)
- 44: Ley Hill (Birmingham), Merritt’s Hill, Opposite Taysfield Road (SMS:nwmatdwd)
- 46: Ley Hill (Birmingham), Merritt’s Hill, Taysfield Road, Adjacent (SMS:nwmatdwg)
I don’t know which of these stops is the one I aimed for, so I’ll just pick the first one.
When the results come up, it’s not the stop I had in mind. But I can zoom in and look at the 8-digit codes for the stop I do want, then back track and try again. The stops labelled nwmdmtgm, nwmatgaj, and nwmgjtjt look like better prospects.
The nwmdmtgm result looks good, indicating that a 50 to the 18 is an effective option. But I want to see another one. The nwmgjtjt result tells me that the 50 to the 27 is also an option. Both routes take about 45 minutes.
There is, however, a simpler method of planning. Centro have plotted stops on a Google map. All I need to do is zoom in on an area, pick a stop, and the Centro map tells me which buses are running there. If I want to plan ahead, it links to the Transport Direct page, where I have to go through the same faff about the start or end point. But it gets me there!
Things found in the process of reseaching this stuff:
- Network West Midlands - Network West Midlands
- ÖPNV-Karte (related to Birmingham - OpenStreetMap)
- Transport Direct - Britain’s free online route planner & journey planner
- walk — walkit.com
- and the somewhat less effective National Express West Midlands, which shows timetables if you know what bus you want. It’s not so good at identifying the route by searching on the destination. I tried Merritt’s Brook Lane and had poor results.
Tagged bus, planning, travel
maplinks
Googling ‘mental maps’, the interesting results.
Mental maps versus physical cartography
Mental maps are a personal way of representing geographical space: instead of considering a place in its absolute sense, a mental map looks at it in relation with other places emotionally close. Each mental map is particular to the the environmental perception of its author, the images they have of their own life, known places and the way they are connected.
Cognitive maps shows not just where we are and what we know, but who we are. Because of their serendipitous quality, they have a great potential for the discovery of relationships not explicitly intended; they allow appreciating the internalised spatial structure upon which a person is operating. The most significant differences are those between people (or the same person at different points in time) of the same places. “It’s possible to take one geographical area and to demonstrate that it really consists of a set of overlapping places depending on which group of people we are considering. 3” Mental maps are thus interesting indicators of how we interpret our neighbourhood.
3 David Canter, Psychology of Place. Palgrave Macmillan, 1977, p.68
http://www.ctrl-n.net/journal/archives/on-cognitive-mapping/
http://www.fedstats.gov/kids/mapstats/concepts_mentalmaps.html
http://pgh-hash.blogspot.com/2009/04/poon-lim-landing-day-hash.html
http://www.landslidecommunityfarm.org/Landslide_Community_Farm/Home.html
Tagged mental maps
AstZounding
A smallish part of the reasons for lack of more and longer blogposts here and elsewhere is the awkwardness of using the software. I think I may have fixed that.
I haven’t ever shelled out for one of the premier clients - partly because they don’t necessarily keep up with the things I want to do on the net. For instance, had I been using a paid-for client that dind’t support tags when I started using Wordpress, I’d have been stuck with an obsolete tool.
But free clients aren’t necessarily better, and I periodically do a search for improved tools for the job. For the last year or so I’ve used the Firefox ScribeFire plugin, as it’s both straightforward and multi-featured. ScribeFire’s main limitation is that it’s a Firefox plugin, which means it’s slow… very slow.
After fiddling about with yesterday’s post, I decided to see what might be out there on the ‘net, and found that Zoundry (now known as Raven) had gone open source and updated versions from the 0.9.284 I’d previously tried to1.0.375. It looked quite different in the screenshot, and, even better, it works quite differently as well! It looks more like a full-fledged page editor.
It seems to have created a filestore in my Windows profile folder, and tracks my links and images separately as well.
I’m liking this enough that I’ll give it a spin - as I’m doing just now - to see if ScribeFire joins the list of obsolete clients.
Sphere: Related ContentTagged blogtools client software
Freecycle is Evil
Surprising that a search turns up just one use of the phrase, and that from three years ago.
I reckon it’s time to revive it, if only this once.
Freecycle is Evil
freecycled_out - Community Profile