So I made a mental note of their location and then kept looking. Then I saw what could be a face. So, cracking open the line drawing tool (back then, this was a feature that you had to pay for and was, in fact, the reason I’d upgraded from the free version of Google Earth) I started to expand from the face, sketching an outline of Santa, working out which mountains and valleys I could use to suggest a shape.

It looked pretty good, then I realised the scale was right and I could incorporate the antlers on a much larger scale, so I sketched a (very simplistic) reindeer, enough to guide an adult so they could point it out to a child. Then I came up with a simple story about Santa leaving clues of his whereabouts.

Someone in the Google Earth community had asked if there were any good Santa sightings, so I added it to the forum. I expected that the imagery of that area would have changed enough by now that it would no longer be visible, but happily, coverage of some areas is still fairly slow to update, so it can still be seen this year.

Yesterday it was covered by GEarthBlog and the number of downloads has thus increased rather rapidly – I suppose one year on there are many thousands of new Google Earth users out there, and many new sets of small sparkly eyes to look and wonder.

If you have Google Earth, you can download this file to see it, you can also visit my original post on the subject. If you can’t run Google Earth, you can view the overlay in Google Maps (it’s a bit messy, but it still works).

My apologies in advance if you end up with excited little finger marks all over your monitor

Happy Christmas!

One of the surprises when I converted my grandparents cine films to digital format was almost four minutes of footage from the 1968 Killay House Garden Party; here it is in it’s entirity.

It was a surprise because it was a film I’d never, ever seen, but I suppose there are some films that will bore a four year old that thirty years later he’ll watch repeatedly, so I can understand why it was never considered of interest to me.

The Fields That Became Killay

Killay House was one of the first buildings in the modern (i.e. non-farming) Killay, and when new it was by far, one of the most grand. Almost all the old buildings are now gone, victims of the weather, and a lack of foresight. Over the hill to the north Llanerch Farm (what we called “The Old Farm”) was still standing when I was a kid, both stables and farmhouse, but I recall it deteriorating to just a shell before it was eventually demolished to make way for the Hendrefoilan housing estate. The Llanerch Fach farmhouse was also still a fairly looming structure on the north side of Derlwyn until sometime in the 80′s. The farms that gave Goetre Fawr and Goetre Fach their names were long gone, as was Wimmerfield House, which stood on the corner of Dylan Road and Landore Avenue.

If you grew up in Wimmerfield, or attended Hendrefoilan School, you’ll probably find this photo a bit of an eye opener. It’s Killay House, circa 1900, when all around was just fields.

The small light coloured field in the top left still enjoys the same boundaries today, but it’s now the site of Hendrefoilan School. I wasn’t sure if the photo really is of Killay House at first, so using Google Earth I created an overlay of the old field boundaries from the 1884 Ordnance Survey map and used that to help me get my barings.

The field-boundaries are a perfect match and the overlay may be of general interest to anyone tracing the growth of Killay, because it shows how house construction was grouped according to the land that was available at different times. See it in Google Maps, or download it to view it in Google Earth.

My memories of Killay House

We (my friends and I) were very fortunate that our mate Martin’s dad used to look after the place, with the biggest bunch of keys in the world, so when we went round Martin’s house, he had a bigger back garden than any child could wish for, and what’s more, it was a remarkably well tended garden thanks to Mr. Cunningham. The grass was always cut, so we could play ball games, or ride our bikes around like nutters.

Incidentally, the year of the video (1968) was the year that Mr. Cunningham became the gardner.

Many hours were spent around the small pond at the source of the killay spring (susprisingly few residents know it exists, but it’s on maps) just outside the grassed area, where the slope of the woods falls away. Over that pond, which was often no more than a muddy bog, some of the older boys had somehow made a rope swing. This was a proper rope swing, one made of several misatched pieces of rope and attached to the tree by magic, because it was inconceivable to us that someone could have climbed the tree due to it’s height and lack of branches anywhere but in the canopy.

The other thing we found you could do very effectively with several acres, is have a really good game of hide and seek, or mob, or any other game that is normally limited by people complaining that you’re hiding in their garden. I must have picked up more grass and mud stains in the gardens of Killay House than any other single place.

Killay house was also one of the only places that had it’s own racetrack. Admittedly it was supposed to be a one-way drive for visiting vehicles (so as to maximise safety), but it formed a complete loop, an oval, laid with smooth tarmac – how could we resist? The laps we did on bikes and skateboards must number in the thousands.

Indoors

Most of the time we spent outside, but there were occasions when the buildings were used. Attached to the main building by a covered walkway was what I remember as a brown, probably wood-built hall where I recall the whole class gathering for Rachels birthday party (8th I think). This event was cetainly a disco, possibly a “roller disco”.

A few years after these more youthful pursuits I fondly remember Diane Shaw (official courtesy title “Martins Mum”) opening the house up on Tuesdays during the long wet winter nights, I definitely rememeber playing table tennis, and on reflection the rooms and hallways seemed huge; their spendour when first built must have been quite imposing when Morgan Bransby Williams built the place in the late 1800′s.

2006 and beyond

It’s a tiny bit sad that the view from Hendrefoilan School will be forever missing one of it’s foreground gemstones, as the picture from circa 1900 has today been inverted: instead of Killay House, surrounded by fields, there’s a housing estate abutting an empty space. I rather hope the next generation of inhabitants will have similar enjoyment to our own; I know any kids growing up there are going to love the woods.

Hopefully the building will stop soon; the thing that made Killay special was all the fields, and they’re nearly all full of houses these days.

The only magazine big enough to be seen from space – and only in Vegas!

That’s beautiful… only in Vegas… and maybe Paddington, West Australia.

Seen from Outer Space!

Here’s what Maxim has to say on the subject:

Constructed near Vegas out of vinyl mesh to celebrate our 100th issue, this colossal babe can be seen from outer space using Google Earth.

This is utter nonsense, but brilliant marketing.

Invisible from space.

When I was composing the backstory for the iPod gag, one thing I was very careful of was to give it enough factual basis that the silly bits could be believed, so I checked about the height where space officially begins, and I checked that the tailings dam was visible from that height in Google Earth, without magnification.

The Maxim advert which covers 697 square metres is a tiddler in comparison to “the iPod” which is more than 1000 times bigger, covering 893240 square metres.

If the advert exists (and I’m assuming it does) it has an absolute zero chance of being spotted by an orbiting astronaut taking a walk after lunch. As commercial ventures/hoaxes go, however, it’s a total success, because it’s got press coverage, and it’s got web coverage.

The journalists at C|Net, Yahoo etc. may be feeling a little used right now over the whole “from space” thing. This however, is the world of entertainment, where facts don’t matter and a good story is the only thing of importance.

So what is this Maxim thing really?

If you use Google Maps to go to the spot where the magazine is supposed to be you find a big plain empty patch of ground.

To create this image I used this bookmark from Google Earth to show the spot where the magazine is supposed to be – look for the remarkably small white rectangle just above right of centre.

No evidence?

There are no images currently in Google Earth that show the existence of a giant magazine cover. You can’t see it without an overlay.

The lack of evidence from a trusted third party (in this case Google) is what has prompted many to cry hoax. This is also the reason why the iPod gag took off – it was visible in Google Earth and Google Maps without any overlays, people believed they could verify its existence, so they believed the story.

Maxim have had to create an overlay that you can load, which adds the image of the magazine onto the desert, and for good measure, it adds a bit of desert too. This is probably so you don’t wonder why the nearby desert is in such low resolution when looking at the magazine in relatively high resolution. The downside of this is that although it looks nice, people don’t trust it.

Ultimately, Size Does Matter

So did they really create it? It’s feasible. It’s not particularly big, so it could be done. Remember this is 1000 times smaller than the iPod; but why bother when photo manipulation can do it so effectively?

One theory (which I’m enamoured with) is that we are seeing a preview of higher resolution data that has not yet made it into Google Earth; in which case Maxim have spent a lot of money on an advert that seems to have arrived too late. Hence the need for the overlay. Supporting this theory is the fact that this image can be downloaded from earth.google.com.

If that’s not the case, then it’s a pure unadulterated and massively successful hoax.

One not so giant leap for advertising

If the tailings dam really were an advert, then it really would be visible from space, but whatever the full story is behind the Maxim magazine cover, it’s not visible from space (as is claimed on the cover itself), because it’s just way too small, which is a shame.

In the centre you’ll see that little white rectangle again. That’s the size of the magazine.

You can try taking Google Earth to the edge of space and looking for it (62 Miles/100Km high), but you won’t see it. In fact, to make it simpler, I’ve shifted the maxim overlay to Australia so you can see one within the other. The size remains the same, only the magazine’s positioning has been transposed (which is why it appears upside-down). The height is set at 62 miles up to get you started, then you can zoom in.

And the winner is…

Google, obviously.

It’s another wonderful example of Google Earth becoming the advertisers dream, which, oddly enough I sort of I predicted back in October 2004 when I wrote:

Virtual billboards here we come.

Ah well.

Digg this.

It’s not really a giant iPod; and no, there was no high-stakes poker game between Kerry Packer and Steve Jobs, I made that bit up.

Space really does “begin” at 100Km high, so the dam really could be visible, but is most likely indistinguisable.

What’s also true is that it’s Apple‘s 30th Anniversary on April 1st 2006 – and in Australia it already is April 1st, ’cause Brisbane is 10 hours ahead of GMT, so although this server’s time zone tells me it’s still 31/3, I have no doubt Dad is (probably at this very moment) attaching an exploding cork to someone’s hat and hiding a plastic novelty spider under a toilet seat.

See it in Google Earth (Free Mac & PC versions available here).

Thanks

If you believed; if you wanted to believe, or if you blogged it or reported it, thanks!, it was fun to watch a small April fool that was intended for a few family and friends as it went global!

Getting mentioned in Engadget, Gizmodo, the Grauniad, CNN Money and InternetNews was great. There are too many others and I’ve not had time to see them all yet.

A special mention is also due to Leon who kindly contacted me and put me straight thus:

I already read this somewhere, I cant remember where but when I saw this and read that it was an exclusive story; I have to correct you, it isn’t, I already read it and that it was aquired in a poker match, and saw it on google maps, sorry mate.

Having someone believe the story so much that they let me down gently about not being an exclusive, especially highlighting the bit about the poker; that made my week.

Thanks are also due to Apple afficionado Steve Woolley for proof reading the original article and also to the people kind enough to point out that the structure is a tailings dam (there were remarkably few of you). I didn’t know this when I made up the story, but assumed there was some kind of evaporation happening because of the pattern.

Tailings

So you may well ask: since it’s not an iPod, what is a tailings dam?

There are an estimated 300 tailings dams in Australia, but fewer than 100 are in operation.

The exact content of a tailings dam depends on the geological composition of the ore that is being mined and any chemicals (explosives, corrosives and catalysts) that are employed in the mining and extraction process.

Paddington is actually a gold mine (not a disused mineral mine at all, I made that up too), so the tailings will be commensurate with a gold extraction process. Close up, the (highly acidic) tailings dam in Paddington looks like this.

The general cosensus is that tailings dams are among the most toxic man made areas on Earth. As liquids are absorbed into bedrock or evaporate, the dessiccated tailings can become airbourne, leading to long-term widespread pollution of the area surrounding a tailings facility.

Discovering the iPod

Several people have asked how I came across the thing in the first place, and that’s down to the fact that searching for locations in Google Earth is sometimes a bit hit and miss. I was looking for Paddington, a residential area of Sydney which I now know is about 2.5K SSE of Sydney Opera House.

I tried entering “Paddington, Sydney, Australia” into the GE search bar and it came back with no match. So then I tried “Paddington, Australia“.

If you have GE installed, give it a go, you basically land slap bang on top of the Paddington gold mine with the iPod (tailings dam) in full view.

Apple

So there you have it. Sadly there’s no gargantuan iPod, but we can at least be happy that Apple make lovely looking machines, and have contributed immensely to the public understanding that Human-Computer Interaction should have a strong emphasis on the “Human” side of the equation, so thanks and happy 30th anniversary to everyone at Apple, past and present.

I wonder what they’re really going to announce.

Today I learned from a trusted source that Apple is poised to make history next Saturday when it unveils the worlds first advertisement that can be seen from space.

Apple had hoped to keep their creation secret until the grand unveiling, however, after I was tipped off, and with just a little bit of lateral digging, I was able to uncover enough background information to get a clue of the location.

From there, it was just a matter of firing up Google Earth, and hunting for it! The pictures are a few months old, but clearly show the advert well on the way to completion.

The sheer size of the publicity stunt is difficult to comprehend. It covers 893240 square metres; roughly equivalent to eighty football pitches.

The ad, which depicts Apple’s flagship iPod product has been constructed on the site of an abandoned mineral mine in remote western Australia. It has been in development for almost two years since Apple’s founder Steve Jobs acquired the location during a game of poker with (the late) Australian publishing and gaming tycoon Kerry Packer.

Aliens need not worry about advertising regulations however; the general concensus is that the edge of space is at a height of 62 miles (100Km), and once you go much higher than that, the ad will very quickly shrink towards invisibility. It’ll look like an iPod nano for a while, then maybe a tictac.

Speculation is currently rife that the grand unveiling will be coordinated with the launch of a touch screen Video iPod.

Apple have a press meeting scheduled at the start of next month when more details will be revealed – you heard it here first.

See it in Google Maps.
See it in Google Earth (Free Mac & PC versions available).

A series of articles in BoingBoing have recently highlighted the fun that can be had by using anagrams of station names on tube maps, and one article in particular described how Transport for London (TFL) were attempting censor the publisher of one such anagram map because it infringed on their copyright.

It’s a bit of a kneejerk reaction, but I can understand their desire to protect what must be a jolly good revenue stream.

The revenue stream is, of course, linked to that specific map, and the relevance of that map is now diminishing, in part thanks to a fabulous example of what can be done with Google Earth – where the route of every London Underground line has now been modeled.

It was whilst looking at this insanely cool map (and wondering if TFL could claim copyright on it because they own the design of the track, and therefore the shape) that the clue became apparent, writ large over, under and throughout the whole of Greater London.

Here’s what the London Underground network looks like when viewed from the north west:

Anyone familiar with pastafarianiam will immediately spot that TFL cannot claim copyright because of prior art; and not just any old prior art, but the original drawing of the FSM Himself.

TFL may argue that their track shape existed before Bobby Henderson’s 2005 drawing of the FSM, but the FSM must have existed before TFL’s track, in order to first create the universe in which the track resides; so if any copyright is held on the shape, then it must be with the FSM Himself!

Yarrrr!

This is without doubt, one of the largest clues that the FSM has ever left for His loyal pirate followers, who will surely redouble their pirately activities, prime the beer kegs and await the coming of the FSM, for the London Underground Network is indeed designed in the shape of His Noodly Self.

This similarity is not a wind up, that really is the shape of the london underground, and that really is Bobby Henderson’s unaltered drawing from his open letter to the Kansas School Board.

I’m off to get my pirate costume dry cleaned; I want to look my best when He arrives.

News reports are focusing on the town of Innisfail at the moment, probably because it’s the most populated area and the eye of the storm appears to have passed overhead there; but looking at the weather satellite images the storm was huge, so there’s going to be a lot of people affected.

The place we stayed is approximately 14 miles from where the storm centre hit the land. Around the same time, the main storm area was about 200 miles in diameter.

The huts are in the rainforest just up from Bingil Bay, and it sounds like the area has had a battering.

Ms Welch said the landscape was usually dense with rainforest, but “all of a sudden it is just open and we can see the hill in front of us. We can see houses in the next street we couldn’t see before.”

Hope you’re all ok folks.

Cyclone Larry

By overlaying satellite images from the last 24 hours I’ve been able to fairly accurately model the path and the extent of the storm.

The extent of cyclone:

The path of the cyclone:

Google Earth Model

To view this model of cyclone Larry in 3D get Google Earth (it’s free).

Mum lives very near to the school and noticed “what looked like a house on fire” at about 01:30 and was about to call the emergency services when she saw blue lights so observed the events as they unfolded.

Two hours later (03:30) in gale force easterly winds, the fire continued to blaze – Emergency services swarmed all over the local roads to the west of the school, sensibly keeping out of the smoke when it’s not necessary.

Mum reported seeing people up ladders and hearing things exploding.

By 05:00 the fire was under control, but extensive damage had occurred. A large proportion of the school has been razed: science, business, computing, staff areas, dining rooms & kitchens all flat to the ground.

Surviving the fire

The Leisure Centre which adjoins the school to the east (a favourite for kids birthday parties) has slight smoke damage. The English and Maths departments have survived, but a lot of coursework and school records have been lost. There is some hope that work which teachers and kids did on computers (including assignments and grades) is likely to exist in different forms on home computers, laptops and on backup disks in various places, so it’s not as complete a loss as it would have been just a few years ago.

Photos

Clicking on each photo will take you to a flickr (photo sharing) page where you can download high resolution copies.

Press Coverage

The story has been picked up by the BBC, and as other agencies publish reports, they’ll be listed here (archived stories here).

Google Earth Location / Model

This is a Google Earth placemark which identifies the school’s location, and includes a (fairly simple) 3d model of the former building illustrating what’s been destroyed.

Previous Fire

The school was rebuilt in 1976 after a fire destroyed the previous buildings. A couple of photo’s of that fire are available on the web at the Gorseinon History Archive (here and here).

Places that were already in high resolution have been improved, and many new places added, including lots of South Wales (as far west as Gower, North to Ebbw Vale, South to Cardiff and west to Newport). Bristol is also included, as is a HUGE swathe starting at Liverpool and spreading east. Greater London is now far clearer than before and some sections of the south coast including Portsmouth, Bournemouth, Poole and the Isle of Wight have also benefitted from higher resolution images.

I’ve also noticed massive improvements to Belfast, Glasgow, Newcastle Upon Tyne, and even little old Hebden Bridge and Heptonstall are now in high res.

I think it’s time to revisit my comparison of Aerial Photo’s and Google Earth to see how the images have improved.

So where ever you are, hello!

Now, the next cool crossover has to the getting this data as a live Google Earth overlay.

Portsmouth College provide some fantastic (historical and current) aeriel pictures of Portsmouth on their website, so I thought I’d try comparing them to see just how good the rendering in Google Earth really is.

In the example shown here, the photo (on the left) was taken before the construction of the Tipnor Bridge which now carries the M275. The output from Google Earth, shown on the right, is generated using more recent aeriel photography.

Virtual Tour

I’ve bookmarked more than sixty locations around Portsmouth so you can make up your own mind on a virtual tour. If you do not have Google Earth, you can, get it here (Windows only).

If you have Google Earth installed, all you need to do is download this file.

The file contains several placemarks, each of which has an accompanying photo. If you double click on the placemark, the viewing height and angle should be adjusted to the approximate position that the camera was in when the photo was taken, you can then click on the word “photo” in the speech bubble to see the real picture.

Enjoy!

Brett and Vicky got hitched at the “Moon Palace Golf Resort and Spa”, a nice “wedding-on-the beach” affair which is approxiately 10 miles south of Cancun, and around 60 miles north of where the centre of the storm hit land.

The big red arrow is highlighting the large red spot south of cancun centre, which indicates the location of the resort.

The white dotted line shows the extent of the storm system, which is approximately 160 miles in diameter, so they were definitely affected by it, and the resort will have been 20 miles within it’s limits.

The picture was generated using Google Earth (which is free), with an overlay of the hurricane’s path.

Update

Sounds like Brett’s hotel was used as a refuge by many people from the surrounding area, which is good news ’cause they’re likely to be OK, but a shame their honeymoon got gatecrashed:

They were then told they would be evacuated at 9 a.m. Sunday. A bus took them to the Moon Palace Resort in Cancun, where they camped with thousands of other displaced tourists in a hastily arranged shelter on the beach. – Dayton Daily News

The Moon Palace distributed notices Sunday advising guests that a curfew would begin at 5 p.m., alcohol sales were banned, and room service was terminated. ”We suggest you stay calm and strictly follow instructions of the hotel staff . . .,” the advisory said. “Stay in your room. Keep your shades and curtains closed. Do not use the Jacuzzi. Stay away from windows and doors. Keep your documents and valuables safe.” – The Miami Herald

It’s based on Keyhole EarthViewer which used to cost $29.95 for a subscription, so google are obviously relying on (a) the advertising revenue they can generate from this new search portal and (b) sales of the enhanced “Pro” “Fusion” and etc. versions that will be of interest to companies that want real-time 3D data integration.

Get it here.

If (like me) you find the controls amazingly clunky and non-intuitive, you might like to try WorldWind, on which the mouse-control is decidedly more dynamic. The major difference between the two products is that Google’s financial clout results in more high resolution imagery being available for places outside the USA.

The fruits of the marriage are about to be born. The new child will be called Google Earth, it will do what Google Local and Google Maps can do, but in 3D.

It might even be free…

Watch this space.

Some reviews and screenshots from the beta release are starting to appear online:

• Pics

Previously I described a query where you might ask about who voted for Kerry – a simple enough query – obviously from an advertising perspective there’s more to be had by enabling queries on commercial properties: the example on the introductory tour is a query for sushi restaurants in New York, I tried a similar query for Palo Alto and it seems to be jolly successful at showing up the place where I first had Sushi, on University Avenue, back in 1998. Finding the hotel where I stayed, Dinah’s Garden, was similarly easy.

So, although it’s not possible yet to see the data in 3D (with terrain-mapped aerial photos so we can’t yet see if the hotels and restaurants are nicely situated on a hill with great views of the valley); the combination of the two services can’t be far off – Google now has it’s foot firmly in the door of a significantly untapped marketplace; and importantly, the service is both highly usable and useful.

Keyhole make a product called EarthViewer, which is one of the coolest applications I’ve ever seen – it makes extensive use of the high end graphics cards found in PC’s to map satellite images onto a virtual Earth, adding topographical information into the bargain and then overlaying information about roads, rivers, gas stations, ad infinitum.

Google’s aquisition puts it in a position where it can provide geographically attuned search results – imagine, for example, that you wish to see, at a glance, how many people in the USA have a weblog that mentions “I voted for Kerry“. Google now has the potential to provide such information overlayed directly onto the USA as seen from several kilometers above.

Google is currently rich from the proceeds of it’s IPO, so it is now in a position where it can make strategic purchases the like of which it could only dream of before. With Keyhole, Google has bought itself into a position where it could introduce a completely new way of presenting and interpreting searches results – the combined data from all Google’s other ventures now has a serious and highly attractive presentation engine that could put Google months, if not years ahead of it’s rivals.

Earlier I called Keyhole “one of the coolest applications I’ve ever seen” for good reason – it has competition (which emerged only a few weeks ago) in the form of a NASA led project which is now hosted on sourceforge, namely Worldwind.

Aside from being several years of development behind Earthviewer, Worldwind’s greatest advantage (that it is open source, and free) is also it’s greatest downfall. Interest in Worldwind has been so great that the servers which provide the satellite images from NASA have been down due to overloading. Nasa (and others) are working to remedy this at present, however, with Google’s legendary server farms this is a problem which is unlikely to befall the great search-monster.

Google have immediately slashed the price of the end user version of EarthViewer, and I will not be surprised if it lowers this still further (to zero) once full integration with it’s other services offers significant economies of scale, and advertising opportunities hitherto unimagined.

Virtual billboards here we come.

In the mean time, developers are of course invited to get involved on sourceforge and help develop Worldwind.