Urban Voodoo Machine

Saw these guys playing live today and was really blown away.  Just a great show!!

Nudging users to do the right thing!

To encourage people to take the staircase instead of the escalator, Volkswagen converted a set of steps at the Odenplan subway station in Stockholm into working piano keys. The effort is just one stunt that appears on the carmaker’s Rolighetsteorin.se or “Theory of Fun” website, which showcases efforts to get people to change by simply making things more fun.

Anyone who has read "Nudge" will recognise how important this is!

Free maps for GPS recievers

If you have a GPS reciever (not one that you use in the car, but a handheld device for trailwalking), you will find that it comes into it's own with an installed map.  Some units come with a mapbase installed, but often it is very basic (as is the case with the Garmin GPSMAP60csx).  Some have a map preinstalled, but then you have paid extra for it. With most of the devices, you can purchase and install additional maps separately.  They are available through Garmin directly or other third parties.  However, they are expensive and (in my experience) of limited use on a small display. However, there is an alternative.

The OpenStreetMap project is a wiki map project that is a free editable map of the whole world. OpenStreetMap allows you to view, edit and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere on Earth. You can download part or all of the maps for the UK for free - both with contours and providing routable maps.  The UK routable map with contours weighs in at around 250MB, but with micro SD card slots in many recievers this is not a problem.  A 1GB micro SD card will cost you less than £10.

You can download the maps from here http://sites.google.com/site/talkytoasteruk/ukmaps which also contains an FAQ and full instructions.

The instructions are straight forward and I installed it within 20 minutes on my 60csx.  The maps from what I can tell are as good as any other on the market (and these are free) and installing the maps opens up a whole new set of features on the device.  If you don't have any maps on your Garmin, I strongly suggest investigating these.  You won't be disappointed.

Geochecker

Here's another useful geocaching resource.  If you set a puzzle and want to allow finders to check their calculations, then this site will allow you to input the cache name and GC code.  It then automatically allows finders to check their location.  It generates an easier URL which you can then enter on your cache page.

http://www.geochecker.com/

It's not about the numbers. Or is it?

Here's a useful website that will take the list of your found geocaches and provide a graphical representation of the data.  You will need to be a premium member on geocaching.com to be able to run the pocket query to produce the zip file, but other than that it is just a case of uploading it to the website. 

It does seem to get overloaded on occasion and throw a server error, but I guess that is the price we pay for using a popular (and free) website. You will find it here: http://www.itsnotaboutthenumbers.com/

Once you have uploaded your zip file, you can generate various pages.  His my current summary page: