Geohash

Gustavo Niemeyer announces on his blog that the Geohash service has gone public.

“Geohash offers short URLs which encode a latitude/longitude pair, so that referencing them in emails, forums, and websites is more convenient.”

More details can be read at the Geohash Wikipedia entry.

Apart from all the usual benefits to this system which are mentioned, I have a particular use-case for it: tagging historical content. Our database has a lot of content which needs to be recorded as belonging to some region, but placenames are not sufficient as they change so much over time. Some of our entries go back to the year 900. Lat/Long coding is unwieldy and subject to datum or scheme errors. So Geohash to the rescue.

It would be nifty to dedicate an ICONCLASS entry (with name) to Geohash codes, and use that for recording place. I will leave the selection of where in the hierarchy to my colleagues. But for arguments sake, 25A153 Geohash (WITH-NAME) That would be perfect, especially as you can leave of charachters to ‘widen’ the searches.

So geohashes might be the perfect fit. I don’t have the time to delve into it right now (and I have to resist the temptation) other matters are screaming for attention. This blog entry will remind me to look at it later though.

PS: And this where I am: http://geohash.org/u173yuejkj21

An artist can be both artist and entertainer, but an entertainer is not an artist

Says David Kramer in an interview with Koos Kombuis. It is a fascinating read with lots of thoughts and fact-dropping worthy of further research.

While they are discussing music, the quote very succinctly captures what I have often wondered about visual art too. But then ones’ entertainment is the others art…

And now I better stop reading varia and get to work, or the day will slip beyond my reach.

UPDATE: Lovely riff on ‘But is it Art?’:

Lego bricks actually a British invention?

I stumbled upon this page (via). It describes how British inventor and toy maker Hilary Fisher Page invented his ‘Kiddicraft Interlocking Building Cube’ and sold it as sets in Britain in the late 1940s. It seems quite clearly to be the genesis of Lego, and it turns out he only had patents in Britain but crucially not in Denmark. Best to read the whole page for details.

This certainly rocks my world-view… 😉 Well not really, but it is strange how certain ‘facts’ that you seem to know so clearly always turns out to have interesting wrinkles. If you continue reading the brickfetish site it becomes clear however that the phenomenal success was not only due to the single nifty invention of the brick, but how the Lego ‘system ‘ was then conceived and marketed in a coherent way.

So once again I remind myself: “It is not the Bright Idea, but the Execution that matters”

Update: And if you read even further it is clear that another breakthrough was the re-designed bricks of 1958. And, “But the original 1958 brick is still fully compatible with a brick manufactured today”

Slashdot isn’t news to me any more

It used to be that all the really interesting stuff first came to my attention on Slashdot. But for a while now I have seen things posted on various blogs and appearing in my feed reader before I see them on Slashdot.

Something just went ding! in my head. Another phase of my life has passed.

Toy Purchase: Dance mat for the PS2

I have been meaning to do it for yonks, and finally got round to doing it today: I ordered a dance mat for the PS2. 🙂

It is a plastic mat with giant buttons on it, which you plug into your games console. The whole family can then have fun copying the dance moves and in general giggling at each other. Wonder of it will get any use and actually be any fun, or just gather dust like so many other gadgetry. Stay tuned for an update…

The new ways money is made selling the free

…is a quote by Kevin Kelly from his essay ‘Better Than Free‘.

Worth a read for his list of the eight things that are better than free in a world where copies are easy and abundant. Makes me want to take the list and turn it into a checklist for the things I produce.

Fix for podencoder AV synch problems

I found the fix for the audio/video synchronisation problem I was having encoding recorded television programs to MP4 (H.264) files. The most excellent podencoder
script from Mark Pilgrim is absolutely the dogs bollocks in encoding media on Linux.
Especially the image quality produced by mencoder at the relatively low resolution
without me futzing with settings is great. The MP4 files produced were however slightly out of whack between the audio and video. After some headscratching and Googling I simply had to change the fps settings in the podencoder script to ’25’. My source .VOB files are made on an old KISS DP-538 player, and the fps of these VOB files are encoded at 25, but the script was trying to use something approaching 24. This is probably due to NTSC DVD disks being 23.976 fps according to Wikipedia.

Ah well, now to encode the 300GB of children’s television to keep the kids happy.