Mega Man 9 press kit

I was lucky enough to get a code for purchasing the Mega Man 9 press kit a couple of weeks ago and today my order has arrived. Capcom put together 200 of these in celebration of the release of Mega Man 9.

If you aren't familiar with it, the box art is an homage to the terrible artwork associated with the North American version of Mega Man 1 for the NES:



The actual kit is a real NES cartridge that has been stripped of screws and logic board, then reassembled with magnets and a new label. The first auction for one of these on eBay went for $750 but as you can see (since I opened it) I'll be keeping mine!

Here are some photos I've taken of the unboxing:

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Solar-powered theremins

Today Matt and I built solar-powered theremin kits made by ClockworkRobot!

The instructions were pretty straightforward... Except for an undocumented film on the solar panel that was very difficult to remove.

There was also a fair amount of cursing involved but both kits finally made that distinctive heliophone sound.

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Pencil from scratch in Photoshop

Tonight I tried a tutorial from PSDTUTS to draw some pencils in Photoshop:

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Microsoft Photosynth part 2

I talked about this last year, but now Microsoft Photosynth has launched with a tool for creating your own synths to explore.

Here's one I did this afternoon with some quick harbourfront pictures with the iPhone: (If the display sticks in the parking lot, keep moving to the right.)



It was supposed to be a 360 degree view but I must not have taken enough photos in one direction for the software to recognize them. Pretty fun though - I may try again this weekend with my regular camera.

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Privacy policy ignored at Domino's Pizza?

Here's what Domino's Pizza says in its privacy policy:

Only employees and agents of Domino's Pizza of Canada Ltd. who need to access your personal information in the course of their duties will have access to it.

And here's the customer-facing monitor (visible from outside, even) that I found when picking up a pizza tonight:



I emailed the privacy manager to find out if this was just a mistake by a lone franchisee, but the message bounced with a "user unknown" error.

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Map of Rogers-branded hotspots for iPhone use

I wasn't going to buy an iPhone, but the last-minute data plan price reduction was just enough to change my mind. (It still feels like a deal with the devil of course...)

The data plan includes free wifi access at any Rogers-branded hotspot, so I decided to map out the locations. The address of each hotspot is provided by this website but requires processing in order to be usable by Google Maps.

Process

- Downloaded the XLS version of the hotspot list
- Converted it to CSV format and imported it into the database
- Ran a modified version of this PHP script from Google that geocodes addresses into latitudes and longitudes
- Wrote a PHP script that exports the database to KML format in a few different configurations

And presto! Here they are, viewed in Google Maps:
- Rogers Wireless hotspots (352 entries, 142 KB)
- Bell hotspots (704 entries, 292 KB)
- Telus Mobility hotspots (127 entries, 54 KB)
- All hotspots (1183 entries, 486 KB)

If you want to load the entries in Google Earth or another mapping tool, you can grab the raw KML files here: http://www.techknight.com/kml

Update

I got someone with an iPhone to try loading the maps on their device. (Mine won't arrive until next week.) It seems that KML support is spotty at best... In Safari the map loaded but wasn't interactive, while the actual Google Maps application could not load an external resource. So for now these are useful only when you're at your PC, about to leave home. :)

Screenshots





Issues

A few problems cropped up while geocoding. Addresses that returned french accents in the XML caused simplexml_load_string() to error out with "Entity: line 1: parser error : Input is not proper UTF-8". A forum post here had a solution using iconv().

Another problem was that some addresses in the original file are out of date. For example, this entry for Emerald Hills Golf Club:

14001 Concession #5, Stouffville, ON

Doing a search for emerald hills golf club ontario, it looks like "Concession #5" was renamed to "Warden Avenue", which causes the lookup to fail.

Also, there are some perfectly valid entries that show up in Google Maps but return a GGeoStatusCode of G_GEO_UNKNOWN_ADDRESS (602) when querying for them using the geocoding API. Examples:

Suite 220, 10610 Airport Drive, Grande Prairie, AB
1 First Canadian Place, Toronto, ON
7585 Market Crossing, Burnaby, BC

I'm guessing that the database used by the geocoding API differs from the database used by Google Maps proper. Other addresses in the original list are simply misspelled. Anyway, I thought at first that I would manually get co-ordinates for such entries, but there are 151 of them so I'm going to pass on that. :) (I did do some manual updates using this tool for the few downtown Toronto locations that didn't work though.)

I'll try to get in touch with whoever is in charge of updates at canadianhotspot.ca... Maybe if I give them a list of the non-working entries they can fix them.

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Six-eyed Root Horse (Spore creature)

Oh god, you can keep adding eyes and mouths... I'm really curious to see how the full Spore game will stack up against the Creature Creator portion. Releasing that bit early for ten bucks might be giving too much of the full product away.

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