[Herts] Trailwalker geekery and other stuff

[Paul Dixon]

It's been a while since I made a meeting (thanks my wife starting to
work nights not long after I discovered HertsLug!), but I live in hope
of making it to a meeting soon. I've missed some interesting sessions
by the sounds of it!

You might remember I gave a little talk about Geograph to introduce
myself, that's still going strong, we should hit one million images by
Christmas! There's some interesting things I've been doing to it
recently which might be of interest, such as setting up bittorrent
distribution of the archive (see http://torrents.geograph.org.uk if
you fancy seeding one of the volumes!)

The other thing I could talk about is "mashing up" location data and
doing interesting things with data feeds to create something fun or
interesting. One example is that I'm doing a charity walk this
weekend, Oxfam Trailwalker, which is 62 miles in 30 hours. Among other
techniques, I've set things up so I can SMS my location and state of
mind to Twitter, and then I can grab that information and display it
on a Google map to keep people updated
(http://trailwalker.dixo.net/live-tracker). While it maybe heresy for
this list, I'm also fortunate (or foolhardy) enough to own a new
iPhone 3G, so I've exploring how to get my location off the phone and
into interesting applications also.

Anyway, hope to make a meeting soon and chat about this stuff if
anyone is interested!

Paul