t:. toastcrumbs

NZ Android Phone News

toastcrumbs — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:16:10 +0000

Just a quick note to say that another Below43 site has launched: NZ Android Phone News.

The site aims to bring news about the Google Android Phone to NZ.

More here.

Library of New Zealand on Flickr

toastcrumbs — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 23:21:58 +0000

The latest post on the Flickr Blog is about the National Library of New Zealand which was one of the first users of Flickr’s Commons which is for public photo archives. The library’s collection is viewable here and the blog post is here. Nice to see someone in the NZ public sector up with the technology.

Announcing Kawhe.com

toastcrumbs — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 04:50:22 +0000

I’ve had the idea for a while, and now that I’m back in Aotearoa, and in a new city, its a good chance to get it started. Kawhe.com is the name for my new site, “New Zealand Cafe Review”.

The idea behind this is to identify the best cafes in New Zealand. At the moment we have reviewers in Christchurch and Auckland, but I’m hoping that as interest grows, so will the number of available reviewers.

This was a good exercise in Wordpress setups. The whole thing including finding a good theme and installing caching and star review module (to put pretty stars on the page) took four hours. In time, I may want to change the site to arrange reviews in a better structure, but for now tagging and categories will help me organise the reviews.

Reviews take into account the coffee (both espresso and flat whites), food and atmosphere.

Click here to go to kawhe.com…

Port Hills Drive

toastcrumbs — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:09:54 +0000

Lydia was working and it was a beautiful hot sunny day (temperature in the high 20’s), so decided to go for a drive in the Port Hills above Christchurch. I took quite a few photos on Summit Rd - this runs along the rim between two volcanic craters (one of which forms Lyttleton Harbour). Lovely views of the ocean (New Brighton Beach in particular), Christchurch and the Southern Alps (a wee bit of snow left) - could also see beyond the haze towards Kaikoura and the Alps extending further North from Christchurch. Morocco and China photos will be up as soon as I get a chance… View photos here or click here for a slideshow.

Below43

toastcrumbs — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 22:51:57 +0000

It’s been a while since I posted anything. Since then I’ve left BEAM and flown halfway around the world via various contries. Posts about China, Macau and Hong Kong are still in the pipeline. Meanwhile, Lydia and I are now safely in beautiful New Zealand and below 43 degrees South of the equator. As such, my new website to promote my work is called Below43.com. My friend Martin Buchan has also recently left BEAM.TV and has a new site at www.postwork.co.uk and a blog here.

Dad’s in the Tate Modern

toastcrumbs — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:06:28 +0000

Dad just received news he’s in the Street or Studio Tate Modern competition. He was in a group of 100 out of 2600 submissions which is pretty cool! His shot is of a fishmonger in Shanghai sleeping in her fish-bowl. Click the image on the left or click here to view it.

The 100 winners are viewable here. His other submission is here. My submissions were this and this. The views went up slightly on the first one during judging so I was hopeful, but obviously Dad pushed me out of the competition - I’m not jealous at all ;)

Photosynth

toastcrumbs — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 11:46:44 +0000

Photosynth (a cool Microsoft Labs product which stiches collections of photos together in a 3D panorama) have recently opened up to allow people to submit their own content. I just uploaded a series of photos from Djemaa el Fna at dusk from a restaurant balcony (see video of the square at night in a previous post) - it took a few attempts to get 100% of the photos stitched together (it does it automatically but some photos don’t always match up - you have to edit your submission, remove the images and reupload).

The final result is pretty cool. I think it gives a really good feel for the square and the people in it. To view it click here.

Only works on Windows unfortunately. Mac and Linux users get a polie message: “Unfortunately, we’re not cool enough to run on your OS yet.” Probably something to do with it being a Microsoft product.

Djemaa El Fna in Marrakech

toastcrumbs — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:25:05 +0000

I took loads of photos in Morocco so it will take a while before they are ready to put up on this site. However, in the meantime, here’s a video I took using Lydia’s camera while in the Djemaa El Fna square in Marrakech. The square is amazing - by day its full of orange juice vendors, snake charmers and henna tattoo artists, but at dusk, the smoke starts rising and the drums start drumming and it becomes alive. Its amazing to watch and experience, and hopefully the video gives a tiny hint of that. For more on the square, go here.

Beam.tv Mobile in Broadcast Magazine

toastcrumbs — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 08:29:30 +0000

Beam Mobile got into the Broadcast Magazine today. There’s a few good soundbites from Mikey who is one of our developers, including, “This is a fundamental shift in how content is accessed”.

Unfortunately I was away in holiday so didn’t get interviewed for it. Its nice to see a mobile and not just an iPhone focus on the article though.

The article is here, and the print version goes into this week’s publication.

Garmin Nuvi 300

toastcrumbs — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:19:36 +0000

I’ve been playing around with the Garmin Nuvi 300 trying to get Morocco maps on it. There is a guy who’s made the maps freely available here. I got the Nuvi 300 from Amazon (at the moment it seems they don’t have it in stock) - partly for the bargain price and partly because i knew the Morocco map only works on Garmin.

The Nuvi 300 seems to be really good and I’m very happy with it so far - I used it to find out where we were in Epping Forest while mountain biking the other day, and it works from within my office. Its very fast finding satellites (using its internal aerial) and is very light and compact compared to the TomTom’s I have used in the past. Interface-wise, its harder to get to advanced functionality than a TomTom - but perhaps that’s a good thing.

Finally managed to get the maps onto the model by downloading a copy of MapSource. Generally Garmin supplies this with the GPS on CD, but mine didn’t come with it. Thankfully I found a site that described how to obtain a copy (http://freegeographytools.com/2007/garmin-mapsource-for-free). I used the second method which was a MapSource update.

Update (13/08): I used the maps in Morocco and they were fairly useful. The waypoints that I added were especially useful, and we used the GPS on occasions to navigate the maze of medinas. However, the free map offers no routing which was a slight pain - there was a rough road map (I think this is a world map) already loaded on to the unit which offered routing though the roads were not very detailed. This was hard to turn off, though proved useful for some route planning. The offroad routing was useful for navigation on locations that didn’t have the world map routes - eg. going to Merzouga.

In general, we navigated very easily as the signeage in Morocco is excellent which meant in combination with our paper Morocco road map and the GPS we got around Morocco with little effort. Driving into a Saharan sandstorm topped the driving experiences - we used the offroad GPS routing to navigate to our hotel at the foot of the dunes!

Update 2 (15/12) - You can still get this unit from Amazon UK at a fairly decent price - click here to view