I bought a Tevion 32″ LCD TV from Aldi a few months back, and was intrigued by the 8-pin RJ45 connector marked ‘serial’ on the back panel.

I finally got around to investigating it this weekend … the results are here…

People continue to find new ways to explore Google Map’s public API. Today, I came across this site:

http://www.sueandpaul.com/gmapPedometer/

It lets you measure the walking (or cycling) distance between any two points in the city, simply by double-clicking all the significant direction changes along the router. Simple, but effective.

A friend referred me to this website today:

http://www.mackers.com/projects/dartmaps/

It’s a very cool Google Maps hack that scrapes realtime DART position info from Irish Rail’s website and plots it on a Google Map of Dublin.

Be sure to zoom in – you can actually see the trains moving in realtime. Click on a train to find out its destination.

Amazing what you can do with a bit of XML, scripting and some ingenuity…

New Scientist has an interesting article about a new robot with a knack for finding its feet.

While there have previously been some impressive demonstration videos of robots from Toyota, Honda and Sony, this is the first robot I’ve seen that actually mimicked human like movement patterns.

You can download the 13 MB demo video here; it’s rather unsettling to watch.

I just hope they have a good team working on the software…

I came across this article about RAID systems under Linux, and some of the problems that can occur.

It’s interesting reading, especially the explanation as to why a single drive failure in a Linux RAID system is often also followed by a second failure before the array has had a chance to rebuild … rather concerning, since that can effectively negate the redundancy benefit of having a RAID in the first place.

Let’s hope my MegaRaid SATA150-6 controller doesn’t suffer from similar problems…

Also of interest: drive manufacturers appear to be routinely making minor adjustments to the size of discs, even when the model number remains the same – this can cause problems when swapping out a dead drive, if the replacement is slightly smaller. Might be an idea to stockpile a few spare drives to have on hand which are from the same batch as your original set.

Those clever folks at sysinternals.com have a blog entry up describing how to run Windows with no services whatsoever enabled — a very neat trick.

The article is here and is well worth a read if you like to know what goes on under the hood on your Windows system.

Not content with playing with World Wind (referenced in an earlier post), I see now that Keyhole are offering a commercial version of the same technology – or at least very similar technology. Google bought Keyhole last year, so they now have some mighty computing resources behind them.

Keyhole wins on ease of use (faster, less interruptions while pulling down map data, usually faster downloads courtesy of Google’s impressive servers) and scope (more aerial maps of more cities) but loses a bit on general detail – planet-level maps are only down to a resolution of 1 Km or so, while World Wind gets down to 30m outside the big cities.

Also, the interface for moving around the globe seems slightly more refined with World Wind – I kept finding Ireland was upsidedown when I rotated the globe in Keyhole, and rarely had that problem with World Wind.

Keyhole is $30/year subscription (7 day free trial) and given that the maps are being continually updated, this is probably good value. Worth a look at the very least…

Update: It looks like Google have re-branded this now as Google Earth, free for personal use!

Here’s a useful link from a friend (thanks, Kevin!)

http://www.grynx.com/index.php/projects/laptop-on-the-wall-walltop/

A nice look at the steps needed to convert that old laptop into a neat wall-mounted photo/art display.

I was away last weekend at the annual ICPUG Charmouth meet, and saw a very cool demo of Nasa’a World Wind mapping tool.

It’s hard to do it justice in a description, but essentially it provides a 3D interface to a world database of satellite maps, such that you can wander around the globe with your mouse, zooming in to any area to a resolution of around ~30m (and down to ~1m in some parts of the US). Generally, US detail is much better than in the rest of the world, since there are more detailed maps available for free – in Europe and elsewhere, similar maps are quite expensive.

You need a decent PC (1.5 GHz+), graphics card, and hard disk (5-10 GB for the cached data, 1 GB minimum), along with a fast Internet connection, but it’s well worth it – if you haven’t seen World Wind already, give it a try.

For those of you who use it, my DVD list now sports a handy search field … enjoy.