This evening I read through the general conditions of access and use of the dublinbikes service, which stipulate that:

The customer is authorised to use the bike in accordance with the terms hereof,
provided that such use is reasonable, which excludes the following:

• any use contrary to the provisions of the Rules of the Road and current traffic regulations;
• any use on land or under conditions that are likely to damage the bike;
• the transportation of any passenger under any circumstances;
• any use of the bike causing a danger to the customer or to third parties;
• any dismantling or attempt to dismantle all or part of the bike, and more generally, any abnormal use of a bicycle.

Assuming similar regulations exist in Paris, this video probably depicts the violation of every single one.

Note the hilarious description:

Aucun des Vélib’ utilisés dans cette video n’a été maltraité

Most Irish readers will be aware that Dublin City Council has given 15 years of advertising rights in Dublin to the advertising company JCDecaux in return for providing one of its public bike schemes, the first of which debuted in Paris in the summer of 2007 as Vélib’.

I was in Paris not too long ago, and although I didn’t get to try one of the bikes out for myself, the whole thing seemed to be a raging success. There are now close to one-and-a-half-thousand stations in operation, with 20,000 bikes between them. That said, however, there have been instances of vandalism and theft. There have been reports of Vélib’ bicycles turning up all over France. rollingresistance.net even suggests that they have been found far away from Paris in Romania.

Naturally, the introduction of ‘Dublinbikes‘ has been met with some scepticism. As I can attest, Dublin is not the most pleasant place in which to cycle, and a lot of people (myself included) question whether Dubliners will treat the ‘dbs’ with the same respect as their Parisian counterparts.

Following on from my recent look at Mike Cammarano’s huge World Trade Center site aerial photograph, I discovered The Gigapxl Project which is, according to its website:

Defining the upper limits of large-format film photography, digital scanning and image processing, custom-built Gigapxl™ cameras capture images with unprecedented resolution.

It would take a video wall of 10,000 television screens or 600 prints from a professional digital SLR camera to capture as much information as that contained in a single Gigapxl™ exposure.

The Project’s near-term goal is to compile a coast-to-coast Portrait of America; photographing in exquisite detail the cities, parks and monuments of the USA and Canada.

A longer term goal is to create for future generations a world-wide archive of vanishing cultural and archaeological sites.

The image gallery contains some of the most mind-boggling detailed photographs I have ever seen. Take this example, a wide shot of New York’s Times Square.

We come from this:

to this:

to this:

Unnecessarily detailed photography seems to be turning into a bit of an obsession for me…

Searching the Internet for information about OS X’s network location settings the other day yielded one of the coolest applications that I have seen in a long time: MarcoPolo.

Basically, the idea is that if you use a portable computer, you tend to use it in different contexts: At your desk at home, in the café down the road, in a university library, etc. Depending on your context, you do different things, have different settings and configurations, and use different resources.

This is where MarcoPolo steps in. By gathering information about your computer’s environment, it ‘guesses’ which context you are in. This infomation includes your current IP address, the devices you have connected, the computers surrounding you, the time of day, and even the ambient lighting conditions. When it knows where you are, it can do loads of things: mute your speakers, run a particular program, mount a particular volume, change your desktop background, to name a few.

For example: I only use my Mighty Mouse when I’m at home. If MarcoPolo detects it plugged in, it can be pretty sure that I’m at my house. Furthermore, if the ambient lighting conditions are high and I’m running off the battery, I’m probably in the garden. If I have a monitor and a power adaptor plugged in, I’m most likely at my desk. Then it can get to work: At home, I get it to mount my Mac Pro’s hard drives. When I’m not out and about I don’t need to be so paranoid, so I tell it to disable automatic logout. If I’m at my desk, I connect to my network over Ethernet, so AirPort can be turned off.

You can be really specific, right down to which room you occupy, what task you are performing, and at what time you are performing it.

Say I go to the library. MarcoPolo knows I’m there because I’m running on battery power, and I’m connected to the library’s wi-fi network. I can get it to mute the speakers so as not to disturb others and dim the screen to save power. I don’t want people hacking me, so I can set a firewall rule to block file sharing and remote login.

What’s more, it’s really expandable, because among the actions that can be triggered are shell script and AppleScript execution.

Are you getting it?

It’s really great, and free. You can get it here.

Founded in 1947, the Foreign Service Institute is a facility of the US military which trains diplomats and officers to operate overseas, which tends to involve speaking different languages. To this end, since the ’60s it has been producing and publishing loads of audio language courses, designed to deliver quick results, which as government works are in the public domain (so they’re free).

Most of them are quite old, and there are probably better commercial ones out there, but it’s worth a look nonetheless, if only for a bit of cold-war-era nostalgia. You can download dozens of them here.