identi.ca
joe shaw
This weekend I read that the MBTA and Massachusetts Department of Transportation had released a trial real-time data feed for the positioning of vehicles on five of its bus routes. This is very important data to have, and while obviously everyone would like to see more routes added, it’s a start.
I decided to hack together a mashup of this data with Google Maps, to see how easy it would be. In the end it took me a few hours on Saturday to get the site up and running, and a couple more on Sunday adding features like the drawing of routes on the map, colorizing markers for inbound vs. outbound buses, and adding reverse geocoding of the buses themselves.
To do this I used three technologies (Google App Engine, JQuery, Google Maps) and two data sources (the real-time XML feed and the MBTA Google Transit Feed Specification files).
I discovered a way to copy some podcasts onto my 5th gen iPod Nano without using iTunes, since I was not at the Mac I use to sync it. It utilizes the voice memos feature, so it probably won’t work on other iPod models. It probably will work on Windows, though.
Connect your iPod to the Mac, and turn on hard drive access in iTunes if it’s not already on.
You’ll need your music or podcast to be in AAC (.m4a) format. If you have an MP3, go into iTunes preferences -> General -> Import Settings… and set the “Import using” encoder to AAC. Then select the tracks and go to Advanced -> Create AAC Version.
Copy the new .m4a file into the Recordings directory on the iPod, and give it a name like “20090101 120000.m4a”.
I have ranted about the iPhone’s horrible iPod interface in the past, and any improvement they can make is certainly welcome. But the improvements in the iPhone OS 3.0 update seem more half-assed than a true solution. Yes, the ability to skip back 30 seconds will be nice, but it’s still a ham-fisted solution to the problem of exact scrolling inside a 70 minute podcast. And the “scrubber” interface seems complicated and error-prone.