"I wanted a nerdy planning-related poster for my wall (other than the periodic table of city planning), so I made one this week. I scoured Google Earth and measured that quintessentially American grid in about fifty downtowns around the country." There's a surprising variation in block sizes across the cities.

A very good writeup of a Tim Fendley talk about Legible London, which is slowly spreading from its West End trial area. I should keep an eye out for this chap speaking again; seems like it'd be an interesting talk.

An interesting interview (assuming it's true) on Facebook, privacy, administration tools ("You’ve previously mentioned a master password, which you no longer use."), statistics and user analysis, and an upcoming compiled PHP. As an aside, it seems Facebook now has a London data centre.

Gizmodo on Photosketch. "Take any rough sketch, with the shape of each element labeled with its name, find images corresponding to each drawn element, judge which are a better match to the shapes, and then seamlessly merge it all into one single image." Just watch the video.

Interesting: as well as a simple colour customisation UI, they also support Tumblr themes. "You can drop them right in, and they'll work. We don't support 100% of their blocks and elements, but all the basic ones will work out of the box."

"I wondered how convincingly I could model [30 St Mary Axe] in Mathematica." Somewhat interesting stuff (although possibly more so if you note that the original buildings themselves were digitally modelled as part of the design process).

"Recently, camera companies have begun diverting their research efforts from 'how to get more megapixels' to 'how to get better photos.' They’re working on things that really do matter in a consumer camera, like sensor size, stabilization — and fixing low-light photography." David Pogue reviews interesting Fuji and Sony compacts.

A transcript of Stephen Fry's speech to the Royal Geographical Society in April. I haven't read it yet, but I'd like to remember to do so. (Maybe it's time to look into Instapaper.)

"it’s still possible to travel 3,585 miles across the United States without being the target of billboards, golden arches or absurdly large twine balls. The rails offer a view onto Unbranded America — the land as it was"

"Meggy Jr RGB is a new kit that we designed as a platform to develop handheld pixel games. It's based around a fully addressable 8x8 RGB LED matrix display, and features six big fat buttons for comfy game play." Looks a bit like a baby Tenori-On, and at a baby price, too: $75 (vs £700-odd for the Tenori-On). Of course, it's a very different beast, but still, impressive.

Reminiscent of OnABus (RIP), but with the added bonus of having actual buses on it. (Well, not really, because it's a web page. It has representations of buses. Still.)

"Portland installed a system that lets users track bus arrivals by cellphone; afterwards, people thought that service had improved, with more buses, and more of them on-time. But outside the tracking system, nothing had changed."

'The one-line summary: push into a remote repository that has a detached work tree, and a post-receive hook that runs "git checkout -f".'

Stephen Fry continues to cement his reputation as Britain's favourite technologically-inclined national treasure with this video wishing GNU a happy birthday. (Is it ironic, then, that you can see a MacBook Air in the background?)

A bunch of Bonjour services to enable offline group development. It's all pretty cool, but not much use if you have Internet access and don't have a lot of local developers. Also, *jour looks a bit like Flame.