James Turnbull

Posts from Rotacoo

Less clicking to inspect with Firebug

“Months without an update, and all you give me is a little tip for using a Firefox extension that’s only of interest to Web Developers?”. Yes, we’ve been busy. If, like me, you spend a lot of time inspecting websites with Firebug you’ll have got into the habit of clicking the little bug in your status [...]
Posted on 24 June 2008

Microsoft adds great new features to Live Maps, blocks UK visitors.

Yesterday Microsoft’s Virtual Earth blog announced a whole host of new features for their Live Maps service (that’s their version of Google Maps) and Virtual Earth 3D (that’s their Google Earth competitor). For me, the key feature of the announcement is “Neighbourhood Subscribe via GeoRSS” which provides an RSS feed of your area, aggregating geo-located content [...]
Posted on 11 April 2008

Minimap Sidebar for Firefox

Tony Farndon’s fantastic Minimap sidebar has quite rightly won a grand prize in the Extend Firefox 2 contest. Tony presented the plugin (originally as a Flock extension) during last year’s Refresh Edinburgh event, and we were very honoured to see that he’d even built in support for Google Sightseeing sights to be easily loaded into the [...]
Posted on 20 February 2008

RSS Fatigue

I’ve just managed, for the very first time, to get my Google Reader unread count down to zero. And I’m very proud of this achievement. I’m not the best at keeping on top of my 257 feeds, and having recently moved house I’ve been without the internet for a week or two. So the unread count [...]
Posted on 10 January 2008

Google Sightseeing (Oxford Branch) Presentation

Last night James (the Oxford branch of Google Sightseeing) did a very quick, but thoroughly entertaining, presentation about Google Sightseeing at this month’s Oxford Geek night. You can watch the 5 minute video of his Micro Presentation in mp4 format directly via this link.
Posted on 29 November 2007

Posts from Google Sightseeing

Independence Day 2008

If you’ve been wondering why half of the Internet had gone quiet, then (like us) you might not have realised that today is the 4th of July, and that means it’s America’s Independence Day. The holiday marks the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 - which is today held at the National [...]
Posted on 4 July 2008

Three Sisters, Pittsburgh

No, you’re not seeing triple - these are Pittsburgh’s Three Sisters, a trio of nearly identical suspension bridges erected side by side over the Allegheny River. Rachel Carson (Ninth Street Bridge) All three were built between 1924 and 1928 by the aptly-named American Bridge Company, and they are the only trio of nearly identical bridges, as well [...]
Posted on 3 July 2008

Tour de Street View

The first Street View images outside America are now available - Street View has come to France! Added in celebration of the upcoming Tour de France, the street view images are mostly restricted to the race route (rather than allowing you to explore whole cities). However, there is lots to see, including the most classic of sights: [...]
Posted on 2 July 2008

I’m A FOOL 4U. GINA I ♥ U

Somebody must have had a major crush on Gina to go to the effort of creating this massive, brightly-coloured graffiti on a disused highway overpass here in Seattle, that reads “I’m A FOOL 4U. GINA I ♥ U“ Usually when someone goes to the effort of creating a personal message this large and detailed it’s to [...]
Posted on 1 July 2008

Blue Trees

It’s commonly quoted as fact that in nature, no food or vegetable is naturally blue. This information was again disputed recently by the re-introduction of blue Smarties1, this time using 100% natural seaweed extract to create the blue colour. Additional support for the “blue-in-nature” brigade comes in the form of blue trees spotted on Google Earth. Firstly, [...]
Posted on 30 June 2008

Recent Del.icio.us Links

The Adventures of LOLBAT. Roflcopters.

Tags: lolcats | Posted on 4 July 2008

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button This blog has been daily posting pdf chapters of the short story from 1922, which had made into a Brad Pitt film for release later on in the year. It was a great story, which a oddly depressing ending.

Tags: reading | Posted on 4 July 2008