bioneural.net

Down the Nile to ancient Thebes

Bruce + Simone — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 21:15:13 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

Following our visit to Abu Simbel and other temples on the shores of Lake Nasser, the second part of our 2010 Egyptian holiday involved a cruise down the Nile from Philae (Aswan) to Thebes (Luxor). Overview of our Nile cruise itinerary En route to board our boat at Aswan we drove through the Western Desert before making a stop at the High Dam, and then caught a small boat out to the island temple of Philae. From Aswan we sailed downstream, calling in on Kom Ombo then Edfu before reaching Luxor. From Luxor excursions comprised Karnak Temple, Valley of Kings, Temple of Hatshepsut, Colossi of Memnon, and Luxor Temple. Waypoints on the Nile Download a KMZ file (82KB) for viewing the above map in Google Earth, showing tracks at the key sites and location thumbnails. Recorded with a GlobalSat BT-335; zoom right in to see our footsteps! Nile cruise KMZ Day 5 to Aswan The early afternoon bus journey from Abu Simbel through the Western Desert took several hours. We made one stop, to look at a mirage that was barely in evidence due to the dust haze. What was remarkable about the journey, however, was how many different kinds of nothingness we passed through. Western Desert with sand haze Before reaching Aswan, given our approach from the south, we visited the High Dam and the Temple of Philae. Excursions to the High Dam and Philae Temple We couldn't really see much at the High Dam due to haze. We could only just make out the Egyptian-Russian monument, commemorating ...

Monuments of ancient Nubia

Bruce + Simone — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 18:52:27 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

Bruce determined that he wanted to visit Abu Simbel as a child, when he came across an old National Geographic from May 1966 describing how the temples were saved from drowning. Although the engineering achievement was remarkable, what struck him at the time were the depictions of life in ancient Egypt. While he never did get to reign as Pharaoh, he has at least fulfilled that early ambition to see these magnificent temples for himself. In February 2010 we flew into Luxor (ancient Thebes, in the former Upper Egypt) and travelled south of Aswan (the site of ancient Philae, near the First Cataract) into the northern lands of Nubia (known as the Kingdom of Kush after decolonisation, now mostly in Sudan). Below are crops from two of the wanderlust-evoking paintings from the article Saving the ancient temples at Abu Simbel by Georg Gerster and Robert Nicholson, National Geographic 1966 129(5) p.694. We managed to track down a copy in good condition via an Internet bookseller and had it delivered from the US by airmail, all for a very reasonable £9.93. Pharaonic grandeur at Abu Simbel (© National Geographic 1966) Overview of our Nubian itinerary Our first stop on Lake Nasser was the Temple of Kalabsha, just south of the High Dam at Aswan. We 'sailed' south towards Abu Simbel with the Western Desert (eastern Sahara) to our starboard bow. Abu Simbel itself is about 70km north of the Sudanese border. All of the Nubian temples we saw (except for Kasr Ibrim) had been moved ...

myTracks plays nice with Places

Bruce — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 18:37:31 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

myTracks is track log manager (importing from a GPS logger or GPX file) and editor. Trackpoints can be individually adjusted and tracks can be split or simplified. Geocaching is built-in, with local caching of OpenStreetMap mapping. Geotagging is also supported, with reverse geocoding of photo locations (writing coordinates to EXIF/IPTC headers and optionally updating iPhoto's Places database). Uniquely, tracks can be created from geotagged photos (with export to GPX and KMZ); direct upload to Flickr and Locr is supported.

Find which application is using a file

Bruce — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 15:44:15 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

Not infrequently during my use of Apple's OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) I have been seeing a dialogue upon emptying the Trash telling me that 'This operation can't be completed because the item "xxx" is in use'. The culprit has been Mail.app, and the scenario seems to occur when I attempt to delete a file after having sent it as an attachment (and some time after the event at that). Here is the dialogue: Given that I know the file is not open, how do I find out what application thinks it is still in use? Thanks to a response on Apple Discussions, all you need to do is run the 'list open files' (lsof) command in Terminal.app: sudo lsof /path/to/file A shortcut to entering the file path correctly is to drag and drop the file from the Finder into the open Terminal window. In this example, Mail.app was refusing to let go of a Dilbert .gif file I had sent some hours previously: The solution was to quit Mail, empty the Trash, and relaunch Mail. Easily solved, but something Apple should be fixing, surely?

Open Share Icon from idea to Google

Bruce — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:27:23 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

You know a concept has merit when it's picked up by Google. Google have adopted the Open Share Icon (OSI), the product of a creative partnership that I'm proud to have played a part in. This is something to celebrate: you don't need highly paid professionals or deep pockets to pull off a good idea: you just need plain-old enthusiasm and an unmet need. Here is the story of how the Open Share Icon (OSI) came to be. The Google toolbar—now with OSI A proposal On 20 March 2008 I read that Shareaholic had been threatened by ShareThis.com over the use of the Share Icon in their functionally similar Firefox extension. After discussing this with David Hall and Icerabbit we agreed that next day I would write to Jay Meattle, entrepreneur at Shareaholic, to seek confirmation this was so—and to float the idea of his involvement in an alternative icon project. Having recently proposed and completed the design of the Geotag Icon we were game to be involved ourselves: If you needed assistance with the vector graphics, moral or other practical support, I know of at least a couple of volunteers ;-) Iteration after iteration Things moved quickly: we didn't wait for a response. David, Icerabbit and I exchanged an enormous number of design candidates within the space of a few days. Most of our designs involved hands: Our final selection came down to stylised "seeing hands", which we described in the design note I sent to Jay on 24 March as follows: We just couldn't help ourselves ...

Air Sharing between iPhone and Mac

Bruce — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 16:14:38 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

Air Sharing is a fab app for iPhone that lets you mount a file store on the device to the desktop as a wireless share. You can browse your files using any decent web browser, and even upload files to the phone—albeit one file at a time. This limitation can be overcome by mounting the iPhone as a network drive (on Mac from the Finder Go > Connect to Server... and enter the server address). Rather than have to visit this menu each time, wouldn't it be nice if there were a one-click way to mount iPhone? There's a app for that. Yep, there's an app for that if you're willing to make one. Fear not, this is very simple using Automator which brings AppleScripting to the Rest of Us. The iPhone supports Apple's Bonjour networking protocol, and can be recognised by either the assigned device name or IP address. If like me you use your iPhone on more than one WiFi network, it might be assigned a different IP address via DHCP. Because of this it makes sense to use the iPhone's Bonjour name rather than IP address, which you can identify from within Air Sharing by taping on the WiFi icon: My Air Sharing app is built with three Automator actions: Get Specified Servers, Connect to Servers, and Show Growl Notification (Growl is an essential OS X add-on). In Automator drag these actions to the right side of the window in the order shown: In the Get Specified Servers action click Add ...

Geotagging on WordPress.com

Bruce — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 08:08:38 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

WordPress.com has introduced geotagging of user profiles and posts. Location is input manually via an integrated Google map or automatically via GPS, the W3C Geolocation API, the Google Gears Geolocation API, or guesstimated from your IP address. The geodata are recorded in posts via the geo microformat plus geo.position and ICBM meta tags, and in feeds via GeoRSS and W3C geodata standards. More here; where's the geotag icon?

Twitter release per-tweet geotagging API

Bruce — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 08:19:52 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

Twitter's geotagging API is official. There is now a checkbox to enable geotagging in your Twitter account settings; enabling this option allows third party applications to annotate individual tweets with location data. Developers could previously integrate only profile location with the Google Maps API as here.

Castles in the sand

Bruce — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:55:02 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

Taken at Sugar Beach, Flic en Flac, Republic of Mauritius. Click thumbnail to enlarge imageCastles in the sand

A Mini adventure

Bruce — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 19:05:21 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

Apparently the diminutive Mini is 50 years old this year. Worthing played host to a Mini rally today and—although not fans—we took the opportunity to have a look at what it takes to be an enthusiast. Herewith a few shots taken with my iPhone's equally diminutive 2MP camera. A political statement on the UK automotive industry: This one might have had a small part in the Transformers movie if it wasn't pink: Initial attempts at cross-breeding with Smarts were semi-successful, resulting in the Mini 0.5 Edition: Retrofitting a Space Shuttle main engine to a Mini... the power of dreams: Yep, that essential engine component really is made from a Red Bull can: Restoration on a budget using a repurposed jam jar with coat hanger mounting: This Mini toots like a truck: