Over recent weeks, I have noticed docking stations for the London Transport Cycle Hire scheme popping up all over the place. Coverage in central London is impressive – there’s 400-odd such docking stations in total, ready to serve 6,000 bekes across the capital. The pricing for the scheme is aimed at journeys less than 30 minutes so, once you’ve paid the daily access charge, the first half an hour’s rental is free and you can make as many 30-minute trips between docking stations as you like without paying any more (provided a bike is available, of course). If you want to make longer journeys between docking stations, the costs can mount up to £50 for the day but, given you could cycle from one end of the docking station zone to the other in less than 30 minutes, it really is an unlikely and easily avoided situation.

So the only snag is bike availability in peak times – I’ll be very interested to see how this scheme takes off.
I’m certainly signing up. If I’m ever caught out without my trusty Birdy folding bike, I know how I’ll be getting about!

Thanks to cyclehireapp.com for the map visualisations of bike docking locations data from TFL – the  bike rental map on the London transport site doesn’t (yet) work!

Paste the following in the address bar:

Martin, a robotics researcher friend of mine, showed me this video at the weekend:

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

It certainly got us talking about where augmented reality may be headed, particularly for advertising. While the video is perhaps a little over exaggerated, the technology is rapidly getting there. Take, for example, the new augmented-reality mapping from Microsoft:

1. Create a new app at dev.twitter.com/anywhere/apps/new
   a) Application Name = Name of your website
   b) Application Website = Your website URL
   c) Callback URL = Your website URL
2. Insert the following code into your html:

   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

   <script src="http://platform.twitter.com/anywhere.js?id=YOUR_APP_ID&v=1"></script>   <script type="text/javascript">       twttr.anywhere(onAnywhereLoad);       function onAnywhereLoad(twitter) {         twitter.hovercards();         twitter('.follow-me').followButton("yourtwittername");       };   </script>

3. Job done. Grab a coffee and read more on the API docs

Demo:
* hover card – @markrocky || @markrocky
* follow button – #

Plesk can be handy if you want to get a simple hosting situation up and running but is an absolute nightmare if you want to get into any nitty gritty on the server that might require some custom configuration. So how do you go about installing Symfony on a server running Plesk? As it is one of the common frameworks that we frequently need to be installing, I thought it worthwhile publishing my notes on the steps we need to take:

To allow deployment via rsync from Symfony – in Plesk, enable user to access via SSH by checking: “Shell access to server with FTP user’s credentials (/bin/sh)”

As you move differently in bed during the different phases of sleep, Sleep Cycle uses the accelerometer in your iPhone to monitor your movement to determine which sleep phase you are in. Come morning and it plots out a graph of your nocturnal activity. Here’s mine from the last couple of nights:

Sleep statistics for 30 – 31 Jan
Went to bed / woke up: 01:18 / 08:27 | Total time: 7h 08m

Sleep statistics for 31 – 01 Feb
Went to bed / woke up: 23:21 / 06:30 | Total time: 7h 08m

Can you guess when I woke to tend to our son? Now I *know* when I woke at night…

This is the first post I have managed to type out in months, besides the regular amalgamations of various Twitterspheric streaming that this site has become. It must be because I’ve just read something that pushes my psychology / computer science / internet geek buttons just enough to warrant a little more rambling than the usual delicious tag or tweet. Jakob Nielson has published an article that cites the classic seven plus or minus two of short-term memory capacity (i.e. executive function) in the context of Website User Experience. Ooooh.

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