If Star Trek’s computers were real…
Posted by a friend of mine on Facebook… I LMAO:
To be more realistic, Star Trek interactions with the computer should have gone more like this:
“Computer, hail the Klingons.”
“What was that?”
“Hail the Klingons!”
“To help me understand you better, please tell me what you just said…..
1) Ale to Vogons
2) Hail on Vulcan
3) Bale for Klingons”
“None of the above!”
“Initiating death from above.”
“No, stop!”
“Coming to full stop.”
Playlist dumper for iTunes
I’ve been meaning to write this bit of software for a while now, its a simple app that dumps out all your playlists in iTunes into .m3u playlist files.
I use it to generate playlists that my HTPC (running Boxee) can play.
It’s a .NET app. You can download it here: PlaylistDumper_v101.zip
If the “dump folder” is the root of your music library then the .m3u file will contain relative paths which is useful for playing across network shares.
Auckland bus stops in Google Earth
Since Jonah asked for it, I have generated a KML file of the Auckland bus stop data. If you have Google Earth installed then click on this link to see the stops overlaid on an actual map: http://www.rabidgremlin.com/viz/auckland_bus_stops_kml/auckland_bus_stops.kmz
If you hover over a red dot you will get the stop’s number. Interestingly if you zoom in enough, you will see that Google already has all the stops loaded and if you click on a little bus icon under a red dot, you will get the route info for that stop.
Have fun.
Fun with Auckland bus data
A couple of days ago I discovered that Auckland Regional Transport Authority (ARTA) make all of their bus schedule data available for download from the maxx.co.nz site. The data is in the Google Transit Feed format, which means that it consists of a bunch of comma separated value text files, describing things like stops, routes, trips and calendars.
I decided to see what I could do with this data. Below is my first attempt. It is a “density” map of all the bus stops in Auckland.
Click here for a hi-res version that allows you to pan and zoom.
The initial version of the map only took about 30 minutes to create but I have spent a few hours tinkering with it since then.
Quick guide
Here is quick guide to the process if you want to try something like this yourself:
- I extracted stops.txt from the data set
- I then gpsvisualizer.com to plot out the stops as data points on map. I got it to output a 4096 pixel wide .svg file
- Next I used Inkscape to edit the .svg file, adding the text & zoomed area and exporting the result as a .png file.
- Lastly I used the Google Maps Image Cutter to generate the pannable and zoomable version. The Google Maps Image Cutter is a pretty neat tool. It takes any big image, chops it into different resolution tiles and then spits out some html which uses the Google Maps API to view your chopped up image.
Next steps
If I get some more time I will try create some more visualizations. I’m thinking it would be interesting to merge the bus stop density data with some population data. Also an animation showing 24hrs of bus movement compressed into a couple of minutes would be pretty nice too.
The Amen Break
Came across this fascinating clip about the “Amen Break”, a 5 second sample taken from a 1960 b-side recording by a funk and soul bank. Amazingly this loop became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music. Not to mention that it has been used on numerous hip-tracks too.
Watch the video below and check out the Wikipedia page for more info
BTW if you ever played with MOD trackers in the 90′s then check out Sony’s free ACID Xpress and relive those glory days :)
