sebflipper

Over the past couple of weeks I have been working on a project for a friend, which required me to use Google Maps to locate houses. If you have used Google Maps before you will know that you can just type in a postcode and it will take you there. Google Maps offers an API so that you can use the power of Google Maps on your own web site, but you can’t just tell it to put a marker on a specific postcode.

Personally I would have thought that putting a marker on a postcode would have been included, as it’s on of the core features of Google Maps, but it might be due to some licensing issue with Royal Mail. Instead you have to give it the longitude and latitude of a location you want to mark on the map, which is fine if you happen to remember all your locations this way! I myself prefer using postcodes, which why I found a free database of the first part of UK postcodes (which included longitude and latitude) so I tied Google Maps in with the MySQL postcode database.

A working demo can be found under the scripts section.
I have also released it for free so you can get your hands it.

In other news I got my new 60GB iPod video in black will post some photos soon. Videos look pretty cool on it, but I would have thought that the TV output would be very pixelated as the video file is only 320×240, but it looks ok and you could easily watch a movie from it.

This weeks recommended album is We Have Sound by Tom Vek and Pete Tong’s Podcast is pretty good too!

Last week Steve Jobs came into a vision of mine in a form a QuickTime presentation telling me to buy the new 60GB iPod (with video) in Black. So without further a do I was there on their on the Apple website hypnotised into buying it. My 1 year old 4th generation black & white iPod is now obsolete will sell on eBay for around £150 to £200, so its not really that much to upgrade. I guess the main reason for getting a new iPod was that its run out of space on my current iPod (not that I will be able listen to 40GB of music in one sitting) anyway it’s currently in Shanghai and hopefully should be here by Monday! It came with free engraving, so you can probably guess from the title of this entry what’s on the back of my new iPod!

Also this week I attempted to have ago with some of that homebrew that’s been going around on PSPs. I was a bit worried about using the downgrade hack from 2.00 to 1.50 as I risked bricking my PSP. But I thought what the hell and hoped for the best, lucky all turned out well and I was back to 1.50 in less than 3 minutes. Now I have a few emulators and I am playing old Mega Drive and Gameboy games such as Tetris, Donkey Kong, Lemmings and Sonic in widescreen!

I also got a limited addition copy of F.E.A.R. which comes with the comic for the series. From the trailer and reviews the graphics looks pretty sweet with Max Payne style bullet time and Half Life 2 style graphics.

Saw The Quiet Family this week, and I have to say its one of the bizarrest (not sure if that’s a word!) films I have seen for awhile. It’s Comedy/Horror about a Korean family that setup a hotel/lodge in the middle of no where and all their customers are acting pretty odd. Its well worth a watch, though if you do get the English DVD, make sure you switch off the cheesy American voice over and put it back into Korean with English subtitles, as the American voice over doesn’t do it justice, especially during the funny fighting scenes!

Google Earth have recently added high resolution photos of the Uxbridge, Brunel and Heathrow area, worth checking out if you haven’t use it in awhile. Hey I can see my uni house from there!

If you have ever played Counter Strike you will love this video, its dam right hilarious!

I have spent the last few days designing a new ‘about me’ selection and I think I have finally finished! The design works totally of CSS styles and I have designed 7 themes (that’s a difference theme for each day!) if you scroll down to the bottom of the page and click one of the little page icons you can preview each day. Personally I like Saturdays theme as it reminds me of an old 80′s fury wallpaper that was in our house when we first moved in, it was awful!

I have added all my university and other projects into my Portfolio, 13 of them at the moment (unlucky for some). The portfolio runs off a MySQL database allowing you to sort all the projects by date and type etc, it also allows you to view a specific type of project e.g. view only website designs.

Last week I bought Burnout Legends for my PSP overall it’s a pretty good and quite addictive, it rivals Ridge Racers and I would have to say it’s a must have game for the PSP. Seems quite easy to begin with but when you get into Coupe Class the computer blatantly starts cheating by having faster cars and never crashes. Can’t wait for GTA: Liberty City Stories and Lemmings for the PSP.

I also bought Day of Defeat Source for the PC by Valve (makers of Counter Strike Source and Half Life 2) the graphics are really sharp and the game play is quite interesting, as it actually seems more like a World War 2 style battle as each team has to capture and hold certain points on the map, once the team has captured all the points they win the round (which can sometimes take 5 minutes or 2 hours!). I think this game will replace Medal of Honour: Spearhead as my favourite WW2 FPS.

Oh and my favourite bit of music for the day is Arcadia by Gabriel & Dresden (Godskitchen Global Gathering 2005 Mix) works wonders at 1:45am!

Quite a few people have been bugging me for past couple of months telling me I should setup a blog, not quite sure why, but they do have there own blogs 3/4 of them on LiveJournal and I do find some of them interesting reading. But I am sure this probably won’t be the case with my blog as I will most likely ramble on about much about nothing. haha.

Anyway I am starting up a personal section to my website which will hopefully include an about me page, gallery, blog and my portfolio of work from university, work and things I make in my spare time such as the much loved Multi-Forums script, which I have been running for the past few years. Thing is these will need to be integrated with each other (having the same template layout as each other) and not looking like separate packages such as they do at the moment.

Once that’s done I hope to keep this blog up to date with recent goings on and points of interest.

Better start her off with what I am doing now, as this is the first post and all. Currently I am on the Work Placement year at Brunel University (and that’s not Bristol! Its west London) studying Multimedia Design and Technology. My youngest brother Oli has just started 6th form doing his A levels in History, Art, Music and something else. My middle brother Jos has just started term at Bournemouth University doing Business, he tells me he choose Bournemouth as the course was meant to be pretty good, but the main reason being that its meant to have the best night life in Briton and its close to the sea!

In other news, I got back from Miami the other week which was quite cool. 40c every day and the humidity at 90%, the flight was cheap as its standby (stealing unused seats on the plane), but the rest of it wasn’t such as hotels, car rental, food and moped hire (which was pretty cool). Photos can be found here, watch out for the one of me in the snorkelling mask!!

Well I think I may have gone OTT in my first blog post, but I guess I had to start it somewhere, and hopefully I can update it once a week if I have got any thing to ramble on about!