Google Maps meets SimCity

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

If you, like certain members of the PC Pro team, wasted many, many hours of your formative years fashioning little cities of your own in Will Wright’s fiendishly addictive Sim City games, then this little gem will soon see you rummaging around your loft for your dusty, once-cherished floppies.

Some bright spark has taken Google Maps’ rendition of Hong Kong and sprinkled it liberally with two-dimensional, isometric goodness. Forget Street View, forget Bing’s Bird’s Eye view – this is better. Much, much better.

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1,000,000 keys and a celebratory holiday

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

You may remember that a while ago I reviewed a Logitech keyboard that tracked key presses. Well, I’ve been using it at my desk since then, and I’ve just passed into seven figures. It’s still going strong despite a few coffee-related mishaps, although I’m still not using any of the more esoteric features.

Considering that I only use it in the morning – I tend to migrate to the PC Pro laboratory in the afternoons, like a goose heading South for the winter – that’s a whole lot of typing.

To reward myself I’m going to take two weeks off work and go on my first holiday since time immemorial. Bye.

Online crime maps are a criminal’s adventure playground

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

So the PM has agreed to the idea of online crime maps to keep the public informed of goings on in their area. It sounds great, doesn’t it: just log on, type in your post code and see a breakdown of all the crimes committed near you this month, compared to neighbouring areas.

It isn’t totally new – Londoners can check their borough already at the Met Police website. And a quick look at the figures shows that – despite the media giving the impression we’re entering a new Wild West of guns and knives – crime in London has been on the decline for several years now.

At the time of writing, gun-enabled crime is down 11.5% on last year; violence against the person has dropped 4.8%; murders fell by 1.9% in the last 12 months and robberies are down a massive 19%.

But according to the papers it’s crime “hot-spots” that are the problem, so a plan like these online crime maps is the ideal way to highlight it, right? Wrong, and to illustrate why, I give you an example of an existing online crime mapping scheme:

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