The Big Garden Birdwatch

I got up promptly yesterday morning to take part in the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch, "...the world's biggest bird survey, providing us with a vital snapshot of the UK's birds each winter.". So from 9:10 to 10:10 I saw (and, appropriately, tweeted the results)...

9:17am 3 blackbirds, 1 robin, 1 dunnock
9:27am 2 blue tits
9:40am 1 blackbird, 1 robin, 1 dunnock
9:44am 1 female blackbird
9:58am 1 blackbird, 1 dunnock, flock of 15 unidentified finch types (but they were next door and flew over)
10:09am 1 robin, 1 dunnock

Under the rules you record and submit the greatest number of each species that you see at one time so my results were...

3 blackbirds
2 blue tits
1 robin
1 dunnock

Birds seen in 2008

And for posterity, these are the birds we've seen in our garden in 2008:

Robins
Blackbirds
Long-tailed tits
Blue tits
House sparrows
Dunnocks
Coal tits
Great tits
Goldfinches
Greenfinches
Bullfinches
A goldcrest
A wren
Woodpigeons
Collared doves
Starlings
A song thrush

And we think we had the following breeding in or near the garden: long-tailed tits, blue tits, coal tits, starlings, blackbirds, greenfinches and sparrows

Last year's results are here.

Personalised guidebooks

We're going to Bruges/Brugge in a few weeks and, having just read Chris Heathcote's recent post from Papercamp which mentioned customised guidebooks, I thought I'd put them to the test for our upcoming trip...

Tripwolf, a European start-up, which I've seen mentioned a few times is apparently "...a social travel guide for the discerning traveler that combines professional editorial travel tips with traveler generated content". It didn't really impress me. You select your destination and then download the free PDF, there's no registration. But the downloaded guide contained very limited information, just a few named highlights and lots of hotels and restaurants with little information apart from the address and a very basic Google map that doesn't look much use.



traveldk from Dorling Kindersley and the Eyewitness travel guides was much better. You first have to register and then there is a large amount of content that you can browse for your chosen location. It's not organised particularly well, there's just a big list of attractions, restaurants and shops which you have to click through to see more details before selecting it to be added to your guide. There are some "Top 10s" as well, but you only get summary information. Having selected your content you can then shuffle the pages/articles around, add some chapter pages, some blurb and a cover photo. The site then creates your guide and you can buy a full-colour PDF for £2.50 or spend £10 to get it professionally printed and bound. I just got the PDF so I can't comment on the book version. As well as your selected items you get colour maps of the area (I ended up with Bruges, Brussels and a few more Belgian towns).



This was a much better experience but I have a few criticisms. There is a lot of clicking to get the content you want and it would be easier if you could just select everything related to that city/country. Organising the book was also difficult as you just get a drag-and-drop Flash interface showing article titles (which were generally Flemish names!). And the content turns out to be fairly brief, which isn't necessarily bad though more in-depth info would have been good as an option. But the worst part is that there is no preview - so you have to pay the money before you see what you've created - I was a bit disappointed that most of the individual articles were identical to the summaries in the "Top 10" sections - so I ended up with a lot of repetition in the guide and pages that I'll throw away. Finally, you can share your customised guide so other users can purchase it.

Now the next two aren't really personalised but are worth mentioning as a comparison.



Lonely Planet sell single chapters of most (?) of their guidebooks as PDFs. I got the Western Flanders and Bruges chapter for £3.36, which gets you 50 pages, 19 pages of them about Bruges plus a map, all exactly as in the guidebook. Pretty good option for a weekend away I think.



I had originally bought the Rough Guide "Directions Bruges & Ghent" for the trip and on searching for this I found this page...

"Please enter the first word on page 17 of the Bruges DIRECTIONS guide as your password to access the e-books:"

...which then lets you download the entire book as a PDF - very nice and totally unexpected.

So overall it depends what you're looking for. Convenience? Cost? Portability? Pre-trip reading? The "personalised" guidebooks aren't really personalised in any meaningful way but the Dorling Kindersley one goes furthest in the right directions but needs more detail and a preview function. With all of these options you lose a bit of the cultural and historical background that you'll get in a full-size country guidebook and they'll be most appropriate for short trips and weekend breaks. I'm happiest with the actual paper guidebook I think and after all it's only the price of a couple of beers...

Links for 18-01-09

Who or What is Bubblino? | MCQN Limited
"Bubblino is a Twitter-monitoring, bubble-blowing Arduino-bot."

russell davies: from product to project
"But what would be really nice would be if it [the bag] could tell its own story more. Generate its own data. I could attach an RFID tag, but I'm not quite sure what would ever read it. I guess ideally it would have it's own GPS logging stick sewn in. Or something." - what about sewing a NikePlus into the bottom?

A wooden radio
"Hand-crafted in an Indonesian farming village, the Magno AM/FM radio has an appealing mix of retro and modern styling. Made from new growth wood, for every tree that is used in production, a new one is planted. Its uncoated surface should be oiled periodically to encourage a deeper connection between user and object. MP3 compatible, with short wave reception."

VisualizingLastfm
Final year project to visualise trends of fans on last.fm using Processing. Look forward to the English documentation appearing.

The Renegades at the New York 'Times
"The proposal was to create a newsroom: a group of developers-slash-journalists, or journalists-slash-developers, who would work on long-term, medium-term, short-term journalism—everything from elections to NFL penalties to kind of the stuff you see in the Word Train."

TA Frank: The change we need
"No one thought Al Gore would be a loveable president, but, after eight years in the White House, he has gotten truly tiresome. The droning voice, the purchase of an eco-friendly robot dog, the campaign for carbon-free diamonds - all these things were hard to take, and he has been way too smug about reversing global warming. I think we've gone too far in the opposite direction, especially in light of the glacier that recently crushed Wasilla."

Blog: It's time to redesign the guitar
"Why are they still making guitars with "real" strings that are difficult and boring to learn how to play and really make your fingers hurt? What is the point? Do we still slaughter our own cows? Dig our own wells? Work in the turnip fields for 18 hours a day, six days a week? No. Buttons have proven themselves to be much easier and more efficient. " Quite.

Helios : A Classical Mix by Keith Kenniff on Type Records
Interesting classical music mix as "Keith Kenniff of Helios and Goldmund fame brings together some of his favourite classical music to give us a taste of his references and influences."

Jazzwise Magazine - Jazzwise Albums Of The Year 2008
Top 10 new albums and top 10 reissues from 2008.

More at http://delicious.com/tristanf

Links for 11-01-09

Radio Public
Curating the best of US public radio.

Twadio! Silent radio for Twitter
"Twadio is a radio station you can't hear. Through the magic of Twitter, it plants a new song in your brain every few minutes. Just follow the Tweejay and it'll play you the tunes right inside your head." - Another idea from Dubber and co.

Mixed Content » A chat with Spotify, and how the URL is the next MP3
"To this end, Spotify have rolled out a cool feature where one can now link to a specific point in time in a song. This link for example, points to Jimi Hendrix’s solo in Little Wing (but you have to have the Spotify beta client installed for it to work)". Didn't know that. They're also producing a large music metadata store based on a number of sources.

zengestrom.com: iTunes and Spotify
"Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has explained his strategy is to simply provide access to music. He sees Spotify as the supplier of social objects for other social networks." - interesting thoughts on iTunes and Spotify

sniff_jazzbox
The iPhone app "sniff_jazzbox creates an audible city. it converts the wlan-waves into sound waves. the wlan conversion uses a streamsearch algorithm which was also used in streamfishing and searchsongs. the extended version for iphone will let the user control instruments and speed of the melodies."

The Science of Spore--The "Evolution" of Gaming: Scientific American
"Spore does not in fact proceed by natural selection at all but rather by artificial selection. Indeed, putting the player in the position of an omnipotent creator makes the game more a simulation of intelligent design than of real-world Darwinian selection."

University of Huddersfield -- Circulation and Recommendation Data
"Since 2005, the University of Huddersfield has provided book recommendations within its library catalogue, driven by mining of the historical circulation usage data. Involvement with the JISC TILE Project led to a decision to release a sizeable portion of the usage data in the hope that it might prove beneficial to others. The released data represents about 70% of the total circulation data available -- only items with low circulation and/or no ISBNs have been omitted."

Baby Steps | R4isStatic.com
Paul is creating RDF/FOAF for the Doctor. Partly inspired by previous BBC work on the Archers and Eastenders

Bug Blogger » Blog Archive » Five New BUGmodules!
The modular hardware hacking system now has modules for a mini DLP-based projector and audio I/O.

350 - Accidental Maps: Cartocacoethes or Blatant Pareidolia? « Strange Maps
"cartocacoethes - the compulsion to see maps everywhere" - photos of things that look like maps

tiltshiftmaker.com - Transform your photos into tilt-shift miniatures
Upload a photo and transform it into a tiltshift

More at http://www.delicious.com/tristanf

Running in 2008

Look away now, this one's definitely for my reference. 2008 was the year I started running a bit more seriously, and my first year with a Nike Plus pedometer. I ran my first 10k in September which made my leg hurt, hence the drop in September! So, according to Nike Plus...





About 245 miles in total, though the Flash-only Nike site doesn't really help in working that out.

Listening in 2008

According to last.fm...



It's not quite comprehensive or accurate - where's the Bheki Mseleku I recently discovered? Possibly because the iPhone, though now scrobbling, isn't quite right yet and Spotify, a recent much-loved discovery, has only just started scrobbling. And some of my partner's listening has sneaked in there (the Royksopp mainly).

Good new stuff there includes the latest The Bad Plus album, For All I Care, with added vocals and 20th century classical works, Aaron Parks' debut, Invisible Cinema, another piano-led Mehldau-esque band, Bill Frisell's History, Mystery which has been this Christmas's listening, lots of Brad Mehldau and, sadly, the final EST album, Leucocyte

I've only got 4 months of radio listening tracked via Radio Pop so that will have to wait until next year.