"The opening will not mark the final completion of the Kings Cross project – that will not come until late 2013 when the green canopy that currently hides the impressive facade of one of London’s oldest stations will finally be removed. It will, however, arguably mark the biggest point of change for passengers – because from Monday the way-finding through Kings Cross will change significantly." The usual worthwhile look at a public transport project.

"I did a blog post about Arrivals, a foursquare glanceable we built a while back. What do you think?"

"We are looking forward the Olympics, for example we are aiming to ring church bells throughout the UK to announce the arrival of the torch relay.
"Also it's also the intention that church bells in London will be rung every time Great Britain wins a gold medal."

Tom Vanderbilt on a new kind of intersection that's being used a lot for new roads in the US, where drivers apparently have a morbid fear of having to either stop, or wait for more than a single phase change. Still, it's interesting.

"I’m happy to announce FareBot! Currently FareBot can parse and display balance and trip history information from Seattle’s ORCA card, and can dump raw data from any other MIFARE DESFire card including San Francisco’s Clipper card. FareBot is open-source and designed to be flexible so that hopefully other developers will add support for other types of cards." For the Nexus S. Interesting.

Lately I’ve been working on a series of river maps, done in the style of Harry Beck‘s famous London Underground design.

"We redesigned the BART ticket kiosk. Our goal was to improve the user interface software within the limitations of the existing 8-button, ATM-style physical interface. We believe our design offers major usability advantages, especially for infrequent riders." Interesting.

"Have you ever needed to generate some fake polygons to test a geo application?  No... oh.  I have, so I created GEOIPSUM!!!" "I used polymaps for the map, rails for the app, don't go near the dateline, it's a bit crap."

"The first library that we are launching is the geometry library. The geometry library provides a set of utility functions for performing distance, heading, and area calculations in a spherical geometry, such as on the surface of the Earth, and also provides functions for handling encoded polylines."

Bruce Sterling (and Jon Lebkowsky) on Twitter, Brazil, photography, Flickr and The Future. And that's just the first nine or so posts. Goodness knows where this'll go after that.

"Does TfL actually want to be open? Is the organisation just doing what it's told, or is it genuinely committed to making data available to third party developers?" Interesting coverage here (including the apparently unauthorised release, then withdrawl, of the MyTfL app).

TfL's fare rises. This is interesting: "One new initiative to be introduced in January is that during the evening peak, all Tube journeys into Zone 1 will be charged at the off-peak rates, as opposed to the peak fare currently charged." Also: "Tube cash fares are now used by under two per cent of Tube users."

"Future Checkin is an app that allows you to check-in to your favorite Foursquare venues automatically when you’re near them. You don’t have to do a thing besides simply have your phone on you and this app will check you in while running in the background with iOS 4." Web APIs + background APIs = a solution for forgetful people who don't want to look rude.

The eye-catching lede - "America’s system of rail freight is the world’s best. High-speed passenger trains could ruin it" - is just the first of many interesting parts of this Economist briefing. Well worth reading.

"[MTC have] begun to provide free personal monitoring services to users of Clipper. It's now possible to access to a complete, up-to-the-minute stream of your own card usage (including the geographic location of each beep)". This for Oyster, please. The Bay Area may be slow to start but they're getting that bit right early.

"German ICE trains still underperform their zappy French TGV counterparts. Deutsche Bahn hopes its new high-speed train will improve Germany's record -- but old tracks and complex networks may put the brakes on the plan." Nice photo gallery, and an interesting comparison with Alstom/SNCF.

On Addison Lee, and minicabs vs taxis. Unfortunately, not enough's made of this introductory piece about GPS data: "The data track the movements of Addison Lee’s [London] cars during a three-year period [and has been used to] create a grid-like model that predicts how long a given journey should take at different times of the day." Still, interesting stuff.

"Messages to Become Public By Default" Facebook really are trying to be Twitter, aren't they?

A very good article which touches new facets of a possibly overfamiliar story, including the fact a Concorde suffered a bird strike, the muscularity of the F-4 phantom, Eric Moody's wonderfully British cabin announcements during a post-flameout 747 glide, and the Airbus 320's use of fly-by-wire. Well worth the read.