My name is Evan and I’m a Geoguessr addict. There I’ve said it.

Geoguessr is one of the simplest, cleverest and most addictive games I’ve stumbled across in ages. Combine a travelogue with a treasure hunt with some real-life detecting and you come close to describing this little gem.

Basically you are taken to a point in the world in Google Streetview. You then have to try to guess where you are. The closer your guess is to the actual position, the more points you get. On it’s face that might sound simple, and sometimes it is. If you land outside a clear landmark like a sign-posted hotel it’s not to difficult to work out where you are. But if you end up in an open stretch of road surrounded by hills it becomes more challenging.

Image: xkcd/1214

The fun part is trying to extract clues from your surroundings to work out where you could be. Look for signs; see if passing cars are driving on the left- or right-hand side of the road; look at how people are dressed. It’s a real puzzle-solver using the real World. And to top it off you get to see views of places you’d otherwise never look. I particularly like some of the obscure places like tiny Alaskan towns or road-side stops in Africa – places I’d never think you look at in the ordinary course of events.

Really the only criticism I have of the game is that there is clearly a limitation on destinations. I’m guessing that that’s because a completely random system would have you landing in the oceans a lot. As it is, Europe doesn’t pop up as often as I’d expect or like and the only Asian destination I’ve hit is Japan. But this is a little thing.

Geoguessr is completely free and runs in a web browser. Just steer yourself to geoguessr.com.

Part of what makes this little game so addictive is the urge to get a slightly better score each time around. Each round consists of five places and the best I’ve managed to score is around 26,000 points. But each time a round finishes you’re immediately presented with another destination and the urge to try to do better is almost irresistible. Please, someone help me. I need an intervention.

Geek In Sydney, Geoguessr is addictive; it really, really is

Here’s all the upcoming cool things that have been cluttering up my inbox for the last week.

Sydney Zombie Walk is once again invading Maitland Goal for zombie laser tag.

Geek In Sydney, Zombies, games and things

So I was at a meeting recently where someone bemoaned the costs of delivering power to iPads. This was in a school situation so they were looking potentially at the cost of charging 1000 iPads. But what would it actually cost?

Although I can’t source the original, there are many articles from last year quoting a study by the Electric Power Research Institute (eg this article from Gigacom) which says that if you were to fully recharge your iPad from empty every couple of days it would consume just under 12 kWh of electricity over the course of a year. By comparison, a plasma 42” television consumes 358 kWh.

At, say, $0.25 per kWh that would come to $4 pa. Most people are paying less than $0.25 per kWh and don’t fully drain their iPad over two days – so that $4 is probably the higher-end cost. So even allowing for variation in usage and cost that’s not a lot of money compared to the cost of purchasing an iPad in the first place.

In the specific school context it was raised you would only be charging when school was on, let’s say 280 days; so, doing some brutal rounding, that would be an annual cost of around $3,000 always assuming schools pay something like domestic electricity rates. $3000 is a lot of money for some schools, relatively less for others. But putting this in another perspective charging an iPad draws less power than using a compact fluorescent light-bulb.

There are many, many complex issues with the use of iPads in schools, but I’m going to say electricity is not foremost amongst them.

Geek In Sydney, How much power does your iPad really use?

I’m not entirely sure what the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) was thinking when it decided to create a game, but it’s a pretty neat piece of work as it turns out.

Run That Town is an iOS game that’s a little like SimCity but based on real census data. You choose a suburb or town and then make a series of development decisions. The correct choices get you money and influence to spend on further decisions, incorrect ones leave you increasingly politically impotent. Because the algorithm behind the game uses real data it provides an absolutely fascinating insight into the place where you live. In my first attempt I failed horribly as my instinctive decisions were hated by the reality of my fellow residents. The second time around I paid attention to the demographics and rejected anything that smacked of public transport or schools and managed to achieve maximum money and influence for most of the game. Clearly playing in a different suburb would require a different approach.

Now I actually was on my local Council for some time and I couldn’t help being struck by how true-to-life some of this decision-making was. Do we really need another pre-school? Yes but it’s not going to be popular with the older child-free people who make up most of the community. A cinema complex looks good from a distance, but not when you’re dealing with increased traffic and parking. For what’s basically a simple game it can be quite thought-provoking.

Don’t download this game expecting endless hours of gameplay. It’s entertaining and thought-provoking for a couple of plays, but you soon realise what it takes to win and the challenge evaporates, especially if you play your own suburb. But, while it’s no Plants vs Zombies or Angry Birds, it truly is worth a look and a few minutes spent thinking about how demographics influence political decision-making.

Outside of the game-play the graphics are charming and the voice-over from Shaun Micallef is witty. The disclaimer at the front says it all really: “WARNING: This game has been made for fun, and while it contains genuine Census data from your selected postal area, it also contains traces of comedy, complete generalisations and some very dodgy puns, which we’d like to apologise for now.”

I’m still not sure why the ABS went to the effort of making the game: Likely it was to demonstrate the utility of census data. While I’m not certain they entirely achieve that end, I’m glad they gave it such a good shot. The data is in: this is a great little game.

Run That Town View in ITunes. $free

Geek In Sydney, ABS creates a game: contains real data, traces of comedy and some very dodgy puns

Flexischools has just launched a new mobile site. It appears to be a mobile skin on their web pages so it is platform neutral – which is a good thing. Sadly it’s not fully functional compared to the desktop site.

I like Flexischools a lot and use it all the time. I was really hoping that their announced changes would address some of the quibbles I have with their approach. The good news is that you no longer have to buy an app to go mobile, and that’s certainly an improvement although I never could understand why they charged for the app in the first place.

The bad news is that they haven’t addressed what I consider to be one of their major weaknesses. Even on the desktop there’s no way to order something for a range of days. I can’t be the only parent whose child wants the same thing for several days in a row but something different the following week. On the desktop I can select an existing order and then add it to another date, one day at a time: It’s far more clunky than I’d like but it can be done. The mobile version doesn’t even have that degree of functionality: Every day’s order has to be created from scratch – which is a complete deal-breaker for me.

On the desktop this update doesn’t address my concerns from my initial review that “My only criticism is that the interface design could do with some work. It functions, but it’s not entirely intuitive or pretty.” They’ve put a lovely new login screen up but haven’t addressed the interface and functionality once you get behind the shopfront.

It’s great to see Flexischools is not resting on its laurels. Going properly mobile is a great move. The whole thing remains a wonderful service which uses technology to make a chore enormously easier. But I can’t help being a bit disappointed with this update and hoping for more next time.

Geek In Sydney, Flexischools new mobile site leaves me wanting more

How fast is our Australian Internet? The short answer is not very. The longer answer is: it’s slow, expensive and under-delivers.

In wrestling with some issues with my own internet connection I came across Net Index, a site which gives loads of useful stats on speed and value around the world. For example, the median domestic download speed in Hong Kong is 46.86 Mbps. In the USA it’s 17.68 Mbps. In Australia we get 12.99 Mbps. Mongolia, Poland and Uruguay sit just ahead of us.

Looked at by quality of connection (packet loss, etc), Sydney is ranked 20th in the world; while Australia as a whole is ranked 38th.

Interestingly, Net index also rates countries on the affordability of broadband. By this measure Australia comes in 20th – we have one of the most expensive broadband systems in the world, but we’re rich enough that it doesn’t look so bad when measured against our GDP per capita. We pay US$9.82 per Megabit per second which is simply pretty abysmal compared to most of the developed world.

But the figure I found really interesting is the ‘promise index’ which shows the median ratio of actual download speed to the download speed subscribed to (“promised speed”). Australia has a figure of 63.75 which puts us in 62nd place in the world. Sadly, Sydney performs even worse than the rest of Australia on this measure. What we’re promised just doesn’t seem to match up with what is delivered. In some other countries they actually over-deliver, can you believe it?

It’s easy to read too much into the detail of figures like these – although, while details may differ, every other survey I can find ranks us in about the same spot in the world. But even taking a broad view it comes down to us being badly under-served by our broadband providers in Australia. Technology changes, such as the NBN, may well change the speed over time – although I’m tempted to shrug my shoulders and say ‘so what?’ when you look at the blistering speeds already being provided by the countries at the top of the table. But technology wont change us paying through the nose for our connection, nor will it address us being sold one speed and then having another delivered.

Geek In Sydney, How fast is Australian internet?

It is officially World Scratch Day. Much as I love Scratch I struggle to see a programming language needed a day to itself. But then, I suppose, there are many less deserving things that get their own day.

Thinkspace at the Powerhouse Museum is running an event:

We’ll be remixing projects from the massive global scratch community, and adding animation based on some of the weird and wonderful things in our collection, and coolest images from our historic photo collections. We’ll be sharing our creations on our exclusive Scratch Day Gallery.

The gory details are as follows. When: 18 May 2013. Sessions: 11-12:15pm, 12:45-2pm, 2:30-3:45p. Cost$25, $20 members. Ages 7 and up. Details and bookings available from the Thinkspace webpage.

Geek In Sydney, Celebrate World Scratch Day at the Powerhouse

Is this a new OPAL terminal on a bus?

Spotted by our roving transport correspondent, Callum P, on a bus in North Sydney this morning it doesn’t look like the OPAL terminals on the wharves, but it certainly looks like a touch-and-go terminal. The bus came fitted with two of these one by the driver and one in the luggage area.

The lack of an LCD screen makes me wonder if this is just a case of wishful thinking rather than the buses really gearing up their infrastructure; but it’s not impossible to believe that there are technical reasons for the design on a moving bus to differ to that attached to a wharf or station.

Does anyone know more?

Geek In Sydney, OPAL system on the buses?

I was reading the paper this morning about changes to the Sydney rail timetable. I read my Sydney Morning Herald on the iPad, but I still use the digital edition that looks identical to the paper version. The article included a neat little graphic that summarised the changes to the rail timetable and suggested going on the web to see “how your station is affected in the new draft timetable.”

On the web I go. The web version of the graphic is exactly the same as the printed version with the exception that you have to click on the dots to see the information that was displayed on the face of the printed version. Exactly the same information. What on earth is the point of taking a lovely, clear graphic and taking information off it just to make it interactive. Really SMH, this may come as a shock but people don’t get that much gratification out of clicking a mouse button these days.

Geek In Sydney, SMH shows how not to do an interactive feature

Parent Teacher Online (PTO) does just one thing – it provides an environment for booking and managing parent-teacher interviews. It does that one thing very well, if my experience booking interviews with my son’s teachers is anything to go by.

The booking process is extremely simple, just being a function of selecting times from drop-down boxes. The interface isn’t fancy, but then it doesn’t really need to be either. This is one of those simple, time-saving ideas that seem blindingly obvious once someone else has put them together. Every other time I’ve booked interviews I’ve had to select a series of times on paper and rely on the school to create a timetable for me. This year I just picked times and, in minutes, had a locked-in timetable available for downloading to my calendar.

There are probably other ways a school could achieve the same end. A Google calendar set-up perhaps? But there’s the danger of recreating the wheel and it all falling in a messy heap as you try to force a generic tool to do a specific thing. That’s what I like about this application – it focuses on solving a single problem.

There are probably other uses that a School could put the system to, but I’m not sure that wouldn’t defeat the purpose of having a tailored tool. From the other end, the company behind PTO is also using their software to create a system to organise volunteer rosters: Pick a Time.

There’s no public information on PTO pricing for schools. But it makes sense that this would save a lot of administrative time, and so money, for teachers and admin staff. And it certainly simplifies life for parents.

Full details are at Parent Teacher Online.

It’s interesting to contemplate a time when the actual parent teacher interviews will be online…

Geek In Sydney, Parent teacher interviews online