Linkstew

Between Google releasing Earth on Tuesday and a map API yesterday, and Yahoo! also releasing a map API yesterday, it's an exciting week for the map lover in me.

But between all the announcements, it was easy to overlook the launch of the A9 maps beta. I admit I'm biased, but I think it's pretty neat. One of my first comments when I saw this was "when did mapquest get such pretty maps?" Be sure to check out a city with Block View data (how about San Francisco?) to experience how much fun it can be to explore the Block View images with this interface. Don't miss the "Mark Streets With Block View" toggle.

Remember, it's actually a beta (I haven't actually asked the guys who are working on this, but I don't doubt that this claim that they finished at 2 am). Also check out what DeWitt has to say.

It's definitely exciting times for maps. I can't wait to see what someone comes up with next.

"Bush urges nation to remember 9/11" Oh yeah, 9/11... Wasn't that the thing that that Osama bin Laden guy was blamed for? Say, whatever happened to that guy, anyway?

Am I missing something, or is there really no useful way to represent "photographer" in iPhoto/EXIF/IPTC?

Industrial Plant in St. Louis Is Exploding. It's not very often you see the present tense used with a verb like "exploding." We just spent the last 15 minutes of lunch staring at the TV. Apparently it was an oxygen tank factory, so every few seconds there was another Yoga Fire into the sky when another tank blew up. If you're near a TV, check it out.

Sometimes the little things can totally make my day, and while driving home from Fathers Day this weekend, I had just such a moment.

I keep my CDs in a 2x2 CD binder which normally lives in my passenger seat. Without really thinking about it, I had always just oriented it "right side up," which required me to reach just slightly too far to comfortably access the top row of CDs.

So, I turned my CD binder upside down, so now all the CD slots are facing towards me instead of towards the passenger door, making my interaction with each row effectively two rows closer. Not only is this a lot easier, but it's probably safer, too.

This is the trace of one year of one person's walking and biking in New York City. Pretty cool.

I just noticed there's a GeoPlugin for WordPress. I suddenly have the urge to go annotate all my old posts with geographic information.

Dreamworks' snazzy video conference room sounds amazing. I think I'd be entertained just by seeing that thing in action. The virtual party they describe reminds me of a party Linden Lab threw during GDC this year at Varnish. They were projecting a real time feed from a Second Life rendition of Varnish where a virtual party was also going on. They were also going to display a video feed of the real party on the equivalent virtual wall, but they apparently ran into some problems with the streaming quicktime functionality required.

Jim Motavalli's New York Times review of the Honda FCX was quite an encouraging read:

Given my experience with fuel-cell prototypes that were noisy, balky and incapable of going very far between refuelings, the FCX was something of a surprise. Featuring the latest generation of Honda's own fuel cells (hundreds of them are arrayed in two multiple sets, called stacks) and a body and electric motor derived from the company's unsuccessful EV Plus battery vehicle, the FCX felt like a real car, not a high-strung test mule.

The FCX carried a federal combined city-highway economy rating of 57 miles per kilogram, but since the car holds less than four kilos of hydrogen - a very light gas - long cruises are a challenge. [...]

The pricing of hydrogen remains fluid. The Department of Energy has estimated that the cost of a kilogram of hydrogen (with roughly the energy content of a gallon of gasoline) could fall to $3 by 2008, but that assumes certain economies of scale that have not yet been established.

In particular, I'm interested in what's involved in preparing hydrogen for usage in a fuel cell. That process needs to be clean and efficient, too.

While searching for this review on news.google.com so I could read the NYT article without logging in, I came across Mike Millikin's discussion of the same NYT article:

A successful plug-in hybrid strategy will have some major PR work to do to counter the apparently automatic (and from what I can tell, unwarranted) bias against a plug-in architecture.

I don't think a bias against plugging in is unwarranted. I suspect people's objections are based on the lack a plug-in terminal infrasctructure . Anything they can't take away from home very long probably isn't going to be received well, and in my case, I wouldn't even be able to use it at home in the first place: I only have street parking for my car; Where would I ever be able to plug it in?

More importantly, as long as there's resistance to plug-ins, there will probably never be enough demand for the infrastructure to overcome the logistical issues with making it available.

See also: laptops.

Oh my god, they've reached a verdict in the Michael Jackson trial! He's ... oh, just kidding. The news is just that they've reached a verdict, not what the verdict was. It was news pre-release announcement and now they've tricked everyone into refreshing news homepages every 5 seconds. What a fabulous waste of 30 minutes of America's time. Thanks, the media!

I had already decided that I wanted to replace my aging Nokia 3650 with a Nokia 6682, and Russell's epic 6680 hardware and software post and Om Malik's review only make me more certain that I'll be picking up this phone as soon as it's available.

As part of the migration, I decided move Links To from being a separate column of links to being small entries commingled with regular entries, Kottke style. I actually copied the format and code of Photo Matt's (The author of WordPress!) "Asides." This has the advantages of freeing up room for other layout options (and more importantly, letting me move to two columns) and allowing me to post small thoughts without the overhead of having a meaningful title. The upshot of this is, if you're subscribing to the "Links To" feed, stop; It's gone.