For some reason this year turned out to be a year with a lot of time spend on bicycles. While I have been cycling more since I changed to a company which allowed me to park my bicycle in the office, this year I increased this even more. One part of this has definitely be Strava, which allows me to track my riding and improvements (or not) over time. Some numbers for 2014, 2013 in brackets: ...
I always loved the idea behind OpenStreetMap. Mostly because of my open source experience and sites Wikipedia, these show that with enough people doing a little bit of work in the area they know, it is possible to create results which are better and more free than the conventional commercial offerings. I remember the time in London, when we had our little start-up and needed location maps for our customers and couldn’t find a good provider for this (there was no google maps or map24 at that time). So fools that we were we decided to write it ourself. We got the raw data on CD from TeleAtlas and one of our programmers got pretty far with a renderer. But before we could get anything useful map24 produced a much better version which we started using. But I always have been frustrated by the lack of open map data and open source renderers. ...
Recently I started using twitter, facebook and blogs more and I got a little bit annoyed that I couldn’t update those sites with my mobile phone. And then my digital camera died on me, which resulted in no new photos by me in the last couple of months. The final point which made me want to get a new fancy phone was me getting lost on Tibidabo without a GPS. ...