Risto H. Kurppa » google

Bring your Facebook events to Google Calendar

Risto H. Kurppa — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 18:56:40 +0000

This is Ultimate Cool. Never thought about it before I saw the ‘export’ link in the bottom of an Facebook event page. You can make your Facebook events appear in your Google Calendar automatically.

Go to you Facebook Events page.
Scroll to the bottom of the page and click ‘Export events’
In the popup window that opens, copy the address to the clipboard (right click -> copy). The address is something like webcal://www.facebook.com/ical/u.php?uid=numbers&key=things
Now go to your Google Calendar
At the left of the screen you have a list of your calendars. Click on the Add down arrow and select ‘Add by URL’
Paste the webcal:// address from your clipboard to the field
Press ‘Add Calendar’

Done. Now you see all your Facebook events in your Google Calendar.

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Samsung Galaxy Tab

Risto H. Kurppa — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 18:52:32 +0000

I today had the possibility to play a bit with Samsung Galaxy Tab that tries to challenge the Apple iPad. Tab runs on Android and the user interface looks very much like the one of Galaxy S phone.

7″ screen is nice, plenty of room to have a decent sized on-screen keyboard, watch videos, read e-books or PDF files
Galaxy tab was maybe a little heavy – but it also fealt very strong built that most likely will not break easily
What else.. Volume & power buttons, 4 buttons below the screen.
Camera had a nice panorama feature. I took a 8 photo panorama inside: photos were not sharp but the panorama stitching was done very well and fast!
Android Market with lots of software – this is what makes the device really useful

What I recently bumped into was the fact that yes, even though you can buy apps from Android Market to all (Google-authorized) Android phones, all the software will not run on all hardware.. Not enought computing power, too small screen… It’ll be interesting to see how Google manages this in the future.

Don’t know what else to say. I’m sure there are people out there who find it useful – I myself would like to have a tablet with more open Linux OS :)

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OpenStreetMap beats commercial maps

Risto H. Kurppa — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 02:13:31 +0000

OpenStreetMap is a project to create an open and free map of the world. The idea is that people go to places, possibly record GPS-traces and make notes or take photos of road signs and the draw the map with this information. No copying from other maps is allowed.

And there’s a reason: First of all, it’s illegal. And they can be outdated, contain false information – some maps contain even ‘copyright easter eggs’ to make it possible to prove the map has been copied.

Aarne Arvosen kuja

OSM vs Google

There’s this finnish guy who was mapping in Järvenpää, a town some 40 km north from Helsinki. He finds a street that had a sign ‘Aarne Arvosen kuja’ (Aarne Arvonen’s alley or so..). Takes a photo, goes home and inputs the data to OpenStreetMap. Then he compares the newly generated OSM map to Google maps and finds that the name of the steet doesn’t match on the maps: the almighty Google called it ‘Hiskinkatu’. Some further surfing pointed out that both Karttapaikka (of National Land Survey of Finland) and the map the City of Järvenpää has on their web page both have the same name, Hiskinkatu.

Openstreetmap

He found this article in a local newspaper mentioning the street. Almost 10 years ago someone suggested that the street would be named after the oldest citizen of Järvenpää, 110 years old Aarne. And now in June 2008 the proposal was finally accepted.

So OpenStreetMap as a freely editable map can react to changes like this very fast: within hours (well, it can take up to week to re-render the map) the changes can be seen on the map. Having many eyes around to check the validity of the information and seeing and hearing about the changes should help fixing false or old information quickly. If they some day start paving a road on your way to work you can mark it paved the very same day. Of course this is not always the case but the concept of OpenStreetMap makes this possible. The more contributors the better the correctness and more up-to-date the map is. No-one gets paid, people do it to get a good, free, flexible map.

How about commercial maps? They don’t update constantly so they contain old data, as seen in the example above. Then, on the other hand, there are stories of roads or bridges that actually don’t exist yet but they have already been added in the maps because otherwise the map would be outdated right after the release. To produce quality maps you need a lot of money. To have them up-to-date you need a lot more money. And for this reason they want to make other people pay to use the maps.

And hey – don’t trust your GPS navigator too much, it can be fatal – I was told about a lady who was taken by the navigator to an unfinished bridge falling down in her expensive Mercedes.

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ps. got the nice image viewer finally working :)

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