The thing about useful stuff is

London tube unearthed Friday, January 09, 2009

A London Underground 1995 Stock train pulls in...

Image via WikipediaDescribing itself as the tube travellers bible, I stumbled across Metazone's London tube site last night by accident whilst looking to find the nearest tube to a meeting venue.

In one part of the site, they've overlaid the tube lines on a google map which highlights the astonishing meandering routes some of these lines follow, but more practically as you mouse over the map useful tube information is revealed.

You can check it out here.

Labels: Google, Google Map, Google Maps, mashup

posted by John Wilson @ 8:40 AM Permanent Link ,

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Recycling in London - a winner Tuesday, November 11, 2008

The UK Government has announced the winner of a competition designed to find better ways that the Government could make public data available. "Show us a better way" selected 5 ideas including one which has resulted in the website "Recycle for London", which highlights places in London you can recycle and opportunities to increase your recycling.

It provides useful details about local services including opening times and materials that can be recycled.

Sadly the site seems wedded to London Borough boundaries, highlighting services that may be on the far side of your borough rather than closer ones which may cross a border into the neighbouring borough. This may be at the insistence of the Councils themselves who only want to bear the cost of their own ratepayers, or it could be poor site design. Either way, it seems at odds with energy efficiency considerations.

Full details of the competition winners were reproduced from the official site were

Ideas where we hope to create a fully working tool

Ideas where we will develop the idea further

Prototypes we will be funding to be developed further

UK School Maps (showing where the UK’s schools are - building on data released for the competition by the Department for Children, Schools and Families);
School Guru, which helps determine whether your child could get into a school (in Hertfordshire only at present);
Where’s the Path, with an Ordnance Survey map and Google Maps satellite picture of any spot; and
UK Wreck Map, showing the location of undersea wrecks around Britain’s coast.

The fabulous thing is how the public's efforts can
- identify great ideas at little or no cost via crowdsourcing
- build useful solutions provided the data is made available from the closed data stores held by Govt at no cost

Labels: Google Map, London Borough, Ordnance Survey, UK Government

posted by John Wilson @ 9:46 AM Permanent Link ,

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Icesave accounts have been frozen Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Following the nationalisation of Iceland's second largest bank, Landsbanki, its' UK internet banking arm which has the unfortunate name of Icesave has frozen all activity on accounts.

Its' home page has the simple and concise message

We are not currently processing any deposits or any withdrawal requests through our Icesave internet accounts. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause our customers. We hope to provide you with more information shortly.

The internet bank is covered by the UK Deposit Protection Scheme, which protects each customer for up to £50,000 [changed from £35,000 today].

For the superstitious amongst you, the jinx of Newcastle appears to have struck again - Icesave's contact details indicate that it is the location of their processing centre, as well as being home to Northern Rock. Worryingly, whilst they disagree on the location of the postcode given for Icesave of NE28 5AL (Microsoft can't even find that postcode!), Google maps suggest the Bank is in the middle of a housing estate near Wallsend.

On a related note, some funny emails doing the rounds on several themes related to the crisis

Mums in trouble with their families for going to Iceland, a twist on the foodstore slogan, with Fathers quoted as saying they always knew its' business model was on slippery ground
Mock-ups of queues forming outside Iceland stores as shoppers panic about its' possible collapse
Questions in banking circles about why no-one realised their was something fishy about Iceland and whether their Govt can revert to any slush funds