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Showing posts from June, 2013

Terrain Aware Navigation

A passion of mine is enjoying the outdoors, especially tramping. I love how easy it is to escape, just pack your bag and head away into the hills. On my last really great trip, my group was at least three days walk in any direction from anyone else. We had a great time visiting a very remote lake on the West Coast of New Zealand called Ivory Lake. But what if we had gotten into trouble? Would one of us have to walk out for three days to get help? Over the last year I've been training in Land based Search and Rescue. In New Zealand many tourists, hunters, trampers, and outdoors adventurers of all disciplines get into trouble every year and need help. For a well prepared group any emergency would soon be followed by a radio broadcast, or the setting off of a Personal Locator Beacon. This immediately notifies the appropriate rescue personnel to the scene. In some cases, especially with solo outdoor people, the emergency services don't find out until many days after an incide

Online Collaborative Playlists for Spotify

I'd like to announce a website that I've created in my spare time over the last few months. The idea is very simple, you invite people to collaborate on a music playlist. For example in a week my flat is hosting a Piano Evening  to celebrate getting our piano tuned. We're inviting friends who play around to each play two pieces. I posted a link to PartySense on the facebook event page and asked people to add their two songs. Surprisingly, people have done so! As you can see on the right hand side, with Spotify we can preview the playlist. I'm still working on a few more features like dragging songs in from the Spotify desktop program. Its currently in beta, but feel free to check it out and give me any feedback! http://partysen.se Its the first project I've done that heavily uses AngularJS, although I've now done a few smaller sites at work that use AngularJS. For this site the authentication is done with Facebook, music data is sourced from Spotify a