13 Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (304 pages) Didn’t enjoy this as much as Dance Dance Dance, but still a delightful way to spend some train journeys. I love the way Murakami describes boring everyday stuff.

14 Vernon God Little (288 pages) Excellent wee book largely constructed of delightful sentences. Read over three days following Super Tuesday where Hillary and Trump look to be stealing a march, and a week after watching Making a Murderer. ‘Murica. Sigh. Another mention of six fingered people. Probably my favourite so far. Second Booker winner on the list. Need to order a few more.

15 A Brief History of Time (256 pages) I’ve never read this before. Oddly. I can argue about emissions from Black Holes, visualisations of four dimensional space, and your general General Relativity with the best of the armchair physicists – but avoided this previously for some reason. Probably a snobbish rejection of overly popular pop-sci. I’m an idiot. The transition at page 23 from Newtonian to Relativistic is brutal. I can see why people stopped at that end of the book. I wish I’d done more maths. I can’t help wondering what shape physics would be in today if it wasn’t for the Pope and his ilk.

16 The Bone Clocks (640 pages) I think this is the first spooky nonsense book so far. Unless you count Murakami dream stuff as spooky. Which I don’t think I do (thereby no doubt demonstrating that I missed the point of the book entirely). I’d have preferred this without the Dungeons and Dragons nonsense. Felt a little bit like an episode of Yu Gi Oh in the third quarter – a bit of a slog. Ended well though, with some This Changes Everything scenario stuff. I preferred the resurrections of Harry August.

17 Trigger Warning (352 pages) Talking of spooky nonsense! Short story books can be incredibly frustrating to read on the train. Getting half way through a chapter is one thing – being three pages from the end of a story is quite another. Some utter nonsense in here. I don’t understand the dr who stuff. Fun though.

18 Good Ideas (368 pages) I’m always being asked how things are made, how they work, why something is, etc… by the wee lads . This is still a good reminder that even boring stuff is endlessly fascinating if you just dig in a bit deeper. Also some nice ideas outside of my usual science / maths / logic zone. Well worth a read if you have little people. While reading this the wee lad asked “Dad. What’s the opposite of medium?”, Discussion ended at head scratching about wether infinity was actually on the number line or not. I resisted showing him this.

19 A God in Ruins (542 pages) This was the only book I already had in the stack that featured in the Baileys long list announced this month. Deliberately bought this because it’s not the kind of thing I’d usually read. A lot of the books so far have done the time jumpy thing to some extent – with things happening out of sequence. You read about the death and then the life – that kind of thing. It feels like this jumps around mid sentence sometimes as recollection and reality get mashed up. My simple brain had to skip back and fore a few times to make sure I wasn’t slipping into that auto pilot where your eyes are reading but your brain is running through a todo list. I’m cheating slightly including this one – I finished it on April 1st.

7 books ( 5 fiction, 2 non-fiction )
2750 pages

I’m working on pairing historic company data with the OSM (Open Street Map) building outlines that we’re using to create our 3D environment. This pairing is harder than it sounds. I’m starting with something relatively simple. Identify the occupants at ground level, using a combination of OSM data, feet and eyes, and Google Streetview.

Starting with RBOS outside M&S and working along to the St Nicholas graveyard should be easy. Shouldn’t it?.

Looking at Open Street Maps there there are six distinct buildings in this stretch.

Looking at Google Maps it looks like we have five distinct buildings.

The StreetView level confirms this five building view if you ignore shop fronts and look at the physical buildings and roof lines.

Looking at the OS data through the Aberdeen City Council map viewer we see street numbers. We also see see – you guessed it – seven buildings.

Finally, looking at StreetView shopfronts we have eight individual shops at ground level.

We also know that the first address (labelled 1 above) is 104 Union Street, and that RBOS (labelled 8 above) is 78 Union Street.

Some Google searches, phone calls and directory checks gives us the following addresses:

• Vape Scotland, 104 Union Street
• Peterkins Solicitors, 100 Union Street
• O2, 98 Union Street
• Vodaphone, 92 Union Street
• McGowans Jewellers, 88 Union Street
• Timpson, 86 Union Street
• Casepoint, 82 Union Street
• RBOS, 78 Union Street

The Importance of our “Base Layer”

So clearly, we have five (or is it six, or seven?) ‘buildings’, and eight ‘shops’ at ground level. That kind of mismatch going to happen. Buildings change usage, they split, combine and generally change.

The challenge is that we need to associate an OSM Way ID with each shop in order to identify it within our visualisation. We’re creating 3D buildings based on the OSM outline data and then layering other info onto that. Things like historic photographs of the frontage, details of businesses that have traded from that address etc…

It’s because the OSM buildings don’t map to the building we see that this is causing some head scratching. The OSM ways don’t have addresses in most cases, they are simply outlines. Our challenge is mapping the eight occupants of the five real buildings to the six building outlines available in OSM.

So should we be starting with the OSM data?

I’m not so sure. The principle feels correct. Base our visualisation system around the best source of open data containing the buildings that we want to visualise, and add our new data to that.

We’re taking a lot of time to work around inconsistencies in the OSM data. Which inevitably introduces guesses. We’ve been mapping data to building outlines that might change / disappear.

PBKAC?

So we started out “pairing historic company data with the OSM (Open Street Map) building outlines”. That was where we went wrong.

Our answer, at least for now, is to avoid associating our data with building ways too early. If we simply store latt/long points for each address that we arrive at, and mash that with the building data later down the line, we can achieve everything we need to independently of any mismatch.

Using geolocated address nodes, rather than building ways,

If an address latt/long is within the way for a building, we can assume that the address is in the building. If that building way gets revised, or moved, or replaced at some point – we lose nothing – we still have out address latt/long.

It means we’re able to benefit from the OSM data, but we’re not tied to it, and we’re not limited by it.

It’s not as direct, but it’s much more robust. It also gives flexibility for the time travel aspects of the project – meaning that if a given street number moved for some reason, we can reflect this by date bounding our address nodes.

These are all the address nodes already in OSM for the area we want to cover. Far from comprehensive. We’re planning to push any new address locations we confirm as part of the project back into OSM to improve this. A comprehensive source of addresses would be invaluable.

You’ll be able to see the data we gathered during Codethecity 6 on github shortly, once we’ve finalised the licences and published.

With the data streaming from processing to the phant setup, we can easily pull various sets of data as json to feed into p5.js sketches. This makes the visualisation easy enough to be fun, because it removes a lot of the faff associated with moving data around. The docs on phant.io give a decent overview of the different cuts of the data you can pull directly.

This is a really simple visualisation – it just pulls a recent data set and plots a pixel for each second – seconds on columns, minutes on rows – in whichever order they arrive.

I like how it goes a bit glitchy when the pixel capture fails for a few seconds, or when the data set spans more than a single hour and it overwrites itself.

Next up – getting the pixel stream to come from this little monkey instead of the Mac. RPi + Lego = Huzzah.

Each pixel represents one second. Each row represents one minute. The 60 x 60 block represents an hour. What can you tell from this photo? Well, you can tell that I probably wasn’t outside from the lack of blues or greens. Something orange turned up late in the hour. Probably a wee lad in an orange fleece. Something red popped up from time to time. Probably my notebook.

The camera for this little test was just the camera on my mac. I used Processing to grab a pixel from the centre of the frame once a second and plot it to a grid.

The next version uses Python, Raspberry Pi, the RPi Camera, a custom Lego Pi case for directing the camera. It’s using phant for data logging so that I can throw the pixels at a server, and then process them into images or animations elsewhere. I’m mainly experimenting with exposure settings to get a balance of pleasing / accurate brightness through a 24 hour cycle.

Testing takes time when you’re taking photos of time.

7 Station Eleven (384 pages) Rattled through this one. Fun to read after Sapiens. Sapiens covered the end of some humans, and the rise of some others. This covers the near death of those heroes of Sapiens, and presents further evidence that religion is largely a negative force in the world. More imagined futures. I should really read King Lear.

8 The Narrow Road to the Deep North (464 pages) A Booker winner. Fancy! I haven’t knowingly read a Booker winner before. I read Life of pi, but didn’t realise it was a booker winner when I read it. I just thought it was a book. I got entirely overwhelmed by something in the first quarter hinting at things to come – felt like the book had eight endings in succession. Which is a good thing. You should read this. It’s early, but this might be the best one on this list. I need to grab some more bookers.

9 The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (448 pages) I do enjoy a bit of time travel paradox. I also enjoy a bit of science and a bit of soviet otherness. Enjoyable. Better than back to the future.

10 This Changes Everything (575 pages) Ouch. Hard read. Sorry kids. We ruined it and we knew, but we didn’t bother to fix it. Found this hard – and took breaks to read other books along the way. Not because it’s a hard read as such – I mean it’s LONG, but it’s fascinating throughout. Hard because I read all about Rio in the Guardian way back in the day and assumed that paying my green party subs, turning off lights, and not using standby on the telly would be enough to fix things. I was an idiot, and so was everyone else.

11 Reasons to Stay Alive (272 pages) Everyone should read this. It’s a tiny book. Go on. You’ll maybe cut a few people a little more slack from time to time. Which might help them. Why wouldn’t you want to help people?

12 Slaughterhouse 5 (192 pages) Back to fiction. I’m not entirely sure why – but I loved this. To bits.

February
6 books ( 4 fiction, 2 non-fiction )
2335 pages

1 Norwegian Wood Cutting etc… (192 pages) Much better than it looks – and it looks lovely. It will make you want to buy a little woodland though – so be warned. Slight cheat as read between giftmas and new year but hey. It’s on the list.

2 Moriarty (400 pages) I loved Sherlock Holmes books when I was younger, only grabbed this as part of a 3 for a tenner offer – didn’t expect much – but it was good. I guessed the plot on page 40ish but hey. It was fun. Read like a Sherlock Holmes book that I hadn’t read. Did what it said on the tin.

3 I Am Pilgrim (912 pages) Awesome. Haven’t read a proper thriller in years. Page turner etc… Eyeballs though. Grim. Was worried getting through almost 1000 pages would take months. Took a week.

4 The Man Who Made Things etc…  (100/240 pages) Read 100 pages of the 240 and got a little bored. Partly because I’ve read a lot about wood already. Partly because it should really be titled “the self congratulatory man who watched other far more interesting people make things out of trees but casts himself as hero for finding them and giving them a part of the very special tree that he was also very clever to find” – I’d have loved to read “the man who largely kept quiet while allowing the interesting craftspeople speak about what they do”.

5 So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (320 pages) I always read Jon Ronson books in a terrible Jon Ronson impersonation voice in my head. This slows you down. Still enjoyed it though. Especially worth reading if you’re a judgemental twitterer. Change your ways!

6 Sapiens (512 pages) Tremendous book. Lovely stuff about pre-history, and a straight(ish) line through to the future. Plenty stuff I didn’t know. Less preachy than a lot of pop-sci. The importance of stories in the development of people is utterly convincing and quite pleasing. Certainly contextualises … well… almost everything. From Polar Bears to the indyref vote to buying shoes. Left me similarly enthused about humans as I was after reading Ug – Boy Genius of the Stoneage. Both books are pretty much about how important it is to imagine the future.

January
5.5 books ( 2 fiction, 3.5 non-fiction )
2468 pages

When was the last time you mixed home made iron filings with golden syrup?

You can watch the videos, read the updates, and admire the sandwiches over on the codethecity #ctc5 tag.

A few pointers if you fancy making one yourself:

• be flexible, it can be 10x easier to make it a bit wider or narrower than you’d like. Try to just go with the flow.
• those double length pallettes are amazingly handy, as you get nice long strips of timber. I used them for the left hand uprights. They often have insulation sheets on them.
• let your little people help out as much as possible – finger loss is unlikely, and a few splinters are character building. Favourite jobs – sanding important parts, anything involving a power tool, measuring stuff, collecting biscuits from the kitchen to keep the workers fuelled.
• let your little people make some decisions. Favourites – where the windows go, orientation of slats, height of shelves.
• plasterboard / drywall screws are fine (and they are cheap and come in massive bags)
• include fun stuff like hinged window flaps, shutters for bigger windows, and sliding ‘nerf hole’ panels. The ‘snack please’ signs are fun.
• take the time to floor it properly -those wee gaps between pallette boards can be a killer if you get a toe / ankle trapped
• getting a pallette to come apart can be hard work. You’ll want to get them nice and dry, and have a chisel that you don’t mind destroying, then just split the nails – don’t try and pry them, you’ll most likely split the boards
• I used PVC from B&Q for the roof so that it would be nice and bright inside. I should have gone for the polycarbonate stuff – about 3 times the cost – but indestructable. The PVC is already a bit bashed by the tree.
• apart from some screws the only other bought parts were the timbers to hold up the roof – I think the spend was about £50 all in.

Only once we’d finished making these did I realise why the boys wanted big handles on the back of the shutters. Shields. Like a knight. Let the warring begin!

Monkeyboy checking the plans. Failed certification apparently.

And yes, that is an Angry Nerds pirate flag on the roof and an old keyboard ‘command station’ on the floor.