Our City, Our Music

Something interesting’s afoot in Leeds, as a group of the city’s digital artists prepare to record its first geo-located album, Our City, Our Music. We’re all accustomed to certain ‘geo-retarded’ music only being available digitally in the US, but what Ben Dalton, Megan Smith and Ben Halsall are proposing is to shoot a couple dozen […]

Mixed Reality & Exploring Deep Place

In recent weeks I’ve been thinking that a confluence of innovations could begin to usher in an era of mixed reality and augmented reality applications… Together, Google’s APIs for mobile maps and mobile search provide a ubiquitous substrate for locative media. Phones & cell networks  are now capable of multiple methods of locating themselves – […]

Leeds Open Street Mapping Party

Tim Waters has finalised plans for Leeds’ first Open Street Mapping party on 15+16th September… Tim’ll walk everyone through how things work and has a few GPS units as loaners for people without the necessary gear. Tim’s arranged a private room at the Starbucks on Albion Street, for some coffee, a chat and some planning […]

Trippy – Nokia Sports Tracker & Google Earth

After learning about the Nokia Sports Tracker almost a month ago, I finally managed to get it working. Apparently, there was a stray folder on my phone’s memory card which meant the application shut down each time I tried to record a GPS track. The software is clunky, but the integration with Google Earth is […]

Divine Direction

Elegant. Gizmodo’s covering a GPS navigator that’s as simple as a stalk that bends towards your destination…pair ’em up and you can keep track of a friend 🙂 Dandella is the winning concept from the Japan Design Foundation’s International Design Competition…woulda been cute to see the two winners finding each other with a pair of […]

The Man Who Fell To Google

As promised, at around noon on Saturday 26th August 2006, Google chartered a plane to overfly Foo Camp at O’Reilly’s Sebastopol campus and photograph the event for Maps and Earth. Here you can see a cute banner on the grass, the camp site, some people splayed out for the cameras and – most significantly – […]

28 Days

The month of Shawwal has been a symmetry of life and death for our family, bracketed by the passing of loved ones and punctuated by the arrival of new lives. Twenty eight days ago, on the bright, crisp Autumn morning of Eid-ul-Fitr, we lost our beautiful baby sister Aisha after a long and debilitating illness…just […]

Maps Of War

I’m a Muslim and a map nerd, so this is very cool…

Beautiful Serendipity

Crossing the bridge to Granville Island in Vancouver last March, I spotted a cute sticker that read You Are Beautiful and snapped a photo. Several months later, a stranger leaves a comment on my photo linking to a photo of themselves at that very location – just a few hours after I was there! More […]

Photo, Mine!

Flying back from Paris in June, I managed to shoot some lovely aerial photos of Leeds as we descended into Leeds-Bradford airport. One of the images – took me some time to identify,; eventually user annotations on Google Earth identified it as the St. Aidans opencast mine, flooded a few years ago when the River […]