Street View is still stunning
Street View has taken over my internet time this weekend 
. It really is stunning. Found myself in France on a mountain road today. Virtual holidays here we come.
Google Street View UK
I am truly fascinated by the brilliantness of Google Street View in the UK that has recently been made live. The quality of the images is amazing. I really want to know how many photos are stitched together to cover just the handful of cities in the UK. How do they get lined up so perfectly? How much storage space do they take up? Fascinating stuff.
Anyway, here is a warm welcome from someone in Edinburgh 
:
Google Maps Gems
Still my favourite application on the internet, Google Maps has thrown up some more gems. ‘Time’ had a great article highlighting some of the best ones. Here is my favourite; Where Planes Go To Die (zoom out for full effect):
Google Maps is unique. There is so much data that I reckon people will be finding odd and interesting landmarks for years to come. Once ‘maps’ has been exhausted then people still have Street View to trawl through. I can still lose hours at a time to Maps, Street View and Earth. This is what the internet is about .
Hubdub – The World’s News Forecaster
Come and play me at forecasting news or world events. Make predictions and create questions of your own. Just a bit of fun
Heathrow T5 and Google Maps
My Google Maps fascination continues. Terminal 5 at Heathrow is a masterpiece of engineering. The logistics and challenges were mind boggling. For instance, they couldn’t build the new control tower in place due to disruption. So they built it at the edge of the airport and moved (?) it in one piece at night in a 5 hour window of downtime.
Google maps really shows how Heathrow is like a well oiled ‘machine’. The maps show so much detail, it is quite fascinating. Terminal 5 was a work in progress when the mapping plane took the photos. Here is hoping for updated images soon.
As a side note, Microsoft Live Maps has a stunning bird’s eye view of Heathrow. This is even more detailed than Google Maps. The fact you can rotate the viewpoint still amazes me.
Google Earth Gigapxl photo viewing
This is what the internet was designed for. I’m speechless at this, you read it right that is a 1000 megapixel image. Or put another way you would need a video wall of 10,000 television screens to capture as much information as that contained in a single exposure (!?).
Load up Google Earth 4.3 and in the sidebar find Layers then drilldown through ‘Gallery’ and turn on ‘Gigapxl Photos’.
Now look for a mountain icon with binoculars and click to bring up the dialogue. Finally, click ‘Fly into this ultra high-resolution photo’. Now you can move and zoom all the way into the photo using normal Google Earth controls. Truly astonishing level of detail.
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- Locations of Gigapxl images
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- Finding the Gigapxl images layer
Random live webcams from the internet
A great site listing public webcams that are found on the internet through clever search techniques. Some are intended to be public, some are not. Some are just plain strange. Quite fascinating.
Media Converter – the free online audio and video converter
Media Converter is an awesome tool. Great for downloading and converting YouTube videos for your portable media player. Also able to just rip the audio from a video. Find a music video on YouTube you like and you can rip the audio to an MP3 file! Great stuff.
