Monthly Archives: July, 2021

Awardify revisited

Ten years ago, as a joke, I created a website called ‘Awardify’. The front page explained its purpose:

Awardify is the internet’s premier award-granting service!

  • Have you ever looked at marketing materials for a product or service and seen them described as ‘award-winning’?
  • Have you ever wondered which award they won, and how recently, and whether it has any value at all?
  • Of course not! You probably thought, “Wow! I wish my company/product/service was award-winning too!”

Well, now you need look no further. Awardify’s simple and convenient service can grant you the award of your choice, so that you too can use that catchy and effective phrase on your own marketing materials, and be the envy of your competitors!

Sure enough, you could fill in your details and it would generate a nice printable award for you. You could pick from a selection of pre-defined titles — “The International Kitchen Excellence Award” was one example, I think — or you could choose your own, and you could then decide who should award it to you from a list of impressive-sounding organisations, all of which were trading names of Awardify.com (which didn’t actually exist as legal entity).

After a few years, I decided this spoof had run its course and it wasn’t worth paying for the awardify.com domain any longer, or keeping the underlying software updated with security patches, so I let it go. You can see a snapshot of the Awardify front page on the Internet Archive, but otherwise it was consigned to the big wastebin of internet history, the domain was bought by somebody else, and there the story would have ended… until…

Well, blow me down, if somebody hasn’t revived the idea!

Yes, I discovered today that you can now go to Awardify Now and get yourself an award, and what’s more, they’re actually charging money for them! Which means they might hang around a bit longer than my site did. But they can’t be serious, surely?

So the question now arises, who is the most foolish? The person taken in by fake awards? The person who pays a website to generate fake awards? Or the person who has an idea for a fake-award-generating-business and completely fails to capitalise on it?

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Eye in the Sky

I had owned my little drone for a while before I discovered one of its cleverer tricks: taking 360 panoramic views. You just put it in the right mode and press the button, and it turns round on the spot taking 26 photos at various pitch angles, then stitches them together. In some ways I find these interactive views more compelling than videos.

This was one of my first: Houghton Mill, on the River Great Ouse. (If you just see a blank space below, I’m afraid you may need to try another browser, and if you get these posts by email, you’ll probably have to view it on the web.)

Or here’s a view of the University’s Computer Lab, where I used to work back in the days when we had physical offices. The big building site opposite is the Physics Department’s new Cavendish Lab (the third of that name), which is also known as the Ray Dolby Centre, since that little button you used to press on your cassette deck is paying for a lot of this:

People who are interested in the West Cambridge Site may want to look at other shots from the same evening. And people who remember when cassette decks started having Dolby C as well as Dolby B may be inspired by the title of this post to hum tunes from the Alan Parsons Project.

There may be more of these to come.

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Location, location, revisited

Previously on Status-Q…

Regular readers may remember that a couple of months ago, I lost my glasses and found them again. If you missed that particularly gripping episode, turn back to Location, location, location (or, ‘How technology saved me a few hundred quid yesterday’) and then you’ll understand the background here.

After posting it, my friend Phil Endecott got in touch with me. “Am I to understand”, he said, “that you would find it useful if you had a map app that could show both the locations of your photos and your current location at the same time? If so, I may have just what you need….”

And he did indeed. Phil, you see, is the author of UK Map, an iOS app that I’ve had for as long as I can remember, and one I should talk about more, because I use it all the time, especially when looking for new dog-walking routes. Yes, I may use Google Maps to find out how long it’ll take me to drive there, and Streetview to check that there’s likely to be a parking spot when I get there, but once I’ve laced up my walking boots, then I generally switch to UK Map. It combines free or paid-for Ordnance Survey maps with footpaths from Open Street Map, and, certainly round here, it’s a much better guide than almost anything else as to where you can actually go for a walk.

New features get added periodically and, like much of the cool stuff, are often buried deep in some menu below some unassuming icon in the corner, making them very easy to miss, so you really do want to go to the home page and read it carefully to see what the app can do, and then to the help button in the app to see how to do it. I don’t check these often enough, but when Phil’s message prompted me, I had another explore and found that, yes, it can show your photos on your maps. This is the site of my aforementioned adventure:

and if I had been there at the time of writing this, the little blue dot would indeed have shown me exactly what I needed to know. (The violet-coloured triangle there, by the way, is showing the rough direction in which the phone was pointing when it took the picture, and therefore shows what you may be able to see in it. Neat, eh?)

Anyway, I’ve mentioned UK Map before, but I’ve used it for so many years that I take it for granted. I do think that if you put in a little time learning what it can do, you’ll find it repays its very modest purchase price. Actually, it’ll repay that even if, like me, you really only scratch the surface.

P.S. If you happen to be anywhere other than the UK, this will be of limited use, but if you’re in North America, Phil is also the author of the highly-rated Topo Maps

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The sound of bubbles

Late last summer we were in Cornwall and spent a delightful day on the Helford river in a boat we rented for the purpose. It had a motor, which was very convenient, but having driven an electric car for the last 6 years, I was very conscious again of just how much noise a combustion engine makes, especially when it’s in the form of an outboard sitting right behind you. Since that day, I’ve been desirous of an electric-powered boat.

Well, today we were able to try out a couple of recent purchases. Our new vessel, Tiddler, is an inflatable that comes somewhere between a RIB tender and an inflatable kayak — and we paired it with an ePropulsion electric outboard, which is a marvellous thing that can be put in the back of the car without any risk of petrol spills. In fact we can just about get the boat, the pump, the engine, the battery and the oars in the boot of our saloon car without needing to fold the seats down.

It took some research to find a combination that would do that, but I was keen to try because it turns out that Teslas are ridiculously dependent on their very low drag coefficient for their range, and doing reckless things like putting something on a roof-rack or towing it behind has quite an impact, so keeping things inside is a good idea if you can.

Anyway, we had a rather idyllic but high-tech day, zooming from our house to the little harbour just over an hour away, along a highway that took us almost all the way, so the car did the vast majority of the driving. Then pottering around the estuary mostly in sunshine and mostly in silence, mooring near a famous waterside pub that we knew to serve excellent fish and chips, and then heading back home the same way. This simultaneously proved two things to my satisfaction: firstly, that most forms of transport can be improved with the addition of a good battery, and secondly, that despite all this technology there’s still nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.

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