| memepool rage against the turing machine |
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| Monday Mar 27, 2006 | The Historic American Buildings Survey and Historic American Engineering Record is a project which documents historic landmarks, as well as structures which are likely to be demolished or lost due to neglect. Slowly they are putting their documents online at the Library of Congress. It seems that structures are often documented just before they are demolished with some support from the owners, perhaps as a condition of permitting. to History by shadow |
| Saturday Jan 25, 2003 | Whether you're a Thunderbirds fan or a stop-motion animation lover, the Supermarionation site is a must-visit. to Television by shadow |
| Saturday Jan 11, 2003 | Bullitt, the movie known for a chase where Steve McQueen speeds around San Francisco chasing down hitmen, provides an interesting look at San Francisco in 1968; You can also see how it looks in 1999 and 2002. to Movies by shadow |
| Wednesday Jul 24, 2002 | Video Orbits have theoretical uses beyond panoramic photography. The software stitches images automatically, and would be great for pasting large documents scanned on consumer scanning products, if I could only get the low overlap case to work.
to Computing by shadow |
| Tuesday Jul 23, 2002 | DjVu is intended to be an all-encompassing document format. You can get a free version from SourceForge or buy it from LizardTech. I find this very odd, as the most useful part, in my opinion, is the image compression technology, which looks like it would be great for maps and especially aerial photos. That market is currently served nicely by another LizardTech product, MrSid.
Indeed, LizardTech gives away various MrSid viewers and tools, but the image server software disappeared, taking along with it the tool which could be used to batch-decode images on Linux machines. For the hobbyist, product pricing is daunting, and hand-decoding isn't very useful, if the viewer software even supports GeoTIFF exports. At least someday GDAL will likely support DjVu, which will ease the space requirements of keeping a personal cache of geodata.
to Computing by shadow |
| Wednesday Mar 27, 2002 | Just as suburban development has been the bane of the urban infrastructure which came before it the next generation of suburban development left these less aesthetically pleasing but just as significant pieces of
of retailing past to rot around the country. Included are malls like the Dixie Mall, seen by so many being wrecked in the Blues Brothers movie, and malls that are doing fine.
to Business by shadow |
| Monday Feb 25, 2002 | For people with an interest in historical maps or the northeastern United States, University of New Hampshire has a historical USGS map collection online.
You'll also want to learn about standard symbols used on old maps. to Cartography by shadow |
| Thursday Feb 21, 2002 | Here's an awesome model of the
Terre Haute Union Station, which served the
Chicago and Eastern Illinois as well as a line which would eventually become past of the vast, past Pennsylvania Railroad,
after much battling in the background. to Toys by shadow |
| Sunday Feb 10, 2002 | Looking for a GPS
tracking
application? Xastir may be just the thing, even if you don't have an
amateur radio license.
to Cartography by shadow |
| Sunday Jan 20, 2002 | Everything you wanted to know about
Digital Video cameras
including
format comparisons,
codec comparisons,
and
tons of technical
specifications.
to Technology by shadow |
| Tuesday Jan 8, 2002 | Before Chicago had a subway,
it had a subway! to Transportation by shadow |
| Thursday Dec 27, 2001 | Moving? Scared your favorite radio station will go away? (Maybe you should be)
Perhaps you should fingerprint all the music they play so you can recreate it later. Clango will do it for you, if you run Windows. SongPrint
is available for Windows and Linux and appears to be similar. There's also TunePrint, but they appear to not be ready just yet.
to Technology by shadow |
| Sunday Dec 23, 2001 | Thanks to OrthoServer and MapServer, combined with free USGS data scattered about, you can build your own aerial photo browser with additional data layers from entirely open source parts and freely distributed data. to Cartography by shadow |
| Saturday Dec 22, 2001 | If you were wondering if your DVD player could play various weird media formats, someone has already figured it out for you. to Gadgets by shadow |
| There are many places you can find disused highways and some places you can find highways that were never finished but there are some relics left behind from the Nazi regime's grandiose plans.
to Transportation by shadow |
| Monday Aug 27, 2001 | Remember when you couldn't get Coors in the eastern United States? (Actually, I don't, but that's beside the point.)
Well, some friends recently introduced me to Cheerwine (it's a soft drink),
first in cake form (see the sidebar), and 2 months later
in liquid form. It's only available in the southeastern United States unless you want to
mail order; I opted to
road trip to Elkins, WV to get some.
to Food by shadow |
| Wednesday Aug 8, 2001 | Make your own paper replicas of the
trams of Brussels.
They include links to paper TGV models,
and trams of Stuttgart.
Make sure you visit the TGV pages, since they include more than just the TGVs, like the
Amtrak Acelas.
to Transportation by shadow |
| After first the
PCC streetcar design, and then many castoff streetcars from the United States found their way to Europe, the
National Capital Trolley Museum
has had the favor returned as
they
acquire a foreign example for their collection.
to Transportation by shadow |
| Thursday Jul 5, 2001 | Haven't kept up on the X-Files?
Here's an eBook which makes sense of the mythology, clearly and concisely.
to Television by shadow |
| Tuesday Nov 7, 2000 | Don't trust Gore? Think Bush is too immature? Later, Nader?
Scully for President! to Politics by shadow |
| Friday Nov 3, 2000 | Want to
operate someone else's model railroad? to Toys by shadow |
| These days lots of cities are jumping on the rail transit
bandwagon, typically about 50 years after abandoning
streetcar service. Some cities actually abandoned subways. Two
such cities are Rochester, New York
and
Cincinnati, Ohio. The Cincinnati system was never completed,
but a similar system in Cleveland,
Ohio which had been started years early was completed,
indicating if Cincinnati had cared, they could have done
the same. to Transportation by shadow |
| Wednesday Aug 30, 2000 | How about a
heritage trolley operation which is converting
a gasoline powered rubber-tired car built from remains
of an original electric car back to electric operation
for their line? to Transportation by shadow |
| Tuesday Aug 29, 2000 | Pssst. Wanna buy a rail car?
to Transportation by shadow |
| Monday May 1, 2000 | Ever want to build your own model of a
large truss bridge
?
He even has a
Tcl script to aid in the design of it!
to Toys by shadow |
| Monday Apr 24, 2000 | Tired of running your model railroad
as a series of electrical blocks instead of as a number of trains?
Build your own digital command control setup!
This one utilizes work done by someone else with a
similar system.
Don't worry, Linux folks, you have options too:
DDL
is a fairly advanced system for use with a PC running Linux.
to Gadgets by shadow |
| It's difficult in a good part of the country to get affordable high speed
networking in the home.
All this competition was
supposed to help, but it looks like the only way to get DSL
if you live outside a large city is for
FCC Chairman Kennard to come install it.
He's probably somewhat busy.
(I had a good deal with a local ISP where I
hosted a dialup pool, but then they pulled out, leaving only
a dark fiber in my house. )
to Commentary by shadow |
| Friday Apr 21, 2000 | Here's a guy who created a simulation of a railroad interlocking plant on
his model railroad layout using both physical and
logical means. to Gadgets by shadow |
| Monday Jan 3, 2000 | There's a group of
people who pay attention to
what Dana Scully's wearing. And I thought I was the only one.
to Television by shadow |
| Sunday Jan 2, 2000 | All sorts of neat stuff to be had at the
Remote Sensing
web site, including a large image manipulation tool
and a tool called geotrans for doing coordinate
translation between datums. Pick them up
here to Cartography by shadow |
| Friday Dec 31, 1999 | If you live in the U.S. or are just interested in
cartography and topography,
KDem may prove quite interesting. It displays 3 dimensional elevantion models,
essentially rendering terrain. The home page also has links to sources for data. to Cartography by shadow |
| Sunday Nov 28, 1999 | Maybe you don't like those
USGS
topographic maps.
Stop your whining! Make your own! You can use the
standard symbols, the
standard colors, and
standard naming!
So what are you waiting for? Go make some maps! to Cartography by shadow |
| Saturday Nov 27, 1999 | If you wondered why those
USGS
topographic maps you downloaded seem to be scanned
crooked,
here's why. Included is a detailed explanation of what
Universal Transverse Mercator is, and why its use means
you can create mosaics from some subsets of USGS
maps, but not others. to Cartography by shadow |
| Ever wonder how
GPS worked, or wanted to use the raw data to do
the position solution yourself? Everything you need to know, and even example
code, in Java and
C
as well as the original author's code, is available from this site,
where
GPS equations are explained. to Reference by shadow |
| Monday Nov 22, 1999 | I found this great site about
cable cars while looking for information about
Seattle's
counterbalance, a unique feature of one of their
street railways after it was electrified. to Transportation by shadow |
| Thursday Nov 18, 1999 | Tomorrow is Ohio GIS Day
but they still don't have their
USGS topographic maps online.
Furthermore,
OGRIP lies about maps not being online. They are.
to Cartography by shadow |
| Thursday Nov 11, 1999 | Given how many things at LISA '99
compared themselves with mon,
perhaps it warrants a look. to Computing by shadow |
| The US Geological Survey
has finally started
putting quadrangle maps online, though their collection is not even
close to complete yet.
If they don't have quadrangle maps for your area online yet,
the meta-index of maps
on the GPSy site may be able to help you.
to Cartography by shadow |
| Friday Nov 5, 1999 | As the water continues to drop in the
Youghiogheny Reservoir, the historic
Great Crossings bridge should again be making an appearance.
to Transportation by shadow |
| Did your city ever have streetcars? If they did,
chances are
Dave's Rail Pix will have pictures of it.
This shot was taken basically right outside my office. to Transportation by shadow |
| George Elwood has collected a vast amount
of rail information and pictures on his
Erie-Lackawanna
and Other Fallen Flags web site. In fact he's picked up
so much other stuff that it dwarfs the E-L stuff he has, his
primary interest! I especially like the
Pennsylvania Railroad information he's collected.
A close second is the
light rail/streetcar info he has. to Transportation by shadow |
| If you live in the northeastern US and ever wondered
about those big blue beats you saw plying the rails
and the stuff they were pulling, the
Conrail Cyclopedia
will tell you about them and give you lots of pictures to help you figure out what's what. to Transportation by shadow |
| Tuesday Oct 19, 1999 | Ever wonder what those strings your GPS receiver
outputs mean? Here's a
complete list of the NMEA sentences and their syntax, including
lots that you're not likely to ever see on your
consumer unit! (Actually, that's ok, because
typical software can't use them all anyhow. to Reference by shadow |
| Monday Oct 18, 1999 | Want DSL? DSLreports
has an agent which will query all the DSL prequalification
engines they know about if you provide the area code and
prefix and your street address. The results will not
only tell you if you can get DSL, they'll also offer
prices, speed estimates, and the estimated line distance.
to Internet by shadow |
| Sunday Aug 22, 1999 | For those of you who want to use aerial photo quadrangle quadrants, like those at
PASDA on your unix host, the
Geospatial Data Abstraction Library
can convert them to TIFF files your favorite viewer can use.
to Reference by shadow |
| Thursday Jul 22, 1999 | KA9MVA hacks the Earthmate so you don't have to. to Gadgets by shadow |
| Here's a projection library for people who are working on mapping applications.
Really useful for converting between various coordinate systems.
to Reference by shadow |
| PhotoPC works really well with my Olympus D-340R camera.
This site has information about the similar D-320L. to Reference by shadow |
| The freely available Mapserver
application from the University of Minnesota looks to be a useful way to serve
interactive map content via the web.
to Reference by shadow |
| Monday Jun 21, 1999 | In addition to the PASDA archive of
US Geological Survey 1:24000 maps covering Pennsylvania,
quite a few other states have
maps online in this form. You can view them with a tiff
viewer, or if you're using Linux like me, grab a copy of
mXmap. It's free for
personal use, and can be used with GPS receivers as well!
to Reference by shadow |
| Monday Jun 14, 1999 | It's somehow strange being in a rural area, and having the road suddenly widen out as if there were an interchange,
but instead find myself crossing a bridge over something resembling a pasture - there were animals grazing on it!
But this pasture looked a lot like an expressway, so I followed it one way and the other, and figured out
approximately what the intent had been. After a bit of research, I found that
it as an abortive attempt at an expressway, now locally known derisively as the "goat path".
The problems which led to it still exists, and Lancaster County
is still trying to figure out what to do; the issues no clearer now than they were when construction was stopped.
In the meantime savor this post-apocalyptic vision of an expressway covered with grass,
running from just shy of another highway to an interchange in the middle of nowhere.
to Transportation by shadow |
| Tuesday Mar 9, 1999 | All this time we were lacking an equalizer for
Unix audio apps; x11amp source finally
becomes available, and then I discover
mpg123 has had the
capability of, but not an interface to, an equalizer, since version 0.59o
or so!
to Music by shadow |
| The details behind CDDB's
license are just a bit hazy.
While you wait for free software freedom fighters to fix it,
you might want to grab
a copy of the database.
to Music by shadow |
| Sunday Nov 29, 1998 | We got tired of lugging around those bulky albums,
so GramoFile
came to the rescue. Now we only lug around those
bulky CDs.
to Computing by shadow |
| A real equalizer app for Linux would be nice,
but in the meantime
PipeWave has to suffice. Has some useful filters, too.
to Computing by shadow |
| Princeton Sound Kitchen
is a set of sound manipulation utilities for SGI and NeXT. Shame on them for
not releasing source so that the rest of us could play along...
to Computing by shadow |
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