Andrew Duff

Just back from Tuscany. Photos here

Who needs tourist attractions?

Where nothing meets nothing, you will find something interesting…

The Degree Confluence Project is a pretty interesting way for GPS geeks to outdo each other. I first heard about it from David Lawrence at Nominum who I met at an ITU conference on multilingual domain names where we were both speaking. From the site – “The goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures and stories will then be posted here.” Apparently there are there are still 12,628 to be found, and there is one within 49 miles (79 km) of you if you’re on the surface of Earth.

As the Internet and digital TV makes visiting tourist attractions from your sofa easier (and the actual attractions themselves are so often mobbed), maybe this is a new way to visit a country and get a flavour of it. I mean, what better way to get a flaour of the Peloponnese than to visit this confluence…

Another cool GPS project online is Geocaching. touting itself as “the sport where you are the search engine”, the site tells you that “A GPS device and a hunger for adventure are all you need for high tech treasure hunting. Here you can find the latest caches in your area, how to hide your own cache, and information on how to get started in this fun and exciting sport.”

Cool huh?

Bill Gates is off again

and this time it’s serious…

I found the article about Bill Gates’ new project Longhorn online – it’s all in the wider context of what Bill is up to and how he’s changing. This is important stuff in my view which could change the way we perceive of PCs. The thinking makes sense and it will be interesting to see how they implement it. The reality is of course that no-one else is really in a position to do this in the PC market, although I think someone with a lot of nous (http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=nous&r=2) like Sky potentially could create something pretty interesting off set top boxes. Quote from the article –

“If this enormous undertaking succeeds, it will make computers more personal than ever. Equipped with Longhorn, your PC will keep track of how you work, whom you talk to, what sites you look at, how you make documents and whom you share them with, which data on the network are yours–making all those things easier.”