Just got back from a three week holiday to Australia and Singapore (well, in fact I still haven’t actually made it back, I’m on the train home from London after WhereCampEU!) Most of this was written on the train to Heathrow on the 19th February, unfortunately I didn’t really get time or sufficient internets to post it sooner. Hopefully next week’s will be up faster!

Another busy week as I prepared for my holiday which I’m now on! As mentioned last week my focus was supposed to be finishing off the mapme.at features while also mopping up the scraps from the client work I’ve done recently. I also ended up with a new day’s worth of client work which I’d quoted for a few weeks ago but forgotten about. I had finished the bulk of the client work that I’d been planning by Tuesday lunchtime but annoyingly I did find it kept springing back as my numerous related tweets will show. I had hoped that with all this “just one more thing” that someone might have paid me before I left, but alas no.

But enough about client work. The “place based check-ins” for mapme.at that I mentioned last week came along really well and I managed to get the code live on Wednesday (17th February). Since then there’s been a few tweaks here and there but as far as I can tell it all went out without any major problems. I put a blog post up about the changes so take a look at that for more information on those.

Something I forgot to mention from lunch last Friday was that Adrian McEwen asked me if I would like him to take my Weasley Clock to Maker Faire UK. Adrian was there last year and his famous Bubblino was filmed by the BBC. Maker Faire is all about interesting hardware hacks and so my clock should definitely be welcome there. Unfortunately it’s on the same weekend as WhereCampEU so it’s a good thing that Adrian offered to take the clock for me. I’ve wanted to come up with something better for it to show than my location as, even with my current travels, it tends not to change much over the course of a few hours. Something more interesting would allow me to demonstrate the clock more actively at conferences. Adrian suggested we use the mapme.at accounts for the Mersey Ferries so I made a few changes and got the clock showing that.

There’s three ferries but usually only one or two of them are active so the 2 hands of the clock can be utilised. When on their standard route the ferries travel between 3 ports - Liverpool, Seaforth and Woodchurch. Other than that they tend to either be in open water or moored in the docks. Using the new place-based functionality I was able to make sure that all the ports and mooring points were in as favourited places with labels for all the accounts. I then updated the clock’s Arduino code so that it could handle 6 different locations (instead of the existing 4). It seems to be working ok but unfortunately before I handed the clock over to Adrian the ferries didn’t seem to go anywhere. I’ve only described 5 of the 6 “places” so far… I took the opportunity with the redesign of the clock face to add a “Mortal Peril” option which should now occur when the ferries are doing tours down the Manchester Ship Canal!

Now I’m back from my holiday I’m sure I’ll have to spend some time over the next few weeks sorting out client requests that have come in while I’ve been away but I’m really hoping to get some more time to work on even more mapme.at features. I’m speaking at Where 2.0 in two weeks and so need to get a talk written with some good visualisations, and want to have a few products I can announce too.