Home Made Christmas Tree

For our Christmas tree this year I've taken inspiration from my favourite computer game of all time - Operation Flashpoint Cold War Crisis (now sometime referred to as ARMA). Some of you might have heard me drone on about it, which I shalln't do now, suffice to say it is most excellent and there is a compass and map with which you can navigate completely by dead-reckoning. In that game, as with many early 3D games, volume was achieved by having two textured plains dissecting each other at 90 degrees. (actually, if I think about it, this is also exactly how one might make a cardboard tree - like the sort we used to have at Christmas which would "flower". WOW! THEY STILL EXIST: Tobar Magic Growing Christmas Tree). I pruned the neighbours laylandii hedge and shoved the branches into holes drilled in a wooden post. So far it seems to be holding up and has taken the decorations. It certainly first the bill making the house feel much more like Christmas than it did beforehand.

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2015-12-19

@NationalTrust Wimpole Hall Estate in Autumn

With autumn upon us and unseasonably warm weather since getting back from Korea we headed out to Wimpole Hall (National Trust) to have a weekend walk around the estate with a friend of ours. I was in a t-shirt walking around, utterly splendid despite being Halloween (surprisingly similar to last year in fact). What's more there was an actual hill to climb which afforded an actual view. A view. In Cambridgeshire. What joy!

wimpole tree stitch

wimpole pond

branches stitch

light through the trees

autumnal leaves

yellow and orange

wimpole at sunset

last light through the trees

Google Maps 3D Hack - get down to eye level

I had an enoyance while browsing the new 3D landscape feature on Google Maps regarding how close I can zoom in. Histon now has the 3D view thanks to it's proximity to Cambridge and it's rather lovely to be able to see my neighbourhood in stunning graphics (yes, I realise this will be outdated in a few years time and you dear future reader will chuckle at how impressive we though this was). The manual controls (ctrl+click) allows you to drag the view round freely and zoom in and out with the mouse wheel. But it seems that you can zoom in and tilt only so far, and less than I think you used to be able to. I did some brief googling to see if there was a way around this (or indeed anyone talking about my observations) but nothing came up. One lifehacker site mentioned that you used to be able to manually edit the URL of an old version of the website. This inspired me to check out and have a play with the new URL. Low and behold - success, if somewhat fiddly.
Take the URL: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.2509106,0.1046145,94a,20y,25.28h,60.55t/data=!3m1!1e3.

Look at all those interesting numbers in the URL: @52.2521678,0.1056801,5a,20y,135h,83.59t/data=!3m1!1e3, here's what I think they mean:

@52.2509106,0.1046145

this is the latitude and longitude in a North East postive system (-ve values are South or West).

94a

this a is for altitude, I assume it's in meters. Setting 3 gives a good eye level view, below that and the screen starts to clip the terrain. Large numbers take you off into space.

20y

this I can not yet work out. It's something like the zoom level, but the API converts it into a change in elevation.

25.28h

h is for heading taking a value from >0 to 360 (north, default).

60.55t

this is the view angle with 180 being straight up (mostly sky), 90 is horizontal and below is tilting down. Above 180 gets reset.

Red Lion pub in Histon from Google Maps

The Boot pub and Coop in Histon from Google Maps
2015-06-25

A typical autumn scene in the arboretum 

Light shining through the trees of the arboretum 

Autumn leaves 

An island silhouette