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Free Geocoders / Geocoding Posts

Several weeks ago I was making changes to an as-yet-unreleased wiki, and to protect it from prying eyes I locked it up from all IP addresses except my own. My IP address was just updated, and looky looky, I can no longer access the wiki, which brought that permission change to the forefront.

Problem is, I posted several articles on some free geocoders I wrote. Just simple tools that you can use to geocode addresses via Google’s Map API or the Geocoder.us service. Those tools are only available on the wiki, so I’m afraid that everyone was met with a ‘403 access denied’ error when attempting to access them.

Everything is open again; please accept my sincerest apologies. There’s nothing I hate more than wasting my time, so I hope I didn’t waste too much of yours.

All I Want for Christmas: BUG, from Bug Labs

This is one of the more interesting products I’ve seen in a while, and although it doesn’t look
like it’s going to be shipping in 2007, this is high on my wish list for 2008.

Bug Labs has created open source hardware modules that can be snapped together like Legos to create a mobile device. You start out with the well-equipped BUGbase, with built-in Wifi, USB, and ethernet. BUGbase has four connectors used for snapping on the open source hardware modules. Each module or combination of modules you snap on enables additional device capabilities. Current and upcoming modules include:

• Camera / videocamera
• GPS
• touch screen
• motion sensor / accelerometer
• qwerty keyboard
• speaker and jacks

Then comes the software, also open source and community-developed with Bug’s own SDK. It looks like there are a handful of applications out there currently, with most being of the test variety, but it doesn’t take long for these kinds of plug-ins to gather momentum.

Sure, these things look like bricks, but you can’t beat the gadget appeal.

Check them out at http://www.buglabs.net/.